Arts and Humanities Commons^™

[Introduction To] Darkness Falls On The Land Of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings In Eighteenth-Century New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

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This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as delusive enthusiasm. These new converts, the progenitors …

[Introduction To] More Than Shelter: Activism And Community In San Francisco Public Housing, Amy L. Howard

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In the popular imagination, public housing tenants are considered, at best, victims of intractable poverty and, at worst, criminals. More Than Shelter makes clear that such limited perspectives do not capture the rich reality of tenants’ active engagement in shaping public housing into communities. By looking closely at three public housing projects in San Francisco, Amy L. Howard brings to light the dramatic measures tenants have taken to create—and sustain and strengthen—communities that mattered to them.

More Than Shelter opens with the tumultuous institutional history of the San Francisco Housing Authority, from its inception during the New Deal era, through …

[Introduction To] America's War: Talking About The Civil War And Emancipation On Their 150th Anniversaries, Edward L. Ayers

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Edited by Edward L. Ayers, America’s War is an anthology of Civil War writing originally published between 1852 and 2008. Co-published by the American Library Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities, America’s War was created in support of a national reading and discussion program for libraries called “Let’s Talk About It: Making Sense of the American Civil War.”

The selections in America’s War include works of historical fiction and interpretation, speeches, diaries, memoirs, biographies, and short stories. Together, these readings provide a glimpse of the vast sweep and profound breadth of Americans’ war among and against themselves, adding …

[Introduction To] When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits Of Women Combat Veterans, Laura Browder, Sascha Pflaeging

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While women are officially barred from combat in the American armed services, in the current war, where there are no front lines, the ban on combat is virtually meaningless. More than in any previous conflict in our history, American women are engaging with the enemy, suffering injuries, and even sacrificing their lives in the line of duty.

When Janey Comes Marching Home juxtaposes forty-eight photographs by Sascha Pflaeging with oral histories collected by Laura Browder to provide a dramatic portrait of women at war. Women from all five branches of the military share their stories here--stories that are by turns …

[Introduction To] America On The Eve Of The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers, Carolyn R. Martin

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The scholarship and public history the sixteen historians had created over their careers made this plan seem at least feasible. Their collective body of work embraces everything from politics to literature, from industrial slavery to African American art, from women's reform efforts to racial ideologies, from military history to the history of memory. Some of them worked at museums and libraries while others taught at universities and colleges across the nations. They belonged to no particular school of interpretation, and quite a few had never met one another.

The historians, whatever their backgrounds, shared a sense of responsibility for opening …

[Introduction To] With The Weathermen: The Personal Journal Of A Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern, Laura Browder

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Drugs. Sex. Revolutionary violence. From its first pages, Susan Stern's memoir With the Weathermen provides a candid, first-hand look at the radical politics and the social and cultural environment of the New Left during the late 1960s.

The Weathermen--a U.S.-based, revolutionary splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society--advocated the overthrow of the government and capitalism, and toward that end, carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots throughout the United States. In With the Weathermen Stern traces her involvement with this group, and her transformation from a shy, married graduate student into a go-go dancing, street-fighting "macho mama." …

[Introduction To] Poverty And Progress In The U.S. South Since 1920, Suzanne W. Jones, Mark Newman

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Poverty, disease, and illiteracy had long bedeviled the U.S. South, even before the agricultural depression of the 1920s became subsumed within the Great Depression of the 1930s. The essays collected in this volume examine a variety of responses to economic depression and poverty. They recount specific battles for civil, educational, and labor rights, and explore the challenges and alternatives to the corporate South in the post World War II agribusiness era. Scholars from both the U.S. and Europe assess how far the South has come in the last century, what forces (from the Sears Roebuck Catalog to the Civil Rights …

[Introduction To] Her Best Shot: Women And Guns In America, Laura Browder

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The gun-toting woman holds enormous symbolic significance in American culture. For over two centuries, women who pick up guns have disrupted the popular association of guns and masculinity, spurring debates about women's capabilities for violence as well as their capacity for full citizenship. In Her Best Shot, Laura Browder examines the relationship between women and guns and the ways in which the figure of the armed woman has served as a lightning rod for cultural issues.

Utilizing autobiographies, advertising, journalism, novels, and political tracts, among other sources, Browder traces appearances of the armed woman across a chronological spectrum from …

[Introduction To] Crucible Of The Civil War: Virginia From Secession To Commemoration, Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, Andrew J. Torget

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Crucible of the Civil War offers an illuminating portrait of the state’s wartime economic, political, and social institutions. Weighing in on contentious issues within established scholarship while also breaking ground in areas long neglected by scholars, the contributors examine such concerns as the war’s effect on slavery in the state, the wartime intersection of race and religion, and the development of Confederate social networks. They also shed light on topics long disputed by historians, such as Virginia’s decision to secede from the Union, the development of Confederate nationalism, and how Virginians chose to remember the war after its close.

[Introduction To] What Caused The Civil War? Reflections On The South And Southern History, Edward L. Ayers

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The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians.

Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, …

[Introduction To] Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since The Sixties, Suzanne W. Jones

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In the southern United States, there remains a deep need among both black and white writers to examine the topic of race relations, whether they grew up during segregation or belong to the younger generation that graduated from integrated schools. In Race Mixing, Suzanne Jones offers insightful and provocative readings of contemporary novels, the work of a wide range of writers—black and white, established and emerging. Their stories explore the possibilities of cross-racial friendships, examine the repressed history of interracial love, reimagine the Civil Rights era through children's eyes, herald the reemergence of the racially mixed character, investigate acts …

[Introduction To] Growing Up In The South: An Anthology Of Modern Southern Literature, Suzanne W. Jones

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Something about the South has inspired the imaginations of an extraordinary number of America’s best storytellers—and greatest writers. That quality may be a rich, unequivocal sense of place, a living connection with the past, or the contradictions and passions that endow this region with awesome beauty and equally awesome tragedy. The stories in this superb collection of modern Southern writing are about childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—in other words, about growing up in the South. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” set in a South that remains segregated even after segregation is declared illegal, is the story of a …

[Introduction To] In The Presence Of Mine Enemies: Civil War In The Heart Of America, 1859-1863, Edward L. Ayers

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Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War.

Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations.

But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and …

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

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The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

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In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

[Introduction To] Crossing The Color Line: Readings In Black And White, Suzanne W. Jones

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The complex truth about the color line -- its destructive effects, painful legacy, clandestine crossings, possible erasure -- is revealed more often in private than in public and has sometimes been visited more easily by novelists than historians. In this tradition, Crossing the Color Line, a powerful collection of nineteen contemporary stories, speaks the unspoken, explores the hidden, and voices both fear and hope about relationships between blacks and whites. The volume opens with stories by Alice Adams, Toni Cade Bambara, Ellen Douglas, Reynolds Price, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, and John A. Williams that focus on misunderstandings created by racial stereotypes …

[Introduction To] Valley Of The Shadow: Two Communities In The American Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

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Two communities in America's Great Valley--Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia--separated by only a few hundred miles, share much in their politics and ways of life. Yet they emerge on opposing sides of a war in which they zealously send their sons to fight and die. Here we see a Civil War that is not the inevitable conflict of rival societies, but a human drama, immediate, particular, engrossing.

[Introduction To] The Viper On The Hearth: Mormons, Myths, And The Construction Of Heresy, Terryl Givens

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Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in such fictional genres as mysteries, westerns, and popular romances. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people--the "viper on the hearth"--who sought to violate the domestic sphere of the mainstream. While other critics have mined the socio-political sources of anti-Mormonism, Givens is the first to reveal how popular fiction, in its attempt to deal with the sources and nature of this conflict, constructed an image of the Mormon as a religious and social "Other."

[Introduction To] The Oxford Book Of The American South: Testimony, Memory, And Fiction, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf

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Resonating with the testimony of slaves and slaveholders, the powerful and the powerless, women and men, black people and white, The Oxford Book of the American South combines the most telling fiction and nonfiction produced in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present. The first anthology to put short stories, novels, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and journalism together, this collection is a rich and varied record of life below the Mason Dixon line. We see the antebellum period both from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand, such as Thomas Jefferson and Harriet Jacobs, as well as …

[Introduction To] All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions, Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, Peter S. Onuf

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Even as Americans keep moving "all over the map" in the late twentieth century, they cherish memories of the places they come from. But where do these places—these regions—come from? What makes them so real? In this groundbreaking book a distinguished group of historians explores the concept of region in America, traces changes the idea has undergone in our national experience, and examines its meaning for Americans today.

Far from diminishing in importance, the authors conclude, regional differences continue to play a significant role in Americans' self-image. Regional identity, in fact, has always been fed by the very forces that …

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

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At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

[Introduction To] The Edge Of The South: Life In Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Edward L. Ayers, John C. Willis

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The chapters in this volume explore diverse scenes of nineteenth-century Virginia: the big house and the slave quarters, small farms and battlefields, freed slaves in the country and freed slaves in the city, dark coal mines and brightly illuminated caverns, raucous political rallies and genteel meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Each essay offers a new perspective on a past which refuses to fit familiar ways of thinking about the nation and the South.

[Introduction To] Vengeance And Justice: Crime And Punishment In The 19th Century American South, Edward L. Ayers

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Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Edward L. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.