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.
Here is an animated and wonderfully engaging work of cultural history that lays out America’s unruly past by describing the ways in which cutting loose has always been, and still is, an essential part of what it means to be an American. From the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have defied their stodgy rules and hierarchies with pranks, dances, stunts, and wild parties, shaping the national character in profound and lasting ways. In the nation’s earlier eras, revelers flouted Puritans, Patriots pranked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, and forty-niners bucked the saddles of an increasingly uptight middle class. In the twentieth century, fun-loving Americans celebrated this heritage and pushed it even further: flappers “barney-mugged” in “petting pantries,” Yippies showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, and B-boys invented hip-hop in a war zone in the Bronx. This is the surprising and revelatory history that John Beckman recounts in American Fun. Tying together captivating stories of Americans’ “pursuit of happiness”—and distinguishing between real, risky fun and the bland amusements that paved the way for Hollywood, Disneyland, and Xbox—Beckman redefines American culture with a delightful and provocative thesis. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
In Literary Executions, John Barton analyzes nineteenth-century representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States. The author creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. Novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction engage with legislative reports, trial transcripts, legal documents, newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House), all of which participated in the debate over capital punishment. Barton focuses on several canonical figures--James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser--and offers new readings of their work in light of the death penalty controversy. Barton also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers--particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard--whose work helped shape or was in turn shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. As illustrated in the book's epigraph by Samuel Johnson -- "Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully" -- Barton argues that the high stakes of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority. In bringing together the social and the aesthetic, Barton traces the emergence of the modern State's administration of lawful death. The book is intended primarily for literary scholars, but cultural and legal historians will also find value in it, as will anyone interested in the intersections among law, culture, and the humanities"--
The narrative of facts—probably best exemplified in the literature of exploration—was an immensely popular genre in mid-nineteenth-century America. In White Lies, John Samson offers full contextual readings of Melville's five major narratives of facts—Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Israel Potter. Samson demonstrates that in these novels Melville critically rewrote the sources on which he drew, in effect making the genre itself a subject of his writing. In his introduction, Samson discusses Melville's knowledge of the genre and its ideology. He then reads each novel in terms of Melville's confrontation with its sources. In each, Samson says, an unreliable narrator represents particular ideological tendencies in Melville's sources. Melville heightens and extends these tendencies, exposes the contradictions and biases within them, and ends by showing the narrator evading or denying experiences that conflict with his ideology. According to Samson, Melville sees the concept of historical progress as the basis of these biases and evasions. In these five novels, Melville reveals the conflict between democratic, humanitarian, and individualistic principles, on the one hand, and the forces of racial superiority, religious bigotry, economic determinism, and political conservatism, on the other. Taken together, Samson asserts, these novels deconstruct the intellectual foundations of the form of historical narration endorsed by white patriarchal culture. Scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature, specialists in the novel, and other readers of Melville will welcome Samson's provocative reinterpretation of these key works in American culture.
This book tells of six remarkable Apache women, relating the true deeds and extraordinary encounters faced and overcome by these very remarkable Chiricahua Apache Women of the mid-to- late 1800's. They were bold, courageous, intelligent, and resilient, and they show that they chose their own role in society, at their own time and on their own terms. They are an inspiration for both women and men of modern society. This book also gives some useful background on Apache ways, beliefs, culture, etc.
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.
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.
Using the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a case study, John E. Alvis shows that a novelist can be a political philosopher. He demonstrates that much of Hawthorne's works are rooted in the American political tradition. Once we view his writings in connection with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, we grasp that what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had stated explicitly, Hawthorne's fiction conveys dramatically. With examples drawn from Hawthorne's shorter works, as well as acknowledged classics, such as The Scarlet Letter, John E. Alvis shows that Hawthorne's characters bear something sacred in their generic humanity, yet are subject to moral judgment. He conveys reciprocity between obligations regulating individual relations and the responsibilities of individuals to their community. From America's founding proclamations in the Declaration of Independence we take a sense of national aspirations for a political order that conforms to "laws of nature and nature's God." From this higher law emerge the principles enumerated in that revolutionary document. Are these principles confined to the political, or do they reach into the experience of citizens to inform conduct? Do they include family, local community, and individual face-to-face relations with neighbors and strangers? Can one make a distinct way of life by fidelity to such standards as higher law, equality, liberty, natural rights, and consent? This study is distinguished from other writings on Hawthorne in its largely positive focus on America. Alvis characterizes Hawthorne as a rational patriot who endorses America's new terms for human association. This fascinating study provides new insights into the mind of one of the greatest American writers.
Increasing interest in the immunology of mucosal surfaces is obvious from the number of publications in scientific journals and from the frequency of national and international symposia devoted to this subject. Particularly encouraging are the large numbers of young investigators who have chosen to work in this area of theoretical immunology with profound practical implications. The two volumes represented here are the result of an International Congress Of Mucosal Immunology held at the Niagara Falls Convention Center and the Niagara Falls Hilton on June 29 - July 3, 1986. This satellite meeting of the International Congress of Immunology placed emphasis on all aspects of the Mucosal Immune System. This included the regulation of differentiation of mucosal lymphocytes, mucosa-associated lymphoreticular tissue and lymphocyte homing, the immunology of mucosa associated tissues and glands, effector functions in mucosal immunity, and the effects of environmental antigens on the immune response, all of which are included in Volume I. The second volume has emphasized studies of the immune response and effector functions, IgA biosynthesis and transport, IgA proteases and effector functions, developmental aspects and immunodeficiency, the immunopathology of IgA and mucosal immunoprophylaxis. A total of 218 papers are included in these two volumes and a comparison to past meetings held at four to five year intervals indicates the explosive growth of mucosal immunology.
This book provides an integrated description of the indicators of rangeland sustainability that capture ecological, economic, and social dimensions. It takes a fresh look at the information available on current and emerging issues across rangelands, and presents collaborative research for future progress. Authors offer a framework for evaluating rangeland sustainability, the best available data to use, as well as an interactive tool for use at a variety of geographical scales. Readers with limited knowledge of rangelands, as well as professional rangeland ecologists and land managers, will gain an understanding of the best tools available today to assess sustainability across rangeland ecosystems in the U.S.
An ambitious new history of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, published for the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. The Pilgrims’ definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow. Drawing on original research using underutilized sources, John G. Turner moves beyond these familiar narratives in his sweeping and authoritative new history of Plymouth Colony. Instead of depicting the Pilgrims as otherworldly saints or extraordinary sinners, he tells how a variety of English settlers and Native peoples engaged in a contest for the meaning of American liberty.
Reflecting a strong managerial orientation, a corporate emphasis, and a true global-local focus, International Business: Managing Globalization explains the 'whats' and 'whys' of global differences as it covers industries, competitors, regions, and markets from the perspectives of practicing managers. Author John S. Hill reviews the geographic and historic backgrounds of regions and markets in a way that no other text has done, with special focus on global supply chains, global branding, and world religions as they affect management at the local level. It integrates business topics and environmental analysis into a strategic, global-local framework. It places current events in focus by covering history and geography as they affect international business. It includes a unique chapter on global industry and competitor analysis, a common business tool, but a topic not covered in other texts. It covers religion as a key determiner of behaviors worldwide to help readers understand why behaviors differ depending on the local context. It focuses on corporate analysis, planning, and internationalization, vital corporate practices rarely covered in other textbooks. It includes short cases for undergraduates and longer cases for graduate students. International Business: Managing Globalization is ideal for the introduction to business course or for courses focusing on international or global business strategy
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