This is the annotated edition of novelist/journalist Rebecca Harding Davisís 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable--and sometimes scandalous--people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the "daughters of the Southland" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still.
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.
The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Instead of focusing on major Civil War conflicts and leaders, she takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads.
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831-1910), born Rebecca Blaine Harding, was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary Realism in American literature. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861), and is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. Throughout her lifetime, she sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about these marginalised groups' plight in the 19th century. From 1869 onwards, she was a regular contributing editor to the New York Tribune and the New York Independent. In 1889, however, she resigned from the Tribune in order to protest editorial censorship of her articles. Her other works include Margaret Howth: A Story of To-day (1862), Waiting for the Verdict (1868), Dallas Galbraith (1868), John Andross (1874), Kitty's Choice (1874), Silhouettes of American Life (1892), Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896), Frances Waldeaux (1897) and Bits of Gossip (1904).
Mired in tradition and hearsay, Germantown was dominated bya few old families and their influence from their founding. All that changedonce the Pickett family came to town. No one was certain what to make of thestrangers at first, and no one could have predicted what they'd bring with them.After the family brought unbelievable tragedy to the small town, those remainingwere left with a hard lesson to learn. Set against the backdrop of the rural NorthCarolinian piedmont during the Great Depression, Amidst This Fading Lightexplores life, death, and what it means to carry on as people deal with what fatebrings upon them, both the light and the dark, to persevere and survive or beswept away by time and inescapable memory.
This gripping true story is narrated by Rebecca Smith Davis as she shares firsthand experiences on how God can intervene in our lives by transforming our trials into a greater purpose for God’s glory. Rebecca tells about her husband, Leroy, before they had met. She shares how he had struggled to stay sober until God planted him in a prison cell while God dealt with his heart. Rebecca reveals her own struggles with wavering commitment to God since childhood, and how her rebellion resulted in three broken marriages. Her chronicle continues as she shares Rebecca and Leroy’s love story where they met in church and formed a quick bond that further cemented their love for God and for each other. These stories of faith allow readers to relate to instances with their own struggles and shortfalls and how God extends grace and forgiveness to those who have a willing heart.
Leroy Davis had been in a coma for more than two weeks. His life was slowly fading with no sign of improvement. Rebecca began thinking of how she may need to prepare for her husband's funeral. She prayed until she fell asleep, crying fervently to God to heal her husband. Over in the corner of the nurse's station outside his room, Leroy saw a tall male figure, an obscure shadowy figure of a sort, peering into the window of his room. The shadowy image had dark hair, a slim build, and wore a dark suit. The being smirked at Leroy through the window while he lay in the bed. Leroy noticed when it snarled, that the spirit had sharp jagged teeth. Leroy could see the figure talking but Leroy couldn't hear what the phantom was saying. Toward the other side of the room, Leroy then saw a plump, blonde-haired lady that had a glow about her. She was in white clothing and was up against the wall. Awe-inspiring and remarkable, this true story details Leroy's fight for his life and describes his encounter with an angel days before doctors planned to remove life support. He tells about a battle of good and evil forces while he lay unconscious, a band of men marching around his bedside, and an angel who woke him and led him down a dusty road.
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831-1910), born Rebecca Blaine Harding, was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary Realism in American literature. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861), and is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. Throughout her lifetime, she sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about these marginalised groups' plight in the 19th century. From 1869 onwards, she was a regular contributing editor to the New York Tribune and the New York Independent. In 1889, however, she resigned from the Tribune in order to protest editorial censorship of her articles. Her other works include Margaret Howth: A Story of To-day (1862), Waiting for the Verdict (1868), Dallas Galbraith (1868), John Andross (1874), Kitty's Choice (1874), Silhouettes of American Life (1892), Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896), Frances Waldeaux (1897) and Bits of Gossip (1904).
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831-1910), born Rebecca Blaine Harding, was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary Realism in American literature. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills published in the Atlantic Monthly (1861), and is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. Throughout her lifetime, she sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about these marginalised groups' plight in the 19th century. From 1869 onwards, she was a regular contributing editor to the New York Tribune and the New York Independent. In 1889, however, she resigned from the Tribune in order to protest editorial censorship of her articles. Her other works include Margaret Howth: A Story of To-day (1862), Waiting for the Verdict (1868), Dallas Galbraith (1868), John Andross (1874), Kitty's Choice (1874), Silhouettes of American Life (1892), Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896), Frances Waldeaux (1897) and Bits of Gossip (1904).
Why, asks Rebecca Davis, did conversions seem so prevalent between the mid-1940s and the late 1990s, and why did people care? Examining the highly-publicized and controversial conversions of individuals include Clare Boothe Luce (Protestantism to Catholicism), Whittaker Chambers ("godless Communist" to Christianity), Sammy Davis, Jr., (Christianity to Judaism), and Muhammad Ali (Christianity to Islam), Davis roots this dynamic in Cold War culture, society, and politics. She reveals how the twin and often contradictory pressures to conform to a specific vision of Americanism while simultaneously celebrating the freedom of religion as a particularly American asset made conversions both attractive and threatening to Americans. Thanks to Davis's compelling case studies, we learn that the act of breaking from the religion of one's upbringing could be seen as a selfish, reckless, and nonconformist act, but conversion also accomplished significant political work, whether fighting communism in the case of ex-spy Chambers or battling racism in the case of Ali"--
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