You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Artistic vanguards plot new aesthetic movements, print controversial magazines, hold provocative art shows, and stage experimental theatrical and musical performances. These revolutionaries have often helped create America's countercultural movements, from the early romantics and bohemians to the beatniks and hippies. This work looks at how experimental art and the avant-garde artists' lifestyles have influenced, and at times transformed, American culture since the mid-nineteenth century. The work will introduce readers to these artists and rebels, making a careful distinction between the worlds of the high modern artist (salons and galleries) and the bohemian.
Unique individuals of fiery temperament, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound made an odd pair on the streets of 1920s Paris. If the elder cane-carrying Pound appeared the out-of-date poet, Hemingway was the epitome of his generation's Flaming Youth. Meeting on the high ground of art, these two literary giants formed a friendship that survived until Hemingway's death. During their short time together in Paris, Pound edited Hemingway's early work. Over decades Hemingway considered Pound a major poet and read The Cantos as they appeared in little magazines and published volumes. Eventually living in countries half a world apart, Hemingway and Pound maintained a lively and sometimes contentious correspondence. When Pound was incarcerated in America for his World War II broadcasts over Radio Rome, Hemingway played a vital role in freeing his old poet friend--the man who edited his early work, the "good game guy" whose wit and brilliance he never forgot. This narrative of a friendship lays bare the triumphs and tragedies of two giants of modern literature.
Part oral history, memoir, and biography, Toast of the Town draws from hundreds of hours of taped conversations between Sunnie Wilson and John Cohassey, as Wilson reflected on the changes in Detroit over the last sixty years. As part of the great migration of southern blacks to the north, Sunnie Wilson came to Detroit from South Carolina after graduating from college, and soon became a pillar of the local music industry. He started out as a song and dance performer but found his niche as a local promoter of boxing, which allowed him to make friends and business connections quickly in the thriving industrial city of Detroit. Part oral history, memoir, and biography, Toast of the Town draws fr...
Called upon to take a hill at the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga, the untested 22nd Michigan Infantry helped to save General George H. Thomas' right flank. Formed in 1862, the regiment witnessed slavery and encountered runaways in the border state of Kentucky, faced near starvation during the siege of Chattanooga and marched to Atlanta as General Thomas' provost guard. This history explores the 22nd's day-to-day experiences in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. The author describes the challenges faced by volunteer farm boys, shopkeepers, school teachers and lawyers as they faced death, disease and starvation on battlefields and in Confederate prisons.
The story of a notable children's institution founded at the turn of the twentieth century, this book looks at the lives of troubled children and those who helped them, and illuminates major shifts in America's child welfare system.
This is a guidebook to the many major examples of public art in metropolitan Detroit and a proof that the tradition of art in public places is enjoying a renaissance. It studies 120 sites, organized into five geographical districts. Each area includes a map to facilitate a walking or driving tour. The text provides a brief discussion of the history of each work, the nature of its commission, and its relation to its site.
Following up Betty DeRamus’s Essence bestselling Forbidden Fruit, Freedom by Any Means follows the story of extraordinary acts of courage and love by Blacks in the American slave era with beautifully written and inspiring stories of how slaves used the law—against all odds—to gain freedom for themselves and loved ones. In Freedom by Any Means, Betty DeRamus explains that “Much of what we think we know about African American history isn't completely true.” Slave freedom isn’t limited to the usual story—slaves gained their freedom by running away, being freed by their owners, buying their way out of bondage, or having someone else buy them. But history doesn’t account for the s...
Motor City Music is a pioneering study of the musical life of an American metropolis. 1940s-60s Detroit produced prominent musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. Author Mark Slobin begins with a reflection on his life growing up in Detroit, stresses public-school music, surveys neighborhood musical life, and covers industry, labor, the counterculture, media, and the record industry, including Motown.
Uppermost Canada examines the historical, cultural, and social history of the Canadian portion of the Detroit River community in the first half of the nineteenth century. The phrase "Uppermost Canada," denoting the western frontier of Upper Canada (modern Ontario), was applied to the Canadian shore of the Detroit River during the War of 1812 by a British officer, who attributed it to President James Madison. The Western District was one of the partly-judicial, partly-governmental municipal units combining contradictory arisocratic and democratic traditions into which the province was divided until 1850. With its substantial French-Canadian population and its veneer of British officialdom, in close proximity to a newly American outpost, the Western District was potentially the most unstable. Despite all however, Alan Douglas demonstrates that the Western District endured without apparent change longer than any of the others.
The first book to document the maritime history of the port city Muskegon combining historical detail and good storytelling.