Hemmed in by steep hills, Glen Park is defined by its quintessentially San Franciscan topography. Only 120 years ago this area, as well as neighboring Diamond Heights, was part of the Outside Lands, so
isolated that only farmers would settle here. Life revolved around Islais Creek, which ran through the canyon and provided water for the dairies. Then, in 1892, a German immigrant named Behrend Joost founded the citys first electric streetcar to shuttle residents to jobs downtown, and a neighborhood was born. As peak-roofed wooden cottages and houses began to fill in the valleys, the urban, homey, and decidedly livable Glen Park that we know today began to emerge.

In 1899, Carrie Chapman Catt, who succeeded Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Women Suffrage Association, argued that it was the "duty" of U.S. women to help lift the inhabitants of its new island possessions up from "barbarism" to "civilization," a project that would presumably demonstrate the capacity of U.S. women for full citizenship and political rights. Catt, like many suffragists in her day, was well-versed in the language of empire, and infused the cause of suffrage with imperialist zeal in public debate. Unlike their predecessors, who were working for votes for women within the context of slavery and abolition, the next generation of suffragists argued their case against the backdrop of the U.S. expansionism into Indian and Mormon territory at home as well as overseas in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. In this book, Allison L. Sneider carefully examines these simultaneous political movements--woman suffrage and American imperialism--as inextricably intertwined phenomena, instructively complicating the histories of both.

Ends of Assimilation compares sociological and Chicano/a (Mexican American) literary representations of assimilation. It argues that while Chicano/a literary works engage assimilation in complex, often contradictory ways, they manifest an underlying conviction in literature's productive power. At the same time, Chicano/a literature demonstrates assimilation sociology's inattention to its status as a representational discourse. As twentieth-century sociologists employ the term, assimilation reinscribes as fact the fiction of a unitary national culture, ignores the interlinking of race and gender in cultural formation, and valorizes upward economic mobility as a politically neutral index of success. The study unfolds chronologically, describing how the historical formation of Chicano/a literature confronts the specter of assimilation discourse. It tracks how the figurative, rhetorical, and lyrical power of Chicano/a literary works compels us to compare literary discourse with the self-authorizing empiricism of assimilation sociology. It also challenges presumptions of authenticity on the part of Chicano/a cultural nationalist works, arguing that Chicano/a literature must reckon with cultural dynamism and develop models of relational authenticity to counter essentialist discourses. The book advances these arguments through sustained close readings of canonical and noncanonical figures and gives an account of various moments in the history and institutional development of Chicano/a literature, such as the rise and fall of Quinto Sol Publications, asserting that Chicano/a writers, editors, and publishers have self-consciously sought to acquire and redistribute literary cultural capital.

Maine has a rich supernatural history and ghost stories from the state are as varied as they are prolific. Freelance writer and reporter Tom Verde first became interested in such eerie occurrences while researching first-hand encounters with ghosts for a series of public radio programs. This book recounts some of the spine-tingling tales he uncovered in his research, including: *The dagger-wielding shade who terrorized a Portland couple *The murdered Indian who revisited Means's Tavern *Famed diva Lillian Nordica, whose voice still echoes through the Farmington auditorium named in her honor *The hostile spirit who tried to frighten the tenants out of an Orrington house *Even an entire phantom ship, bound eternally for Freeport These are not fictitious creations of literary imagination. People from all walks of life-including many who were positive they would never believe in ghosts-attest to these encounters.