As theatre critic for the Village Voice in the 1960s, and as a director and playwright, Michael Smith was a key player in the Off-Off-Broadway movement in New York. Since 1990 he has been active on the West Coast as a playwright, director, lighting designer, and producer. This volume contains eleven of his dramatically varied plays, dating from 1974 to 2010: "The Dinner Show," "Heavy Pockets," "Turnip Family Secrets," "Half Life," "Trouble," "Life Before Death," "Fast Forward," "Dogs Bark All Night," "Bad Dog," "Summer Lightning," and "Hamlet in Love.
MICHAEL SMITH won a Brandeis University Creative Arts Citation for criticism, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for playwriting, an Obie Award for directing, and two Indie Awards for stage lighting. As theatre critic for the Village Voice in the 1960s, he was instrumental in the growth of Off-Off-Broadway. This first of two volumes of his plays contains "More! More! I Want More!" (1965), "The Next Thing" (1966), "A Dog's Love" (1966), "Captain Jack's Revenge" (1970), "Country Music" (1971), "Denver Trilogy" (1971-74), "Point Blank" (1972), "Prussian Suite" (1974), and "Cowgirl Ecsstasy" (1976).
Memoir of a life in theatre by Michael Smith, playwright, critic, producer, lighting designer, a key player in the Off-Off-Broadway theatre movement of the 1960s and beyond.
John P. Dodd, the light man at the legendary Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village in the early sixties, assisted at the birth of Off-Off-Broadway and collaborated with key figures in New York's downtown world of theatre and dance. This book, illustrated with rare period photographs, recounts Dodd's colorful life and career from the unique perspective of playwright and director Michael Smith, drama critic of The Village Voice and his intimate companion in that transformative decade. Smith's personal narrative, thoughtful recollections by friends and colleagues, and Dodd's own words attest to his originality and unusual force of character. A year-by-year record of his wide-ranging work as a lighting designer confirms the importance of his theatrical art.
Writing theatre criticism for The Village Voice from 1957 to 1974, Michael Smith lucked into an extraordinarily dynamic period in American theatre. Broadway-style commercialism was stifling innovation in the early sixties. In response, a new alternative theatre emerged in lofts, storefronts, churches, and coffeehouses radiating out from Greenwich Village. This generous selection of reviews from Smith's "theatre journal" columns in The Voice gives a sense of the range, seriousness, and energy of the brilliantly imaginative artists he encountered in more than a decade of intensive theatre-going,
These mostly poem-like artifacts were published as they were written at http://michaeltownsendsmith.blogspot.com. A log of course is a record of a journey-in a ship's log, location, weather, and daily events. The macrotext of this weblog tracks seasons, moods, happenings, and the national temper; but its real concern is less with external circumstances and more with inner action. The writer's minimalist, allusive diction skips the mechanics of language and attempts to project mental movement directly, the sense arising with the words.
From the author of "Near the End" comes another rich text in which dream and reality overlap to generate hauntingly suggestive images and states of mind. Shot through with intimations of heartbreak, parting, and the dissolution of sophisticated structures, the action ranges from California to Central Europe as the narrator drifts through spring at an isolated English country house.
The long, dark history of political violence in the United States Violence has been employed to achieve political objectives throughout history. Taking the life of a perceived enemy is as old as mankind. Antiquity is filled with examples of political murders, such as when Julius Caesar was felled by assassins in 44 BCE. While assassinations and assassination attempts are not unique to the American way of life, denizens of other nations sometimes look upon the US as populated by reckless cowboys owing to a “Wild West” attitude about violence, especially episodes involving guns. In this book, J. Michael Martinez focuses on assassinations and attempts in the American republic. Nine American presidents—Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan—have been the targets of assassins. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was also a target shortly before he was sworn into office in 1933. Moreover, three presidential candidates—Theodore Roosevelt, Robert F. Kennedy, and George Wallace—were shot by assailants. In addition to presidents and candidates for the presidency, eight governors, seven U.S. senators, nine U.S. House members, eleven mayors, seventeen state legislators, and eleven judges have been victims of political violence. Not all political assassinations involve elected officials. Some of those targeted, such as Joseph Smith, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., were public figures who influenced political issues. But their cases are instructive because of their connection to, and influence on, the political process. No other nation with a population of over 50 million people has witnessed as many political assassinations or attempts. These violent episodes trigger a series of important questions. First, why has the United States—a country constructed on a bedrock of the rule of law and firmly committed to due process—been so susceptible to political violence? Martinez addresses these questions as he examines twenty-five instances of violence against elected officials and public figures in American history.
Based primarily on long-neglected manuscript and newspaper sources--and especially on reminiscences of people who knew him--this psychobiography casts new light on Lincoln. Burlingame uses a blend of Freudian and Jungian theory to interpret the psyche of the 16th president.
In 1856, the US Supreme Court denied Dred Scott, now free of slavery, his Constitutional rights, solely because he was black. According to the Court, when the Constitution was drafted, some 60 years earlier, its authors would not have intended that ‘a subordinate and inferior class of beings’ qualified as citizens of the United States. Thus, the meaning of language drafted over half a century before was frozen in time. This case, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates that the matter of statutory interpretation is critical, technical, and, sometimes, highly emotive. The case is not a mere nugget from history to indulge our disgust with values of another age, and with it a satisfaction of our progress to today’s higher moral ground. It is the unfortunate case that the senior courts of England continue to produce highly contentious interpretations of our equality and discrimination laws. This book examines these cases from the perspective of statutory interpretation, the judge’s primary function. The scrutiny finds the judgments technically flawed, overcomplicated, excessively long, and often unduly restrictive. As such, this book explains how the cases should have been resolved – using conventional methods of interpretation; this would have produced simpler, technically sound judgments. Rather like the case of Dred Scott, these were easy cases producing bad law.
The enduring power of many antebellum American texts trace their inspiration to Puritanism. From Melville's preposterous but irresponsible quarrels with God to Hawthorne's instructed yet edgy evocations of earlier New England, to Dickinson's finely turned little blasphemies. Can one imagine that such texts were written anywhere but in the latter days of Puritanism? Doctrine and Difference shows how the spirit and forms of liberalism are a necessary but by no means sufficient explanation for the flowering of literature in this period. The colonialist writers were attempting to have things their own provincial way amidst an air of rejection by the cosmopolitan literary establishment. Capturing the violence of repression, the energy required to meet its moral argument head on, and the disease of embattled survival, this book shows how these works are in many ways the literary remnants of Puritanism.
From 1928 through 1982, when Columbia Pictures Corporation was a traded stock company, the studio released some of the most famous and popular films dealing with horror, science fiction and fantasy. This volume covers more than 200 Columbia feature films within these genres, among them Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The Revenge of Frankenstein. Also discussed in depth are the vehicles of such horror icons as Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and John Carradine. Additionally highlighted are several of Columbia's lesser known genre efforts, including the Boston Blackie and Crime Doctor series, such individual features as By Whose Hand?, Cry of the Werewolf, Devil Goddess, Terror of the Tongs and The Creeping Flesh, and dozens of the studio's short subjects, serials and made-for-television movies.
With insight and originality, Michael Fellman argues that terrorism, in various forms, has been a constant and driving force in American history. In part, this is due to the nature of American republicanism and Protestant Christianity, which he believes contain a core of moral absolutism and self-righteousness that perpetrators of terrorism use to justify their actions. Fellman also argues that there is an intrinsic relationship between terrorist acts by non-state groups and responses on the part of the state; unlike many observers, he believes that both the action and the reaction constitute terrorism.Fellman’s compelling narrative focuses on five key episodes: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; terrorism during the American Civil War, especially race warfare and guerrilla warfare; the organized “White Line” paramilitary destruction of Reconstruction in Mississippi; the Haymarket Affair and its aftermath; and the Philippine-American war of 1899–1902. In an epilogue, he applies this history to illuminate the Bush-Cheney administration’s use of terrorism in the so-called war on terror. In the Name of God and Country demonstrates the centrality of terrorism in shaping America even to this day.
This volume is a systematic study of the rules of proof in English Courts of Equity between the later sixteenth and the early eighteenth century. In this period the proof practices of the Courts of Equity were controversial, as contemporary lawyers saw them as linked to the Civil Law, and some perceived a threat to the Common Law tradition. The reality of this linkage and threat has continued to be controversial among historians. In addition, this period saw the early stages of the development of the Common Law of Evidence, which in modern law is a striking divergence from Civil Law systems. The origins of the law of evidence have traditionally been linked to the need for judges to control the jury, but this view has been subject to several recent critiques. The Courts of Equity did not generally use jury trial. This study considers Equity proof rules in their relationships to contemporary Civil and Canon Law proof conceptions, medieval Common Law rules governing proof of facts, and early Common Law evidence rules. It concludes that Equity courts operated a variant of civilian proof concepts, and mediated an influence of these concepts on the origins of the Common Law of Evidence. These findings cast a new light on the debates on these origins, and on the relationship between the Common Law and Civil Law traditions in early modern England.
In Face Value, Michael O'Malley provides a deep history and a penetrating analysis of American thinking about money and the ways that this ambivalence unexpectedly intertwines with race. Like race, money is bound up in questions of identity and worth, each a kind of shorthand for the different values of two similar things. O'Malley illuminates how these two socially constructed hierarchies are deeply rooted in American anxieties about authenticity and difference.
Arrowhead: Home of the Chiefs is a monument to imaginative and aesthetic sports arena architecture, still after 25 seasons. While other arenas of its era are being replaced, Arrowhead continues to draw compliments as the best there is for football. Relive 25 years of Kansas City Chiefs football history in Arrowhead: Home of the Chiefs, the official history of the Kansas City Chiefs and Arrowhead Stadium.
Michael Allen's insightful study explores the long and diverse career of the actor and director Robert Redford, from his early work in theatre and TV to his contemporary status as an iconic and enduring star. Allen assesses Redford's importance to the American film industry during a period of great transformation: as an influential industry player, an award-winning director and a committed political activist. Allen considers Redford's individual achievements in the context of shifts and changes in the industry as a whole: some of which benefited Redford's own progress and development; some which he engineered himself, as well as discussing Redford's star persona in relation to ageing and masculinity.
Most observers believe that gospel music has been sung in African-American churches since their organization in the late 1800s. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, as Michael W. Harris's history of gospel blues reveals. Tracing the rise of gospel blues as seen through the career of its founding figure, Thomas Andrew Dorsey, Harris tells the story of the most prominent person in the advent of gospel blues. Also known as "Georgia Tom," Dorsey had considerable success in the 1920s as a pianist, composer, and arranger for prominent blues singes including Ma Rainey. In the 1930s he became involved in Chicago's African-American, old-line Protestant churches, where his background in the blues greatly influenced his composing and singing. Following much controversy during the 1930s and the eventual overwhelming response that Dorsey's new form of music received, the gospel blues became a major force in African-American churches and religion. His more than 400 gospel songs and recent Grammy Award indicate that he is still today the most prolific composer/publisher in the movement. Delving into the life of the central figure of gospel blues, Harris illuminates not only the evolution of this popular musical form, but also the thought and social forces that forged the culture in which this music was shaped.
Over multiple successful editions, this distinctive text puts day-to-day life under the microscope of sociological analysis, providing an engaging treatment of situations and interactions that are resonant with readers’ daily experiences. Clearly written and well-researched, it reveals the underlying patterns and order of everyday life, employing both seminal classical works and contemporary analyses that define and embrace the theories and methods of symbolic interactionism. The latest edition provides fresh insights into patterns of behavior across a wide range of settings and circumstances, connecting our individual “selves” to such issues as the effects of power differentials on social situations, changing definitions of intimacy, varied experiences of aging and the life course, and the ongoing search for meaning. Boxed inserts highlight topics of related interest, while thought-provoking discussion questions encourage readers to apply chapter content to their daily experiences.
An engaging study of authorship, ethics, and book publishing in 18th- and 19th-century America, The Grand Chorus of Complaint considers the uneasy relationship between art and commerce with readings of correspondence, newspaper articles, and works by Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, and Fanny Fern.
Specifications: 6" x 9" size; 244 + xxvi pages; 40 illustrations; well indexed by surname. Includes Castles in County Kerry; family seats of power; locations; variant spellings of family names; full map of County Kerry, coats of arms, and sources for research. From ancient times to the modern day. First Edition in dust jacket. Author/Editor: Michael C. O'Laughlin. Please remember that the first book in the Irish Families Project, "The Book of Irish Families, great & small" has information on Kerry families not contained in this book.
The Church of England in the 18th century is seen as failing its congregation in the industrialising areas; specific issues are set out. Was the Church of England an ailing or a healthy institution in the eighteenth century? Responding to the slings and arrows of its Victorian critics, ever since the publication in the 1930s of Norman Sykes' Church and State inEngland in the Eighteenth Century, modern scholarship has tended to stress the competence of the Church's leadership at a national and diocesan level and its importance and popularity for the nation at large. Moreover, in recent years, several studies have emerged which argue a strong case for the multi-faceted appeal of the Church of England at the local level. However, although this revisionist scholarship helps to underline the importance of religion for eighteenth-century English society, it fails to account for the haemorrhaging of support which the Church of England experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. With reference to the situation in England's largest parish, this new study of the Church of England's fortunes in the eighteenth century demonstrates its long-term failure to retain the loyalty and affections of many men and women in the country's industrialising areas. In drawing attention to hitherto neglected issues such as the situation of the Church of England's non-graduate clergy and the failure of its ecclesiastical courts, it presents a post-revisionist case which challenges the existing academic consensus on the situation and success of this faltering institution. Dr M.F. SNAPE teaches in the Department of Theology at the University of Birmingham
Poet, essayist, chemist, geologist, educator, entrepreneur, publisher--Benjamin Silliman (1779-1864) was one of the virtuosi of the Early Republic and a founder of the American scientific community. This absorbing biography is not only a study of the youth and early career of a complex and remarkable man but also a window on his times. In lively and often moving detail, Chandos Michael Brown opens the broad context of Silliman's life in his native Connecticut. From Silliman's father's disastrous captivity among the British during the Revolution to the intensities of New England religious revivals, from the international celebrity of the Weston Meteor to the economic hazards of introducing artificial mineral waters to the New York market, here is an engaging portrayal of the growth of an American scientist within his rich cultural setting. Brown tells how the young Silliman confronted the declining fortunes of his distinguished family and how he strove to invent a new career worthy of his ambition and social standing. He describes Silliman's education at Yale College and in Philadelphia, his European tour, and his subsequent activities as a professor of chemistry and mineralogy, founder of the Yale Medical School, and editor of the American Journal of Science. Throughout this cultural biography, Silliman appears as the concerned member of an often troubled family--a man who nonetheless managed to achieve that elusive quality, greatly admired by his contemporaries, that of the representative American. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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