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THE TEACHER begins with young BRIAN DESMOND teaching math at Newtown High School in Queens, New York despite a learning disability -- he cannot write legibly. He paid for his college education by fixing clocks, is fiercely independent, and aches for the respect of his sister and father, who treat him as dumb. A new principal comes to Newtown High with a wife, a lovely daughter and problems which threaten Brians teaching career. Martin Bernhard, a wealthy member of the Board of Education, tries to rescue Brians teaching job. In return he asks Brian to help him understand his dynamic daughter Julia, a concert violinist. Briefly barred from active hobbies, Brian accompanies a friend to a little theater audition which leads to involvement with actors, directors and agents in Queens, Westchester and Manhattan. As these various activities overlap, a crisis in Brians family clouds his perspective. He ignores local beauty Sheila Murray, and when she decides its time to look elsewhere Brian is forced to realign all of his priorities.
The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external 'reading' of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists – figures who often hailed from the margins – performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics' institutions to public houses. In this compelling work, Alexandra Roginski recounts a history of this everyday practice, exploring how it featured in the fates of people living in, and moving through, the Tasman World. Innovatively drawing on historical newspapers and a network of archives, she traces the careers of a diverse range of popular phrenologists and those they encountered. By analysing the actions at play in scientific episodes through ethnographic, social and cultural history, Roginski considers how this now-discredited science could, in its own day, yield fleeting power and advantage, even against a backdrop of large-scale dispossession and social brittleness.
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.