You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Oxford Handbook of American Folklore and Folklife Studies surveys the materials, approaches, concepts, and applications of the field to provide a sweeping guide to American folklore and folklife, culture, history, and society. Forty-three comprehensive and diverse chapters explore the extraordinary richness of the American social and cultural fabric, offering a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of American studies, but also for the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice.
Lynchburg, Virginia, is not and has never been a typical Southern city. It grew and thrived not by commitment to agriculture, but manufacture. All the while, it retained its cultural identity as a Southern city, wedded to Southern “gentlemanliness” with all of its implications. Though a slow and conservative city, Lynchburg has developed a unique identity. It is a city with enormous vitality, great engagement, and large resiliency in large affairs or times of crisis (such as the Civil War, depressions and booms). Its resolve, measured and passionless, is essentially Stoical. More than the sum of its people-parts, it is a city with a soul. Beginning with the early history of Virginia, this book covers seriatim Lynchburg’s infrastructure (such as its canal and railroad systems), religious/educative legacy, economics, key moments, and other defining aspects (including newspapers, politics, medicine, and entertainment).
Challenges conservationists to rethink protecting the natural world; making political strategies central to increase support and influence.
Mohawk Rebel is an in-depth exploration of one of North America's most important Indigenous artists. Claire Raymond's compelling and well-researched book connects Niro's lineage as a Turtle Clan woman to the artist's oeuvre that evokes and represents the Mohawk people's memory of and continuing relationship to the land now called New York State. With profound allegorical and metaphorical power, Niro's virtuosic photographic and filmic works create layered temporal tapestries that weave the past and present in a new vision. The book offers fresh interpretations of many of Niro's best-known works and brings into view some of her earlier lesser-known works. Raymond's sensitive and nuanced interpretations of Niro's art ultimately contend that Niro's work agitates subtly but unmistakably for the ethical rightness of the land-back movement. Raymond eloquently argues that this Mohawk artist's relationship to New York State is one of rightful claim.
This book spans a century in the history of the Blackfoot First Nations of present-day Montana and Alberta. It maps out specific ways in which Blackfoot culture persisted amid the drastic transformations of colonisation, with its concomitant forced assimilation in both Canada and the United States. It portrays the strategies and tactics adopted by the Blackfoot in order to navigate political, cultural and social change during the hard transition from traditional life-ways to life on reserves and reservations. Cultural continuity is the thread that binds the four case studies presented, encompassing Blackfoot sacred beliefs and ritual; dress practices; the transmission of knowledge; and the r...
None
Learning Love from a Tiger explores the vibrancy and variety of humans’ sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, rivers that grant salvation, and many others. In addition to being a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and approaches that underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. Daniel Capper’s light touch prompts readers to engage their own views of humanity’s place in the natural world and question longstanding assumptions of human superiority.
Places are today subject to contrary tendencies. They lose some functions, which may scale up to fewer more centralized places, or down to numerous more dispersed places, and they gain other functions, which are scaling up and down from other places. This prompts premature prophecies of the abolition of space and the obsolescence of place. At the same time, a growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care.
The lands the United States claims sovereignty over by right of the Doctrine of Discovery are home to more than five hundred Indian nations, each with its own distinct culture, religion, language, and history. Yet these Indians, and federal Indian law, rarely factor into the decisions of the country’s governing class—as recent battles over national monuments on tribal sites have made painfully clear. A much-needed intervention, Many Nations under Many Gods brings to light the invisible histories of several Indian nations, as well as their struggles to protect the integrity of sacred and cultural sites located on federal public lands. Todd Allin Morman focuses on the history of Indian peo...