Taking up the role of laughter in society, How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920 examines an era in which the US population was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Comic artists and writers, hoping to create works that would appeal to a diverse Audience, had to formulate a method for making the "other half" laugh. In magazine fiction, vaudeville, and the comic strip, the oppressive conditions of the poor and the marginalized were portrayed unflinchingly, yet with a distinctly comic sensibility that grew out of caricature and ethnic humor.Author Jean Lee Cole analyzes Progressive Era popular culture, providing a critical angle to approach visual and literary humor about ethnicity-how avenues of comedy serve as expressions of solidarity, commiseration, and empowerment. Cole's argument centers on the comic sensibility, which she defines as a performative act that fosters feelings of solidarity and community among the marginalized. Cole stresses the connections between the worlds of art, journalism, and literature and the people who produced them-including George Herriman, R. F. Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, Jimmy Swinnerton, George Luks, and William Glackens-and traces the form's emergence in the pages of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's Journal-American and how it influenced popular fiction, illustration, and art. How the Other Half Laughs restores the newspaper comic strip to its rightful place as a transformative element of American culture at the turn into the twentieth century.

In a series of columns published in the African American newspaper The Christian Recorder, the young, charismatic preacher Henry McNeal Turner described his experience of the Civil War, first from the perspective of a civilian observer in Washington, D.C., and later, as one of the Union army's first black chaplains. In the halls of Congress, Turner witnessed the debates surrounding emancipation and black enlistment. As army chaplain, Turner dodged ""grape"" and cannon, comforted the sick and wounded, and settled disputes between white southerners and their former slaves. He was dismayed by the destruction left by Sherman's army in the Carolinas, but buoyed by the bravery displayed by black soldiers in battle. After the war ended, he helped establish churches and schools for the freedmen, who previously had been prohibited from attending either. Throughout his columns, Turner evinces his firm belief in the absolute equality of blacks with whites, and insists on civil rights for all black citizens. In vivid, detailed prose, laced with a combination of trenchant commentary and self-deprecating humor, Turner established himself as more than an observer: he became a distinctive and authoritative voice for the black community, and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church. After Reconstruction failed, Turner became disillusioned with the American dream and became a vocal advocate of black emigration to Africa, prefiguring black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Here, however, we see Turner's youthful exuberance and optimism, and his open-eyed wonder at the momentous changes taking place in American society. Well-known in his day, Turner has been relegated to the fringes of African American history, in large part because neither his views nor the forms in which he expressed them were recognized by either the black or white elite. With an introduction by Jean Lee Cole and a foreword by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner restores this important figure to the historical and literary record.

Pearl Harbor and the tentacles of Word War II turn San Francisco into a raucous, electrifying city. Twenty-year-old Carmel St. John moves into this maelstrom with dreams of winning the heart of Dr. Phillip Barron and becoming a big band singer.

There, Carmel meets Caesar Almalto, a black-market kingpin, and Jerry Cassidy, a musician who helps her and hopes to win her love. Nightclub life, lust, and murder swirl around her, as does her tenuous relationship with Phillip, who leaves as a commissioned officer aboard the first hospital ship in the Pacific theater. A family crisis threatens to destroy Carmel's dreams when she is called home to San Jose to manage the family's 1,100-acre ranch during the war.

"The Stone Must Break" tells the saga of two families, the St. Johns and the Barrons, as they grapple with tragedy, love, and responsibility in a world at war.

Readers today are still fascinated by “Nat,” an eighteenth-century nautical wonder and mathematical wizard. Nathaniel Bowditch grew up in a sailor’s world—Salem in the early days, when tall-masted ships from foreign ports crowded the wharves. But Nat didn’t promise to have the makings of a sailor; he was too physically small. Nat may have been slight of build, but no one guessed that he had the persistence and determination to master sea navigation in the days when men sailed only by “log, lead, and lookout.” Nat’s long hours of study and observation, collected in his famous work, The American Practical Navigator (also known as the “Sailors’ Bible”), stunned the sailing community and made him a New England hero.

Two compassionately subversive plays about identity, by Young Jean Lee, a Korean American playwright whose work is groundbreaking, humorous and often thrillingly transgressive. In Straight White Men, it's Christmas Eve, and Ed has gathered his three adult sons to celebrate with matching pyjamas, trash-talking, and Chinese takeaway. But when a question they can't answer interrupts their seasonal cheer, they are forced to confront their own identities. Raucous, surprising and fearless, Straight White Men takes an outside look at the traditional father/son narrative, shedding new light on a story we think we know all too well. It had its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2021, following US productions including a Broadway run that made Lee the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. In Untitled Feminist Show, six charismatic stars of the theatre, dance, cabaret and burlesque worlds come together in an exhilaratingly irreverent, nearly wordless celebration of a fluid and limitless sense of identity. Untitled Feminist Show isn't a show about feminism - it is a feminist show. It premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2012 before transferring to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. 'Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation' New York Times

"Bold, unguarded work . . . that resists pat definition. [Young Jean] Lee has penned profane lampoons of motivational bromides ("Pullman, WA") and the Romantic poets ("The Appeal"). Now she piles her deconstructive scorn upon ethnic stereotypes in "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven," a sweet-and-sour parade of Asian minstrelsy."-"Time Out New York"

"A perverse, provocative, and very funny festival of racism . . . "Songs" offers not only chauvinistic monologues and ass-slapping Korean dances, but also a rigorous exploration of art-making and its associated terrors."-"The Village Voice"

"Have you ever noticed how most Asian Americans are slightly brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents?" begins the Korean American protagonist of "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven," the singular work of Young Jean Lee, whose plays are like nothing you have ever seen or read. This is the first collection by the downtown writer-director, whose explorations of stereotypes of race, gender, and religion are unflinching-and seat-squirming funny. Also includes "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals"; "The Appeal"; "Pullman, WA"; "Church"; and "Yaggoo."

Young Jean Lee was born in Korea and moved to the United States at age two. She grew up in Pullman, Washington, and attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also studied Shakespeare in the English PhD program before moving to New York. She is the founder of the Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, where she directs her own work, and has toured internationally in Vienna, Hanover, Berlin, Switzerland, Brussels, Norway, France, and Rotterdam; and across the United States in Portland, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She is the recipient of a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.

"Sly, weird, and thoroughly winning . . . Bracing, funny, and, yes, consoling."--"The New York Times"

"Young Jean Lee will give you whiplash. Her ability to stake out aesthetic territory and then abruptly abandon it makes her unpredictable; her tendency to excel at each new genre makes her terrifying. In the enormously touching cabaret-style "We're Gonna Die," Lee jettisons everything that has armored this "au courant" young playwright against the world. . . . Lee purchases our hearts with her bravery's own coin."--"Time Out New York"

Inspired by her personal experiences with despair and loneliness, the Obie Award-winning playwright-provocateur and her band Future Wife create a life-affirming show that anyone can perform, about the one thing everyone has in common: we're all gonna die. Each book includes a CD of all six songs and eight monologues performed by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Adam Horowitz, and others.

Young Jean Lee has been hailed as "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by "Time Out New York." She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her other plays include "The Shipment," "Lear," and "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven." Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

Chinese Women Business Leaders - Seven Principles of Leadership includes seven women who represent the characteristics of ShEOs in the wave of Chinese economic reform. Their unique life stories are also reflections of changes in Chinese society. These women have each played a distinctive role In China's rapid emergence. Reform and opening up has brought more opportunities than ever before to Chinese women, though along with these opportunities come some questions and challenges. The fetters and shackles of tradition have been shattered. A path for self-actualization has opened up. Women in mainland China have experienced great changes, and struggled with conflicts between traditional heritage and modern values. Ever since reform and opening up in 1978, the rapid emergence of women in leadership roles in business has paralleled significant upheavals in the Chinese business landscape.

At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological cliches of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney. Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.