How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society. Exploring legal, political, and literary texts--including the works of Dickinson, Melville, and Emerson--Smith shows how alienation and self-reliance, social death and spiritual rebirth, torture and penitence came together in the prison, a scene for the portrayal of both gothic nightmares and romantic dreams. Demonstrating how the cellular soul has endured since the antebellum age, The Prison and the American Imagination offers a passionate and haunting critique of the very idea of solitude in American life.
When did the age of distraction begin? It might seem like a new problem, a symptom of our digital addictions, but distraction was already a source of deep concern in American culture two hundred years ago. As the industrial market economy emerged, nineteenth-century observers saw the signs: Workers were wasting time, daydreaming on the job, and the public's attention was overstimulated by new media and consumer trends. In response, social reformers designed innovative systems of moral training for the masses. Religious leaders organized far-reaching Christian revivals. And spiritual seekers like Henry David Thoreau experimented on themselves, practicing regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism. From the solitary confinement cells of the earliest penitentiaries to the shores of Walden Pond, disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age. Through twenty-eight short passages on reform, religion, and literature from the strange and beautiful archives of this nineteenth-century attention revival, Caleb Smith reads with an eye for both language and power. Disciplines of attention, he argues, often reinforce a morally conservative social order. At the same time, exercising more careful control over our own attention promises to give us some distance from the consumer marketplace-and, today, from the algorithmic manipulations of the online attention economy. Smith writes with vigilance about the history of coercion, but also with guarded hope about practices of attention, including reading itself. From the benefits of attentive reading to the darker side of enforced attention in prisons and reformatories, this book examines distraction as a moral, political, and economic problem with a long and illuminating history"--
Caleb Smith explores the confessions, trial reports, maledictions, and martyr narratives that juxtaposed law and conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion and shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.
When a windfall on Wall Street gave ex-navy SEAL Cody Sargent a small fortune, he quit his job, bought a forty-five foot sloop, and sailed away to the tropics. Now he spends winters cruising the Caribbean, letting the warm sunlight and salt air wash his mind clean of the five years of death and killing he endured in cold, arid Afghanistan. It is October, and the tropical rain and humidly of the hurricane season have faded. The dry, sunny breezes of the new winter have taken over. Cody Sargent, beginning another winter of cruising the windward islands, sails into Admiralty Bay on the island of Bequia and drops anchor. He plans to while away a few pleasant days and nights with Emma Stevenson, a local boutique owner whom he met the previous spring on his trip south to Venezuela where he laid-up his boat for the summer hurricane season. Over dinner the first evening, Emma tells him the island gossip says a group of Muslims have taken up residence on the adjacent island of St. Vincent and plan to convert the local Rastafarians to Islam. Knowing Muslims well from his tours of duty in Afghanistan, Cody doubts they would even attempt such a conversion. With the whole winter ahead to cruise the Caribbean, Cody decides to take a few days and sail over to St. Vincent and investigate. Soon Cody finds himself both a murder suspect and the target of Muslim assassins, even as he struggles to thwart a strike against the U.S. mainland by Islamic terrorists.
You are holding in your hands a piece of the counterculture. The recent tendency in the academic world has been away from primary sources and toward textbooks. Being a fairly traditional lot, we find that unacceptable. We focus on the “big ideas” that have shaped American government. There are many ways to gain exposure to these ideas, but in our opinion, none are better than actually reading the primary sources that first articulated them. That is why you will see many founding documents, Supreme Court cases, and momentous speeches within these pages. This collection will whet your appetite for exploring our rich American governmental heritage. Our hope is that this may be the beginning of a lifelong interest in the basis of our American government—how we got where we are today, and how we are to proceed from here!
When the Branch Manager of Winston & Company's southeastern Pennsylvania office is killed in a freak accident, Cody Sargent is transferred from the New York office to replace him. Cody is reluctant to leave the excitement of Wall Street, but recognizes his new assignment is an opportunity to gain the management experience that will eventually bring him back to Manhattan with a higher position in the financial industry The job in Pennsylvania begins promisingly enough, but Cody soon realizes little is what he's been led to believe it is. There is wide suspicion that the previous manager's death may not have been an accident. The dead manager's sister-in-law, Patsy Hamilton, is vehement that he was murdered. When Cody calls on the manager's widow to pay his respects, Patsy accosts him and demands to know what he and his company are going to do about her brother-in-law's murder. Cody learns the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating retirement assets Winston & Co. holds for Mexican immigrants working at the local mushroom farms. These assets, in excess of a hundred million dollars, were under investigation by the former manager when he had his fatal accident. Winston & Co.'s New York office instructs Cody to continue this investigation. When Buck Camilla, the broker handling the Mexican workers' accounts is killed during a botched home invasion, Cody realizes Patsy Hamilton is probably right about her brother-in-law's accident being murder, and that now Cody himself may be a target for the killers.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.