Because scholars have traditionally examined the efforts of American suffragists only in relation to electoral politics, the history books have largely missed the real story of what these women achieved far outside the realm of voting reform. Though Stanton, Anthony, and Mott are the best known figures of the woman's suffrage movement, all were dead more than a decade before women actually achieved the vote. Women like Alice Paul, Louisine Havemeyer, and Mary Church Terrell carried on their work, putting their campaign experiences to work long after the 19th Amendment was ratified. This book tells the story of how these women made an indelible mark on American history in fields ranging from education to art, science, publishing, and social activism.
This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of the West.
The fall of 2018 saw an unprecedented number of women elected to Congress, changing estimates of how long it might take to achieve equal representation. For the first time, women candidates used techniques honed by America's political families, which have helped women enter politics since 1916. Drawing on extensive research and conversations with successful women politicians, this book offers a history of the political opportunities provided through familial connections. Family networks have a long history of enabling women to run for political office. There is much for the latest group of candidates to emulate.
From 1880 to 1920, the first truly national visual culture developed in the United States as a result of the completion of the Pacific Railroad. Women, especially young and beautiful ones, found new lives shaped by their participation in that visual culture. This rapidly evolving age left behind the "cult of domesticity" that reigned in the nineteenth century to give rise to new "types" of women based on a single feature--a type of hair, skin, dress, or prop--including the Gibson Girl, the sob sister, the stunt girl, the hoochy-coochy dancer, and the bearded lady. Exploring both high and low culture, from the circus and film to newspapers and magazines, this work examines depictions of women at the dawn of "mass media," depictions that would remain influential throughout the twentieth century.
After years of playing sub-par teams in weak athletic conferences, the University of Houston athletic program sought to overcome its underdog reputation by integrating its football and basketball programs in 1964. Cougar coaches Bill Yeoman and Guy V. Lewis knew the radical move would grant them access to a wealth of talented athletes untouched by segregated Southern programs, and brought on several talented black athletes in the fall semester, including Don Chaney, Elvin Hayes, and Warren McVea. By 1968, the Cougars had transformed into an athletic powerhouse and revolutionized the nature of collegiate athletics in the South. This book gives the Cougars athletes and coaches the recognition long denied them. It outlines the athletic department's handling of the integration, the experiences of the school's first black athletes, and the impact that the University of Houston's integration had on other programs.
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens--typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.
Paper dolls might seem the height of simplicity--quaint but simple toys, nothing more. But through the centuries paper figures have reflected religious and political beliefs, notions of womanhood, motherhood and family, the dictates of fashion, approaches to education, individual self-image and self-esteem, and ideas about death. This book examines paper dolls and their symbolism--from icons made by priests in ancient China to printable Kim Kardashians on the Internet--to show how these ephemeral objects have an enduring and sometimes surprising presence in history and culture.
Public concerns over large losses of wild ungulates to predators arise when restoring large carnivore species to former locations or population densities. During the 1990s, mountain lion (Felis concolor) and grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) numbers increased in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and gray wolves (Canis lupus) were reintroduced to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. We investigated effects of these predators, as well as black bears (Ursus americanus) and coyotes (Canis latrans), on mortality of an abundant and increasing prey species, elk (Cervus elaphus). We captured, radio-instrumented, and monitored survival of 145 elk neonates from 3 cohorts during 1990 - 1992, and 153 neonates from 3 cohorts during 1997 - 1999 when grizzly bears and lions were likely more common than during the earlier period of study. Neonatal (birth through 31 July) mortality of elk due to predation, disease, and accidents increased from 15.2 % to 27.5% (P = 0.01). Sixty-eight percent of all mortality during 1990 - 1992 resulted from predation by black bears and coyotes, compared to 76% during 1997-1999 by black bears, coyotes, grizzly bears, and mountain lions, a non-significant difference (P = 0.49). Weight gains of calves during the first week, but not birth weights, declined from 1990 - 1992 to 1997 - 1999. April temperatures were cooler, delaying spring green-up, and elk numbers were larger during 1997 - 1999 when weight gains and survival of calves declined. Calves that died were more likely to be male, below average birth weight, and had inferior serum nutritional indices. The change in neonatal calf survival reduced the annual growth rate of the Jackson elk herd from 1.26 to 1.23, yielding a decline in the annual increment of approximately 500 animals in a preparturition herd of 11,000 elk. Changes in mid-summer calf: 100 cow ratios indicated a 39 - 45% greater decline in neonatal survival than measured among the radioed calves. We suggest increasing predation during the study was partially compensatory, given predator selection of inferior calves and increased mortality of cohorts with reduced first week growth rates. Reduced rate of first week weight gains of elk calves extended the duration of neonatal mortality by one month during 1997 - 1999, and may be as important in predisposing calves to predation and other mortality as low birth weights. Consequently, we conclude that increased predation was a proximate not an ultimate cause of declining neonatal survival during the 1990s. We recommend careful evaluation and hypothesis testing of predator effects on elk as restoration of large carnivores continues.
In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers of American artists through the Works Progress Administration--fiction writers, photographers, poster artists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry Hopkins hailed it a "renascence of the arts, if we can call it a rebirth when it has no precedent in our history." Women were eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft, interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose lives might not otherwise have received attention. This book surveys the thousands of women artists who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood they created at a pivotal moment in American history.
During the years 1880 to 1940, the glory days of the American circus, a third to a half of the cast members were women--a large group of very visible American workers whose story needs telling. This book, using sources such as diaries, autobiographies, newspaper accounts, films, posters, and route books, first considers the popular media's presentation of these performers as unnatural and scandalous--as well as romantic and thrilling. Next are the stories told by circus women, which contradict and complicate other versions of their lives. Across America in those years an array of acts featured women, such as tableaux, freak shows, girlie shows, tiger acts, and aerial performances, all involving special skills and all detailed here. The book offers a unique and fascinating view of not just the circus but of what it meant to be an American woman at work.
Winifred Black worked in journalism from 1888 to 1936, often writing under the pseudonym Annie Laurie. Her work appeared in the Hearst papers--especially the San Francisco Examiner--and in fifty additional newspapers weekly through syndication. Black wrote 10,000 short pieces, as well as three books, a nonfiction oeuvre that combined quasi-autobiographical details with characters and scenes to provide cultural analysis for a nationwide audience. She wrote about the realities facing modern women--their work, their marriages and divorces, the violence they endured, their need for independence. Contemporary praise for Black named her "the world's most famous feature writer" and "one of the world's most successful reporters," while her critics affixed the pejorative labels "stunt girl" and "sob sister." This study covers her influential career and gives the first serious attention to her journalism and nonfiction.
Before stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood were adapted and readapted for film, television and theater, radio scriptwriters looking for material turned to Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur (1485) and Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883). Throughout the 1930s to the mid-1950s, their legends inspired storylines for Abbott and Costello, Popeye, Let's Pretend, Escape, Gunsmoke, The Adventures of Superman and others. Many of these adaptations reflect the moral and ethical questions of the day, as characters' faced issues of gender relations, divorce, citizenship, fascism, crime and communism in a medieval setting.
This scholarly close reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" considers the iconic poem through a four-part trickster framework: appetite, boundlessness, transformative power and a proclivity for setting and falling victim to tricks and traps. The book pursues various different narratives of the trickster Coyote and the historical and biographical contexts of "Howl" from a truly interdisciplinary perspective. This study seeks to contribute to the current literature on the poetry of the Beats and of Allen Ginsberg, specifically his "Howl," and the ways it continues to expand in meaning, depth and significance today.
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