An autobiography of a Griggsville, Illinois man who, as a youth, set out to explore the California gold fields. He describes his hometown upon his return, then his Civil War service with General Hooker and others.
In this magisterial study, John McWilliams traces the development of New England's influential cultural identity. Through written responses to historical crises from early New England through the pre-Civil War period, McWilliams argues that the meaning of 'New England' despite claims for its consistency was continuously reformulated. The significance of past crises was forever being reinterpreted for the purpose of meeting succeeding crises. The crises he examines include starvation, the Indian wars, the Salem witch trials, the revolution of 1775–76 and slavery. Integrating history, literature, politics and religion this is one of the most comprehensive studies of the meaning of 'New England' to appear in print. McWilliams considers a range of writing including George Bancroft's History of the United States, the political essays of Samuel Adams, the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the poetry of Robert Lowell. This compelling book is essential reading for historians and literary critics of New England.
John McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. The jolting sense of historical change caused by the French Revolution led to an immense readership for a new kind of fiction, centered on revolution, counter-revolution and warfare, which soon came to be called “the historical novel.” During the turbulent wake of The Declaration of the Rights of Man, promptly followed by the phenomenon of Napoleon Bonaparte, the historical novel thus served as a literary hybrid in the most positive sense of that often-dismissive term. It enabled readers to project personal hopes and anxieties about revolutionary change back into national history. While immersed in the fictive lives of genteel, often privileged heroes, readers could measure their own political convictions against the wavering loyalties of their counterparts in a previous but still familiar time. McWilliams provides close readings of some twenty historical novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions established by Scott’s Waverley novels, showing both the continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott’s narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of McWilliams’s perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and achievement.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
With a terrific array of rare and unpublished images, John McWilliams looks at some of the fishing boats that can be found around the coast of Britain.
Mining and Fishing have been the staple industries of Cornwall for two millennia. John McWilliams looks at the rise and decline of Cornish fishing in this new history.
This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It examines Hawthorne's abiding concern with the development of New England from colony to province to republic, and analyses Melville's changing evocation of 'the new American', and the difficulties he faced in sustaining his heady nationalistic faith.
Tuscumbia sits at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in northwest Alabama in an area known as the Shoals. The area is rich with history beginning with the Native Americans who lived near the big spring for thousands of years. The European influence began with the Spanish under De Soto and the French, who had a trading post here in the 1700s. In the early 1800s, the African American influence became prevalent. Tuscumbia was America's first frontier railroad town with the incorporation of Tuscumbia Railroad Company and the home of "America's First Lady of Courage," Helen Keller. Today, Tuscumbia contains the oldest commercial buildings in the state of Alabama. Rail service was expanded in 1834 around the treacherous Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River between Florence and Decatur, connecting steamboats at Tuscumbia Landing with Decatur, Alabama. Thousands of Native Americans--Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw--were removed from Tuscumbia to their new home in Indian Territory.
John McWilliams's 1990 book was the first thorough account of the many attempts to fashion an epic literature (the anxiously anticipated 'American Epic') from a wide range of potentially heroic New World subjects.
The 1960s Cultural Revolution is a highly readable and valuable resource revisiting personalities and events that sparked the cultural revolutions that have become synonymous with the 1960s. The 1960s Cultural Revolution: A Reference Guide is an engagingly written book that considers the forces that shaped the 1960s and made it the unique era that it was. An introductory historical overview provides context and puts the decade in perspective. With a focus on social and cultural history, subsequent chapters focus on the New Left, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and 1968, a year that stands alone in American history. The book also includes a wealth of reference material, a comprehensive timeline of events, biographical profiles of key players, primary documents that enhance the significance of the social, political, and cultural climate, a glossary of key terms, and a carefully selected annotated bibliography of print and nonprint sources for further study.
The 1960s Cultural Revolution is a highly readable and valuable resource revisiting personalities and events that sparked the cultural revolutions that have become synonymous with the 1960s. The 1960s Cultural Revolution: A Reference Guide is an engagingly written book that considers the forces that shaped the 1960s and made it the unique era that it was. An introductory historical overview provides context and puts the decade in perspective. With a focus on social and cultural history, subsequent chapters focus on the New Left, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and 1968, a year that stands alone in American history. The book also includes a wealth of reference material, a comprehensive timeline of events, biographical profiles of key players, primary documents that enhance the significance of the social, political, and cultural climate, a glossary of key terms, and a carefully selected annotated bibliography of print and nonprint sources for further study.
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