The bestselling workbook and grammar guide, revised and updated! Hailed as one of the best books around for teaching grammar, The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation includes easy-to-understand rules, abundant examples, dozens of reproducible quizzes, and pre- and post-tests to help teach grammar to middle and high schoolers, college students, ESL students, homeschoolers, and more. This concise, entertaining workbook makes learning English grammar and usage simple and fun. This updated 12th edition reflects the latest updates to English usage and grammar, and includes answers to all reproducible quizzes to facilitate self-assessment and learning. Clear and concise, with easy-to-follow explanations, offering "just the facts" on English grammar, punctuation, and usage Fully updated to reflect the latest rules, along with even more quizzes and pre- and post-tests to help teach grammar Ideal for students from seventh grade through adulthood in the US and abroad For anyone who wants to understand the major rules and subtle guidelines of English grammar and usage, The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation offers comprehensive, straightforward instruction.

Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts. The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers, radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of progressive American educational reform, these violent comic stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider" or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious, even shocking terms.

Teaching guides and lesson plans designed to make classic literature engaging and relevant to today's students! This comprehensive book of lesson plans, projects, discussion questions, reproducible worksheets, and more provides teachers with everything they need to engage middle- and high-school students in the study of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Each SparkTeach Guide includes: - Dozens of lessons and contextual "Real Life Lens" discussion prompts - "Big Idea Question" prompts, activities, and projects that explore the work's key themes - Poetics lesson plans - Film comparative lesson plans - Exercises in studying the play's use of metaphor, simile, personification, and motifs - Lesson plans for differentiated instruction - Reproducible worksheets and lesson assessments that build reading, vocabulary, and comprehension skills - Answer keys - Student rubrics There are also tips for class planning and management, ideas for personalizing content, Common Core references, and more, making this the perfect resource to engage students in literature study that's meaningful, exciting, and above all, FUN.

Contributions by Beverly Lyon Clark, Christine Doyle, Gregory Eiselein, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Anne K. Phillips, Daniel Shealy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites As the golden age of children's literature dawned in America in the mid-1860s, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Never out of print, Alcott's tale of four sisters growing up in nineteenth-century New England has been published in more than fifty countries around the world. Over the century and a half since its publication, the novel has grown into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. Little Women at 150, a collection of eight original essays by scholars whose research and writings over the past twenty years have helped elevate Alcott's reputation in the academic community, examines anew the enduring popularity of the novel and explores the myriad complexities of Alcott's most famous work. Examining key issues about philanthropy, class, feminism, Marxism, Transcendentalism, canon formation, domestic labor, marriage, and Australian literature, Little Women at 150 presents new perspectives on one of the United States' most enduring novels. A historical and critical introduction discusses the creation and publication of the novel, briefly traces the scholarly critical response, and demonstrates how these new essays show us that Little Women and its illustrations still have riches to reveal to its readers in the twenty-first century.

This crucial book guides academics and researchers through the process of peer reviewing manuscript articles, outlining the methods and proficiencies required to write a high-quality review. Gloria Barczak and Abbie Griffin specifically highlight the importance of becoming a first-rate reviewer to early-career scholars. Beginning with a working definition of a high-quality review, subsequent chapters detail the financial, career and personal benefits of peer reviewing for researchers, outline editors' and authors' expectations of reviewers, and offer a template for reviewing manuscripts effectively. Next, the book explicates sets of questions to consider in reviewing each section of a manuscript and features examples of reviews for actual journal submissions by the authors. Comprehensive in its approach, this book will be crucial for any early-career social scientist hoping to effectively join the peer review process and write high-quality, meaningful reviews, as well as seasoned academics wishing to refine their skills.

How can we look afresh at Shakespeare as a writer of sonnets? What new light might they shed on his career, personality, and sexuality? Shakespeare wrote sonnets for at least thirty years, not only for himself, for professional reasons, and for those he loved, but also in his plays, as prologues, as epilogues, and as part of their poetic texture. This ground-breaking book assembles all of Shakespeare's sonnets in their probable order of composition. An inspiring introduction debunks long-established biographical myths about Shakespeare's sonnets and proposes new insights about how and why he wrote them. Explanatory notes and modern English paraphrases of every poem and dramatic extract illuminate the meaning of these sometimes challenging but always deeply rewarding witnesses to Shakespeare's inner life and professional expertise. Beautifully printed and elegantly presented, this volume will be treasured by students, scholars, and every Shakespeare enthusiast.

In late 1872, the New York Herald named James J. O'Kelly its special correspondent to Cuba, to cover what would later be known as the Ten Years' War. O'Kelly was tasked with crossing Spanish lines, locating the insurgent camps, and interviewing the president of the Cuban republic, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes. O'Kelly became a political lightning rod when, after fulfilling his mission, he was arrested, court-martialed, and threatened with execution in Spanish Cuba. For the book that followed, The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba, O'Kelly assembled edited versions of the eighteen dispatches he sent to the Herald, some written in the remotest imaginable places in the Cuban interior. The Mambi-Land constitutes the first book-length account of Cuba's Ten Years' War for independence from Spain (1868-1878) and provides a window on an understudied moment in U.S.-Cuba relations. More than recovering an important lost work, this critical edition draws attention to Cuba's crucial place in American national consciousness in the post-Civil War period and represents a timely and significant contribution to our understanding of the complicated history of Cuba-U.S. relations.