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Books > Humanities > History > American history > General
From the days of early tribes that hunted and fished to the
tourists who later relaxed on the beaches, St. Simons Island has
been part of the changing landscape of Georgia's coast. When Gen.
James E. Oglethorpe established Fort Frederica to protect Savannah
and the Carolinas from the threat of Spain, it was, for a short
time, a vibrant hub of British military operations. During the
latter part of the 1700s, a plantation society thrived on the
island until the outbreak of the War Between the States. Never
returning to an agricultural community, by 1870 St. Simons
re-established itself with the development of a booming timber
industry. And by the 1870s, the pleasant climate and proximity to
the sea drew visitors to St. Simons as a year-round resort.
Although the causeway had brought large numbers of summer people to
the island, St. Simons remained a sleepy little place with only a
few hundred permanent residents until 1941.
Two distinct communities which share equally vibrant histories, the
twin cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor possess a rich heritage
rooted in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and tourism.
Through more than 200 photographs, this book documents the cities'
development from the time when pioneers first struggled to create a
community in the wilderness. It pays tribute to the men and women
who labored to establish farms and industries, and celebrates the
delightful beaches and amusement parks-such as the House of David
and Silver Beach-that have brought joy to generations of residents
and visitors alike.
For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven
recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music
riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found
in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were
made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name
among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear
little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the
perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as
inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his
music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early
listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms,
something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture
their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change
our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's
Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional
records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg
Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy
Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show
business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of
making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze
Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as
virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and
high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday
requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of
influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo,
and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold
insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of
Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.
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Eerie Oklahoma
(Paperback)
Heather Woodward, Rebecca Lindsey; Foreword by Stephanie Carrell
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The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a
hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the faith of
a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were
deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state.
Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to
show that virtually all of the founders were orthodox Christians in
favor of state support for religion. As the essays in this volume
demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the
political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders
of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths,
such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions, such as
Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific
founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and
John Leland, and Federalist Gouverneur Morris, among many
others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths,
constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between
religion and the state. This volume will be a crucial resource for
anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the
American constitutional republic, from political, religious,
historical, and legal perspectives.
Progressive unions flourished in the 1930s by working alongside
federal agencies created during the New Deal. Yet in 1950, few
progressive unions remained. Why? Most scholars point to domestic
anti-communism and southern conservatives in Congress as the forces
that diminished the New Deal state, eliminated progressive unions,
and destroyed the radical potential of American liberalism. Rights
Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions
argues that anti-communism and Congressional conservatism merely
intensified the main reason for the decline of progressive unions:
the New Deal state's focus on legal procedure. Initially,
progressive unions thrived by embracing the procedural culture of
New Deal agencies and the wartime American state. Between 1935 and
1945, unions mastered the complex rules of the NLRB and other
federal entities by working with government officials. In 1946 and
1947, however, the emphasis on legal procedure made the federal
state too slow to combat potentially illegal cooperation between
employers and the Teamsters. Workers who supported progressive
unions rallied around procedural language to stop what they
considered Teamster collusion, but found themselves dependent on an
ineffective federal state. The state became even less able to
protect employees belonging to left-led unions after the
Taft-Hartley Act's anti-communist provisions-and decisions by union
leaders-limited access to the NLRB's procedures. From 1946 until
1950, progressive unions withered and eventually disappeared from
the Pacific canneries as the unions failed to pay the cost of legal
representation before the NLRB. Workers supporting progressive
unions had embraced procedural language to claim their rights, but
by 1950, those workers discovered that their rights had vanished in
an endless legal discourse.
Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and
historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course
for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular
setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of
their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in
the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book
shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their
state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to
Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free
people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white
abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black
historical agency.
Although it is often claimed that slavery in New England is a
history long concealed, Making Slavery History finds it hidden in
plain sight. From memories of Phillis Wheatley and Crispus Attucks
to representations of black men at the Battle of Bunker Hill,
evidence of the local history of slavery cropped up repeatedly in
early national Massachusetts. In fixing attention on these
seemingly marginal presences, this book demonstrates that slavery
was unavoidably entangled in the commemorative culture of the early
republic-even in a place that touted itself as the "cradle of
liberty."
Transcending the particular contexts of Massachusetts and the early
American republic, this book is centrally concerned with the
relationship between two ways of making history, through social and
political transformation on the one hand and through commemoration,
narration, and representation on the other. Making Slavery History
examines the relationships between memory and social change,
between histories of slavery and dreams of freedom, and between the
stories we tell ourselves about who we have been and the
possibilities we perceive for who we might become.
Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of
Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake
P tzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater,
tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a
ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present
day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican
politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates
choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.
Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe,
Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex
processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and
tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic,
archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion
website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.
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Chicago's Motor Row
(Paperback)
John F. Hogan, John S Maxson; Foreword by Jay Leno
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Cold War Texas
(Paperback)
Landry Brewer; Foreword by Amanda Biles
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R552
R512
Discovery Miles 5 120
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Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague?
Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it?
For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago.
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?
Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.
v
TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie's lasting gift with the world.
One of the longest and seemingly most intractable civil wars in
Latin America was brought to an end by the signing of the Peace
Accords between the Guatemalan government and the Unidad
Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) in December 1996. The
essays in this volume evaluate progress made in the implementation
of the peace agreements and signal some of the key challenges for
future political and institutional reform. The volume opens with a
chapter by Gustavo Porras, the government's main negotiator in the
peace process. The first section then examines the issue of
demilitarization. This is followed by aspects of indigenous rights
in the peace process, including conceptual frameworks for rights
advancement, the harmonization of state law and customary law, and
the challenges of nation-state and citizenship construction. The
next section examines issues of truth, justice, and reconciliation,
and assesses prospects for the Truth Commission. The volume closes
with an analysis of different aspects of political reform in
Guatemala and includes comments made on the chapters and developed
in the debate which took place at the conference on which it is
based. The contributors are Marta Altolaguirre*, Marta Elena
Casa?s*, Demetrio Cojt?*, Edgar Guti?rrez*, Frank La Rue, Roger
Plant, Gustavo Porras*, Alfonso Portillo*, Jennifer Schirmer,
Rachel Sieder, David Stoll, Rosalina Tuyuc*, Anna Vinegrad, Richard
Wilson (* chapters in Spanish).
The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking
developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's
most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone
Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip
bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive
townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman
offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.
Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's
renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of
gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by
young and idealistic white college graduates searching for
"authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where
postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern
architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for
a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings,
industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge
from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the
emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners
joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local
machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer
areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as
newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists
marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners
debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or
failure. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn deftly mixes
architectural, cultural and political history in this eye-opening
perspective on the post-industrial city.
Before he was a civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was a man of the church. His father was a pastor, and much of
young Martin's time was spent in Baptist churches. He went on to
seminary and received a Ph.D. in theology. In 1953, he took over
leadership of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta. The church
was his home. But, as he began working for civil rights, King
became a fierce critic of the churches, both black and white. He
railed against white Christian leaders who urged him to be patient
in the struggle-or even opposed civil rights altogether. And, while
the black church was the platform from which King launched the
struggle for civil rights, he was deeply ambivalent toward the
church as an institution, and saw it as in constant need of reform.
In this book, Lewis Baldwin explores King's complex relationship
with the Christian church, from his days growing up at Ebenezer
Baptist, to his work as a pastor, to his battles with American
churches over civil rights, to his vision for the global church.
King, Baldwin argues, had a robust and multifaceted view of the
nature and purpose of the church that serves as a model for the
church in the 21st century.
Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of the material
aspects of Sikh identity, showing how material objects, as well as
holy sites, and texts, embody and represent the Sikh community as
an evolving historical and social construction. Widening
traditional scholarly emphasis on holy sites and texts alone to
include consideration of iconic objects, such as garments and
weaponry, Murphy moves further and examines the parallel
relationships among sites, texts, and objects. She reveals that
objects have played dramatically different roles across
regimes-signifers of authority in one, mere possessions in
another-and like Sikh texts, which have long been a resource for
the construction of Sikh identity, material objects have served as
a means of imagining and representing the past. Murphy's deft and
nuanced study of the complex role objects have played and continue
to play in Sikh history and memory will be a valuable resource to
students and scholars of Sikh history and culture.
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