The role of objects and images in everyday life are illuminated incisively in Material Vernaculars, which combines historical, ethnographic, and object-based methods across a diverse range of material and visual cultural forms. The contributors to this volume offer revealing insights into the significance of such practices as scrapbooking, folk art produced by the elderly, the wedding coat in Osage ceremonial exchanges, temporary huts built during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and Kiowa women's traditional roles in raiding and warfare. While emphasizing local vernacular culture, the contributors point to the ways that culture is put to social ends within larger social networks and within the stream of history. While attending to the material world, these case studies explicate the manner in which the tangible and intangible, the material and the meaningful, are constantly entwined and co-constituted.

Nathan Coppedge, previously the author of The Dimensional Psychologist's Toolkit and Nathan Coppedge's Perpetual Motion Machine Designs & Theory, here presents a variety of unique graphic symbols and archetypes. Short and sweet, this text is bound to confound its readers with its sense of originality and meaning as deep as the sea of Odysseus. This book is periodically updated with new images. Recent additions include 'Maze, ' 'Wit, ' and 'King's Highway' archetypes. The textual index of unique concepts is also updated occasionally, but is still undergoing work. For now it is, as I say, short and sweet.

The role of objects and images in everyday life are illuminated incisively in Material Vernaculars, which combines historical, ethnographic, and object-based methods across a diverse range of material and visual cultural forms. The contributors to this volume offer revealing insights into the significance of such practices as scrapbooking, folk art produced by the elderly, the wedding coat in Osage ceremonial exchanges, temporary huts built during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, and Kiowa women's traditional roles in raiding and warfare. While emphasizing local vernacular culture, the contributors point to the ways that culture is put to social ends within larger social networks and within the stream of history. While attending to the material world, these case studies explicate the manner in which the tangible and intangible, the material and the meaningful, are constantly entwined and co-constituted.

"Find your one true love and live happily ever after." The trials of love and desire provide perennial story material, from the Biblical Song of Songs to Disney's princesses, but perhaps most provocatively in the romance novel, a genre known for tales of fantasy and desire, sex and pleasure. Hailed on the one hand for its women-centered stories that can be sexually liberating, and criticized on the other for its emphasis on male/female coupling and mythical happy endings, romance fiction is a multi-million dollar publishing phenomenon, creating national and international societies of enthusiasts, practitioners, and scholars. Catherine M. Roach, alongside her romance-writer alter-ego, Catherine LaRoche, guides the reader deep into Romancelandia where the smart and the witty combine with the sexy and seductive to explore why this genre has such a grip on readers and what we can learn from the romance novel about the nature of happiness, love, sex, and desire in American popular culture.

SLEAZY MAGAZINES AND BOOK COVERS OF THE PAST. IS EXACTLY THAT. THIS BOOK WILL TAKE A LOOK AT THE VARIOUS MAGAZINES AND BOOK COVERS OF THE PAST. THERE HAS BEEN THOUSANDS OF SO CALLED SLEAZE OR SMUT PUBLICATIONS. THIS COLLECTION WILL HIGHLIGHT SOME OF THE WORST OR BEST. THE CHOICE IS YOURS. I THINK THAT THESE EARLY PERIODICALS OF THIS NATURE WERE UNIQUE AND SPECIAL. I PERSONALLY LIKE THE ART WORK AND THE WEIRD PHOTOGRAPHY. NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, THIS IS ALSO A PART OF THE AMERICAN STORY. IF YOU WERE TO COMPARE THESE EARLY MAGS AND BOOK COVERS. UP AGAINST WHAT IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE TODAY. THE OLD MAGS AND BOOK COVERS WOULD LOOK LIKE A JOKE AT LEAST THE OLD MAGS LEFT YOU SOME ROOM FOR IMAGINATION. TODAY WITH THE INTERNET, YOU CAN SEE MORE NAKED MEN OR WOMEN ON ONE PAGE. THAN ALL OF THESE BOOKS COMBINED. TODAY THESE MAGS WOULD CARRY A PG WARNING LABEL. BACK IN THE DAY. THEY WERE CONSIDERED VULGAR. TODAY THEY ARE FUNNY AND OUT DATED. SOMETIMES SOME THINGS ARE BETTER LEFT UNCHANGED ANYWAY YOU BE THE JUDGE, ON WHATS SLEAZE OR NOT. ME, I THINK. IT IS JUST ANOTHER LOST PART OF OUR INNOCENCE OR OUR IGNORANCE. ENOUGH TALK GO LOOK AT SOME VINTAGE COVERS. SEE YOU IN THE NEXT EPISODE.

On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America's discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors.

On any given day in America's news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America's discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors.

The final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, has been controversial since its initial appearance during the first century A.D. For centuries after, theologians, exegetes, scholars, and preachers have grappled with the imagery and symbolism behind this fascinating and terrifying book. Their thoughts and ideas regarding the apocalypse-and its trials and tribulations-were received within both elite and popular culture in the medieval and early modern eras. Therefore, one may rightly call the Apocalypse, and its accompanying hopes and fears, a foundational pillar of Western Civilization. The interest in the Apocalypse, and apocalyptic movements, continues apace in modern scholarship and society alike. This present volume, A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse, collates essays from specialists in the study of premodern apocalyptic subjects. It is designed to orient undergraduate and graduate students, as well as more established scholars, to the state of the field of premodern apocalyptic studies as well as to point them in future directions for their scholarship and/or pedagogy. Contributors are: Roland Betancourt, Robert Boenig, Richard K. Emmerson, Ernst Hintz, Laszlo Hubbes, Hiram Kumper, Natalie Latteri, Thomas Long, Katherine Olson, Kevin Poole, Matthias Riedl, Michael A. Ryan