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Essays reconsidering key topics in the history of late medieval
Scotland and northern England. The volume celebrates the career of
the influential historian of late medieval Scotland and northern
England, Dr Alexander (Sandy) Grant. Its contributors engage with
the profound shift in thinking about this society in the light of
his scholarship, and the development of the "New Orthodoxy", both
attending to the legacy of this discourse, and offering new
research with which to challenge or amend our understanding of late
medieval Scotland and northern England. Dr Grant's famously wide
and diverse historical interests are here reflected through three
main foci: kingship, lordship and identity. The volume includes
significant reassessments of the reputations of two kings,
Alexander I of Scotland and Henry V of England; an examination of
Richard III's relationship to the lordship of Pontefract; and a
study of the development of royal pardon in late medieval Scotland.
Further chapters consider the social influence and legal and
tenurial rights vested in aristocratic lineages, regional gentry
communities, and the leaders of burghal corporations. Finally, the
relationship between saints cults, piety and regnal and regional
identity in medieval Scotland is scrutinised in chapters on St
Margaret and St Ninian.
The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans
responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike
most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the
despair of the American people during the decade, this volume
explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions:
righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the
canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic
archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be
presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a
Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens's record-setting long
jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII's abdication
from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the
founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers
new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from
obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short
stories to classics like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and
Richard Wright's Native Son. The result is a new take on the Great
Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market
crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but
also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures
of feeling.
"An outstanding piece of scholarship and a welcome contribution to
the field, this collection of neglected but powerful poetry speaks
to our own time as much as it does to its own era."
---Nicholas Coles, University of Pittsburgh "Opens up a dramatic
new aspect of American literature for study, discussion, and
enjoyment. The collection of poems is original and engaging and is
sure to be useful for classes in literature, American history, and
labor studies."
---Alan Wald, University of Michigan "You Work Tomorrow" provides a
glimpse into a relatively unknown aspect of American literary and
labor history---the remarkable but largely forgotten poems
published in union newspapers during the turbulent 1930s. Members
of all unions---including autoworkers, musicians, teachers, tenant
farmers, garment workers, artists, and electricians---wrote
thousands of poems during this period that described their working,
living, and political conditions. From this wealth of material,
John Marsh has chosen poetry that is both aesthetically appealing
and historically relevant, dispelling the myth that labor poetry
consisted solely of amateurish and predictable sloganeering. A
foreword by contemporary poet Jim Daniels is followed by John
Marsh's substantive introduction, detailing the cultural and
political significance of union poetry. John Marsh is Assistant
Professor of English at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and Coordinator of The Odyssey Project, a
year-long, college-accredited course in the humanities offered at
no cost to adults living below or slightly above the federal
poverty level. A volume in the series Class: Culture
In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by
journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and
inequality in the United States can be solved through education.
Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in
the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little
impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs
actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach
in them.
Rather than focus attention on the hierarchy of jobs and
power--where most jobs require relatively little education, and the
poor enjoy very little political power--money is funneled into
educational endeavors that ultimately do nothing to challenge
established social structures, and in fact reinforce them. And when
educational programs prove ineffective at reducing inequality, the
ones whom these programs were intended to help end up blaming
themselves. Marsh's struggle to grasp the connection between
education, poverty, and inequality is both powerful and
poignant.
In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by
journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and
inequality in the United States can be solved through education.
Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in
the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little
impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs
actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach
in them.
Rather than focus attention on the hierarchy of jobs and
power--where most jobs require relatively little education, and the
poor enjoy very little political power--money is funneled into
educational endeavors that ultimately do nothing to challenge
established social structures, and in fact reinforce them. And when
educational programs prove ineffective at reducing inequality, the
ones whom these programs were intended to help end up blaming
themselves. Marsh's struggle to grasp the connection between
education, poverty, and inequality is both powerful and
poignant.
"Impressive--Marsh successfully rewrites the founding moment of
American Modernist poetry."
---Mark Van Wienen, Northern Illinois University
"Cogently argued, instructive, and sensitive, Marsh's
revisionist reading opens new insights that will elicit lively
comment and critical response."
---Douglas Wixson, University of Missouri-Rolla
Between 1909 and 1922, the genre of poetry was remade. Literary
scholars have long debated why modern American poetry emerged when
and how it did. While earlier poetry had rhymed, scanned, and dealt
with conventional subjects such as love and nature, modern poetry
looked and sounded very different and considered new areas of
experience. "Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor,
and the Making of Modern American Poetry "argues that this change
was partially the result of modern poets writing into their verse
what other poetry had suppressed: the gritty realities of modern
life, including the problems of the poor and working class.
A closer look at the early works of the 20th century's best
known poets (William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg) reveals
the long-neglected role the labor problem--including sweatshops,
strikes, unemployment, woman and child labor, and
immigration---played in the formation of canonical modern American
poetry. A revisionary history of literary modernism and exploration
into how poets uniquely made the labor problem their own, this book
will appeal to modernists in the fields of American and British
literature as well as scholars in American studies and the growing
field of working-class literature.
Max Edwards has done his time in the British Army. The big wide
world is now his Oyster. He has an Army Pension and his Bounty in
his pocket. He knows what he is going to do. He is going to make
money and plenty of it. Civvy street is not the friendly helpful
place he was expecting. The Stock Market beckons then turns on him.
Edwards has no choice but to adapt and overcome leading him into
the arms of the underworld. Edwards is now in business, which soon
gets out of control, he finds he has no where to turn and no way
out.
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