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.

Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty: about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise: the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman--and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save America's life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise (death, money, sex, democracy) and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it. He makes plain what, exactly, Whitman wrote and what he believed by showing how they emerged from Whitman's life and times, and by recreating the places and incidents (crossing Brooklyn ferry, visiting wounded soldiers in hospitals) that inspired Whitman to write the poems. Whitman, Marsh argues, can show us how to die, how to accept and even celebrate our (relatively speaking) imminent death. Just as important, though, he can show us how to live: how to have better sex, what to do about money, and, best of all, how to survive our fetid democracy without coming away stinking ourselves. The result is a mix of biography, literary criticism, manifesto, and a kind of self-help you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else.

"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.

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.

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.