With a combination of scrupulous original research, new perspective, and a sensitive historical imagination, "Patriotic Treason" vividly recreates the world in which John Brown and his compatriots lived as well as the biography of John Brown and the history of the events leading up to the Civil War. Evan Carton narrates the dramatic life of the first U.S. citizen committed to absolute racial equality. In defiance of the culture around him, Brown lived, worked, ate, and fought alongside African Americans. Inspired by the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule, he collaborated with black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Harriet Tubman to overthrow slavery. Carton captures the complex, tragic, and provocative story of Brown the committed abolitionist, Brown the tender yet demanding and often absent father and husband, and Brown the radical American patriot who attacked the American state in the name of American principles. Carton's fresh archival research, his attention to overlooked family letters, and his reinterpretation of documents and events reveal a missing link in American history. A wrenching family saga, "Patriotic Treason" positions Brown at the heart of our most profound and enduring national debates on patriotism, treason, religion, and race relations.

This book addresses the urgent need for rigorous and creative examination of how new theoretical principles, sociocultural investments, and pedagogical technologies inform classroom teaching. Written by current and former graduate and faculty instructors of English at the University of Texas at Austin--a department that has been centrally involved in national controversies over literary multiculturalism, the politics of writing instruction, and the development of academic computer technology--this collection constitutes a uniquely situated engagement with the most pressing contemporary questions in English studies.

After historical and theoretical contextualizing by its coeditors, "Situating College English" is organized in to three sections that provide conceptual analyses, practical strategies, and empirical data derived from representative classroom experiences and addressed to a range of pedagogical issues.