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Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers
Forests, Animals, And Ambushes In The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Jeremy Withers
Jeremy Withers
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the forest is often depicted as an ideal place for ambushing one's enemy. Such persistent attacks lead many warriors in the poem to encounter densely wooded areas with trepidation and even at times with explicit violence towards these places. However, through its use of several arresting locus amoenus passages, the Morte demonstrates alternative ways for soldiers to experience natural landscapes. Rather than suggest that forests are inherently malicious and forbidding places (as many medieval romances have done), the poem suggests that when cleared of an immediate threat of ambush, natural landscapes can be restorative and …
Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival In Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane E. Dusselier
Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival In Japanese American Concentration Camps, Jane E. Dusselier
Jane E. Dusselier
"Artful Identifications" offers three meanings of internment art. First, internees remade locations of imprisonment into livable places of survival. Inside places were remade as internees responded to degraded living conditions by creating furniture with discarded apple crates, cardboard, tree branches and stumps, scrap pieces of wood left behind by government carpenters, and wood lifted from guarded lumber piles. Having addressed the material conditions of their living units, internees turned their attention to aesthetic matters by creating needle crafts, wood carvings, ikebana, paintings, shell art, and kobu. Dramatic changes to outside spaces of "assembly centers" and concentration camps were also critical …
Countrysides Transformed, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Countrysides Transformed, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Rural and agricultural history provide their readers different perspectives on the ways in which the countryside has changed over the course of American history. Rural history approaches the question of change from the perspective of communities and families, while agricultural history generally eschews the social perspective for issues of crop production. Such is the case of two recent and important books in rural and agricultural history, Hal Barron's Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformationin the Rural North, 1870-1930 and Steven Stoll's The Fruits of Natural Advantage: The Making of the Industrial Countryside in California. While both authors are intimately concerned …
The Historical Development Of Agriculture In Illinois, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
The Historical Development Of Agriculture In Illinois, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Illinois' agricultural history is long and complex. Illinois' first settlers, the Native Americans, practiced hunting, gathering, and fishing and made use of the resources of the woods and prairies. By the tenth century, Native Americans combined men's hunting with women's agricultural activities to meet the needs of their communities. The earliest crop Native American women cultivated was corn, imported to Illinois from the Southwest.
Women, Technology, And Rural Life: Some Recent Literature, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Women, Technology, And Rural Life: Some Recent Literature, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Historical study of American farm women has had a relatively short life, reaching back approximately twenty years. Rural women rarely existed in earlier scholarship that reserved the categories of farmer and farming for males. Agricultural history thus manifested itself as a story of men and their tools, stretching back historiographically into the early days of the 20th century. Although in 1953 Jared van Wagenen described in careful detail many of the physical processes of farming in The Golden Age of Homespun, the women's work from which he derived his title occupied less than twenty pages at the end of his …
Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction And Critiques Of Pure Country, Barbara Ching
Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction And Critiques Of Pure Country, Barbara Ching
Barbara Ching
Country music has the fastest-growing audience in America but it is still rather scandalous for an intellectual to admit to liking it. Contemporary cultural theory—which is to say cultural studies—has thus had practically nothing to say about it. At first glance, it may seem that everything has already been said. I know well enough that many people find country music to be dumb, reactionary, sentimental, maudlin, primitive, etc. Still others, perhaps influenced one way or another by the Frankfurt school, sneer at what they feel is the contrived, hokey, convention-bound nature of the music: they hear a commodification and cheapening …