Traces the history of the saxophone from its invention by the eccentric Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in the 1840s to its role in the jazz genre in the twenty-first century.
Here is the story of modern golf that is not on TV. This is our story, we who pay to play, who can't wait to get another crack at the game, even when golf doesn't love us back. And just as every round is an adventure, every life in golf is, too: we start at home, head on out, endure a series of events--fortunate and otherwise--and hang on for dear life as we play our way back to the house. In these pages, we celebrate the thrill of it all, as we start, turn, and finish this game of a lifetime"--Amazon.com.
In the last three decades, a brand of black conservatism espoused by a controversial group of African American intellectuals has become a fixture in the nation's political landscape, its proponents having shaped policy debates over some of the most pressing matters that confront contemporary American society. Their ideas, though, have been neglected by scholars of the African American experience—and much of the responsibility for explaining black conservatism's historical and contemporary significance has fallen to highly partisan journalists. Typically, those pundits have addressed black conservatives as an undifferentiated mass, proclaiming them good or bad, right or wrong, color-blind visionaries or Uncle Toms. In Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, Michael L. Ondaatje delves deeply into the historical archive to chronicle the origins of black conservatism in the United States from the early 1980s to the present. Focusing on three significant policy issues—affirmative action, welfare, and education—Ondaatje critically engages with the ideas of nine of the most influential black conservatives. He further documents how their ideas were received, both by white conservatives eager to capitalize on black support for their ideas and by activists on the left who too often sought to impugn the motives of black conservatives instead of challenging the merits of their claims. While Ondaatje's investigation uncovers the themes and issues that link these voices together, he debunks the myth of a monolithic black conservatism. Figures such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and cultural theorist John McWhorter emerge as individuals with their own distinct understandings of and relationships to the conservative political tradition.
In 1861 Captain James J. Morrison resigned his commission in the United States Cavalry, returned to his home in Cedartown, Georgia, and was soon authorized by the Confederate War Department to raise a regiment of cavalry. This book is the first complete history of the First Georgia Cavalry, who saw action in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and North Carolina. A regimental roster includes more than 1,600 names with details of service provided, along with pre-war service, death and burial information in some cases.
Here, Michael F. Holt gives us the only comprehensive history of the Whigs ever written. He offers a panoramic account of the tumultuous antebellum period, a time when a flurry of parties and larger-than-life politicians--Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Henry Clay--struggled for control as the U.S. inched towards secession. It was an era when Americans were passionately involved in politics, when local concerns drove national policy, and when momentous political events--like the Annexation of Texas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act--rocked the country. Amid this contentious political activity, the Whig Party continuously strove to unite North and South, emerging as the nation's last great hope to prevent secession.
Informed by new planetary discoveries and the findings from recent robotic missions to Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, scientists are rapidly replacing centuries of speculation about potential extraterrestrial habitats with real knowledge about the possibility of life outside our own biosphere—if it exists, and where. This second edition of Kevin W. Plaxco and Michael Gross’s widely acclaimed text incorporates the latest research in astrobiology to bring readers the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and engaging introduction to the field available. Plaxco and Gross expand their examination of the origin of chemical elements, the developments that made the Universe habitable, and how life continues to be sustained. They discuss in great detail the formation of the first galaxies and stars, the diverse chemistry of the primordial planet, the origins of metabolism, the evolution of complex organisms, and the feedback regulation of Earth's climate. They also explore life in extreme habitats, potential extraterrestrial habitats, and the current status of the search for extraterrestrial life. Weaving together the relevant threads of astronomy, geology, chemistry, biophysics, and microbiology, this broadly accessible introductory text captures the excitement, controversy, and progress of the dynamic young field of astrobiology. New to this edition is a glossary of terms and an epilogue recapping the key unanswered questions, making Astrobiology an ideal primer for students and, indeed, for anyone curious about life and the Universe.
As Allied soldiers fought the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt and, later, Harry Truman fought in private with Churchill and Stalin over how to ensure that Germany could never threaten the world again.
Corbett Mack (1892–1974), was a Northern Paiute of mixed ancestry, caught between Native American and white worlds. A generation before, his tribe had brought forth the prophet Wovoka, whose Ghost Dance swept the Indian world in the 1890s. Mack’s world was a harsh and bitter place after the last Native American uprisings had been brutally crushed; a life of servitude to white farmers and addiction to opium. Hittman uses Mack’s own words to retell his story, an uncompromising account of a traumatized life that typified his generation, yet nonetheless made meaningful through the perseverance of Paiute cultural traditions.
Francis Palmer Smith was the principal designer of Atlanta-based Pringle and Smith, one of the leading firms of the early twentieth-century South. Smith was an academic eclectic who created traditional, history-based architecture grounded in the teachings of the cole des Beaux-Arts. As The Architecture of Francis Palmer Smith shows, Smith was central to the establishment of the Beaux-Arts perspective in the South through his academic and professional career. After studying with Paul Philippe Cret at the University of Pennsylvania, Smith moved to Atlanta in 1909 to head the new architecture program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He would go on to train some of the South's most significant architects, including Philip Trammell Shutze, Flippen Burge, Preston Stevens, Ed Ivey, and Lewis E. Crook Jr. In 1922 Smith formed a partnership with Robert S. Pringle. In Atlanta, Savannah, Chattanooga, Jacksonville, Sarasota, Miami, and elsewhere, Smith built office buildings, hotels, and Art Deco skyscrapers; buildings at Georgia Tech, the Baylor School in Chattanooga, and the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia; Gothic Revival churches; standardized bottling plants for Coca-Cola; and houses in a range of traditional "period" styles in the suburbs. Smith's love of medieval architecture culminated with his 1962 masterwork, the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta. As his career drew to a close, Modernism was establishing itself in America. Smith's own modern aesthetic was evidenced in the more populist modern of Art Deco, but he never embraced the abstract machine aesthetic of high Modern. Robert M. Craig details the role of history in design for Smith and his generation, who believed that architecture is an art and that ornament, cultural reference, symbolism, and tradition communicate to clients and observers and enrich the lives of both. This book was supported, in part, by generous grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc.
“An essential account of America’s greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus.” —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement The landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position—Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.” Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.
This volume introduces a new concept to explore the dynamic relationship between folklore and popular culture: the “folkloresque.” With “folkloresque,” Foster and Tolbert name the product created when popular culture appropriates or reinvents folkloric themes, characters, and images. Such manufactured tropes are traditionally considered outside the purview of academic folklore study, but the folkloresque offers a frame for understanding them that is grounded in the discourse and theory of the discipline.Fantasy fiction, comic books, anime, video games, literature, professional storytelling and comedy, and even popular science writing all commonly incorporate elements from tradition or draw on basic folklore genres to inform their structure. Through three primary modes—integration, portrayal, and parody—the collection offers a set of heuristic tools for analysis of how folklore is increasingly used in these commercial and mass-market contexts.The Folkloresque challenges disciplinary and genre boundaries; suggests productive new approaches for interpreting folklore, popular culture, literature, film, and contemporary media; and encourages a rethinking of traditional works and older interpretive paradigms.
Around 1900, the southern states embarked on a series of political campaigns aimed at disfranchising large numbers of voters. By 1908, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia had succeeded in depriving virtually all African Americans, and a large number of lower-class whites, of the voting rights they had possessed since Reconstruction--rights they would not regain for over half a century. Struggle for Mastery is the most complete and systematic study to date of the history of disfranchisement in the South. After examining the origins and objectives of disfranchisement, Michael Perman traces the process as it unfolded state by state. Because he examines each state within its region-wide context, he is able to identify patterns and connections that have previously gone unnoticed. Broadening the context even further, Perman explores the federal government's seeming acquiescence in this development, the relationship between disfranchisement and segregation, and the political system that emerged after the decimation of the South's electorate. The result is an insightful and persuasive interpretation of this highly significant, yet generally misunderstood, episode in U.S. history.
One of the greatest and most beloved golf books ever written is triumphantly back in print—“a cause for celebration” (The Wall Street Journal)—with a new introduction by Golf in the Kingdom author Michael Murphy, a new afterword, and never-before-seen photographs. Thirty years (and counting!) after publication, To the Linksland still enthralls readers who pick it up for the first time—or return to the book for the sheer pleasure of it. In 1991, Michael Bamberger, a newspaper sportswriter, gave up his apartment, took a leave of absence from his job and his life, and, joined by his newlywed wife, set off to explore the wide world of golf. Bamberger’s first step in this madcap golfing adventure was to become a caddie on the European golf tour, where he encountered the game’s most dynamic players up close and personal, including golf’s greatest artist, Seve Ballesteros. Crisscrossing the Continent with his bride, Bamberger caddied for a true original, Peter Teravainen, a Yale-educated golfer with a workingman’s spirit and a knack for making brilliant, on-the-spot observations about the game (“Good shots must come in groups of two”). Over the course of one unforgettable year, Bamberger caddied in the national championships of Portugal, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, and, finally, Scotland, golf’s ancestral home. Once there, Bamberger fell under the spell of one of golf’s great teachers and thinkers, John Stark. To the Linksland is the captivating memoir of Bamberger’s golfing pilgrimage/extended honeymoon. From an all-night caddie bus on the back roads of southern Europe to Stark’s secret six-hole course in the Scottish Highlands, Bamberger takes you on a journey into the heart of golf. This thirtieth-anniversary edition of Bamberger’s classic, lyrical tale of discovery is bookended with a new introduction by Michael Murphy and a new afterword by Bamberger, with a trove of new photographs in between. Gloriously back in print, To the Linksland is a “great book for your golfing soul” (Golf Monthly).
It is a tale as familiar as our history primers: A deranged actor, John Wilkes Booth, killed Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre, escaped on foot, and eluded capture for twelve days until he met his fiery end in a Virginia tobacco barn. In the national hysteria that followed, eight others were arrested and tried; four of those were executed, four imprisoned. Therein lie all the classic elements of a great thriller. But the untold tale is even more fascinating. Now, in American Brutus, Michael W. Kauffman, one of the foremost Lincoln assassination authorities, takes familiar history to a deeper level, offering an unprecedented, authoritative account of the Lincoln murder conspiracy. Working from a staggering array of archival sources and new research, Kauffman sheds new light on the background and motives of John Wilkes Booth, the mechanics of his plot to topple the Union government, and the trials and fates of the conspirators. Piece by piece, Kauffman explains and corrects common misperceptions and analyzes the political motivation behind Booth’s plan to unseat Lincoln, in whom the assassin saw a treacherous autocrat, “an American Caesar.” In preparing his study, Kauffman spared no effort getting at the truth: He even lived in Booth’s house, and re-created key parts of Booth’s escape. Thanks to Kauffman’s discoveries, readers will have a new understanding of this defining event in our nation’s history, and they will come to see how public sentiment about Booth at the time of the assassination and ever since has made an accurate account of his actions and motives next to impossible–until now. In nearly 140 years there has been an overwhelming body of literature on the Lincoln assassination, much of it incomplete and oftentimes contradictory. In American Brutus, Kauffman finally makes sense of an incident whose causes and effects reverberate to this day. Provocative, absorbing, utterly cogent, at times controversial, this will become the definitive text on a watershed event in American history.
The Guide to the Presidency is an extensive study of the most important office of the U.S. political system. Its two volumes describe the history, workings and people involved in this office from Washington to Clinton. The thirty-seven chapters of the Guide, arranged into seven distinct subject areas (ranging from the origins of the office to the powers of the presidency to selection and removal) cover every aspect of the presidency. Initially dealing with the constitutional evolution of the presidency and its development, the book goes on to expand on the history of the office, how the presidency operates alongside the numerous departments and agents of the federal bureaucracy, and how the selection procedure works in ordinary and special cicumstances. Of special interest to the reader will be the illustrated biographies of every president from Washington to the present day, and the detailed overview of the vice-presidents and first ladies of each particular office. Also included are two special appendices, one of which gathers together important addresses and speeches from the Declaration of Independence to Clinton's Inaugural Address, and another which provides results from elections and polls and statistics from each office.
Stats, history, and trivia -- from the 1901 through the 2003 season -- are all included in the latest edition of this popular, low-priced reference book.
The Natural History of Creation is the third and final installment in M.A. Corey's natural theology series. This remarkable trilogy has worked in tandem with the findings of modern science to help spearhead the rebirth of the once-dead natural theology movement. In this detailed, yet easy to read work, the author focuses on the religious account of creation found in Genesis One and comes to the astonishing conclusion that there is indeed much scientific truth to be found in this ancient work. Many other writers have also noticed the breathtaking parallels that exist between modern evolutionism and the creation account given in the Bible, but nowhere will the reader find a more thorough description of them than in The Natural History of Creation. - Back cover.
World War II and its aftermath brought devastating material losses to millions of West Germans. Military action destroyed homes, businesses, and personal possessions; East European governments expelled 15 million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes; and currency reform virtually wiped out many Germans' hard-earned savings. These "war damaged" individuals, well over one-third of the West German population, vehemently demanded compensation at the expense of those who had not suffered losses, to be financed through capital levies on surviving private property. Michael Hughes offers the first comprehensive study of West Germany's efforts to redistribute the costs of war and defeat among its citizenry. The debate over a Lastenausgleich (a balancing out of burdens) generated thousands of documents in which West Germans articulated deeply held beliefs about social justice, economic rationality, and political legitimacy. Hughes uses these sources to trace important changes in German society since 1918, illuminating the process by which West Germans, who had rejected liberal democracy in favor of Nazi dictatorship in the 1930s, came to accept the social-market economy and parliamentary democracy of the 1950s.
The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball 2006 covers the history of every player and every team, with detailed statistics and summaries about each season, as well as full coverage of this year's exciting pennant and wild card races.
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