Search results for ""Kent State University Press""

Ernest Hemingway casts a long shadow in literature--reaching beyond his status as a giant of 20th-century fiction and a Nobel Prize winner--extending even into comic books. Appearing variously with Superman, Mickey Mouse, Captain Marvel, and Cerebus, he has even battled fascists alongside Wolverine in Spain and teamed up with Shade to battle adversaries in the Area of Madness.Robert K. Elder's research into Hemingway's comic presence demonstrates the truly international reach of Hemingway as a pop culture icon. In more than 120 appearances across multiple languages, Hemingway is often portrayed as the hypermasculine legend: bearded, boozed up, and ready to throw a punch. But just as often, comic book writers see past the bravado to the sensitive artist looking for validation. Hemingway's role in these comics ranges from the divine to the ridiculous, as his image is recorded, distorted, lampooned, and whittled down to its essential parts.As Elder notes, comic book creators and Hemingway share a natural kinship. The comic book page demands an economy of words, much like Hemingway's less-is-more "iceberg theory," only in graphic form. In addition, he turned out to be the perfect avatar for comic book artists wanting to tell history-rich stories, as he experienced beautiful places during the most chaotic times: Paris in the 1920s, Spain during the Spanish Civil War, Cuba on the brink of revolution, France during World War I and during World War II just after the Allies landed in Normandy.Hemingway in Comics provides a unique lens for considering one of our most influential authors. Not only for the dedicated Hemingway fan, this book will appeal to all those with an appreciation for comics, pop culture, and the absurd.

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The untold stories of troops serving miles away from front lines.For decades, the dramatic stories of World War II soldiers have been the stuff of memoirs, interviews, novels, documentaries, and feature films. Yet the men and women who served in less visible roles, never engaging in physical combat, have received scant attention.Convinced that their depiction as pencil pushers, grease monkeys, or cowards was far from the truth, Rona Simmons embarked on a quest to discover the real story from the noncombat veterans themselves. She sat across from 19 veterans or their children, read their letters and journals, looked at photos, and touched their mementos: pieces of shrapnel, a Japanese sword, a porcelain tea set, a pair of wooden shoes, a marquisette wedding gown.Compiling these veterans' stories, Simmons follows them as they report for service, complete their training, and often ship out to stations thousands of miles from home. She shares their dreams to see combat and disappointment at receiving noncombat positions, as well as their selflessness and yearning for home. Ultimately, Simmons finds the noncombat veterans had far more in common with the front line soldiers than differences.Simmons's extensive research gives us a more complete picture of the war effort, bringing long-overdue appreciation for the men and women whose everyday tasks, unexpected acts of sacrifice, and faith and humor contributed mightily to the ultimate outcome of World War II.

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Following the 1957 season, two of baseball’s most famous teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, left the city they had called home since the 19th century and headed west. The Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco. Those events have entered baseball lore, and indeed the larger culture, as acts of betrayal committed by greedy owners Walter O’Malley of the Dodgers and Horace Stoneham of the Giants. The departure of these two teams, but especially the Dodgers, has not been forgotten by those communities. Even six decades later, it is not hard to find older Brooklynites who are still angry about losing the Dodgers. This is one side of the story. Baseball Goes West seeks to tell another side. Lincoln A. Mitchell argues that the moves to California, second only to Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947, forged Major League Baseball (MLB) as we know it today. By moving two famous teams with national reputations and many well-known players, MLB benefited tremendously, increasing its national profile and broadening its fan base. This was particularly important following a decade that, despite often being described as baseball’s golden age, was plagued with moribund franchises, low wages for many players, and a difficult dismantling of the apartheid system that had been part of big league baseball since its inception.In the years immediately following the moves, the two most iconic players of the 1960s, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays, had their best years, bringing even greater status and fame to their respective ball clubs. The Giants played an instrumental role in the first phase of baseball’s globalization by leading the effort to bring players from Latin America to the big leagues, while the Dodgers set attendance records and pioneered new ways to market the game. Sports historians, baseball fans, and historians of American culture on a broader scale will appreciate Mitchell’s reframing of baseball’s move west and his insights into the impacts felt throughout baseball and beyond.

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This series focuses on works that expand the parameters of U.S. foreign relations. Chronologically broad and topically diverse, it is designed to further the internationalization - indeed, globalization - of the field by publishing a wide variety of innovative books, including interdisciplinary studies, that place the United States within a larger, transnational context. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to, identity formation and projection, borderlands studies, comparative history, and cultural transfer.This book offers a provocative reinterpretation of Civil War - era diplomacy. It has long been a mainstay in historical literature that the Civil War had a deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations and that Britain came close to intervention in the conflict. Historians assert that it was only a combination of desperate diplomacy, the Confederacy's military losses, and Lincoln's timely issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation that kept the British on the sidelines. Phillip E. Myers seeks to revise this prevailing view by arguing instead that wartime relations between Britain and the United States were marked by caution rather than conflict.Using a wide array of primary materials from both sides of the Atlantic, Myers traces the various sources of potential Anglo-American wartime turmoil as well as the various reasons both sides had for avoiding war. And while he does note the disagreement between Washington and London, he convincingly demonstrates that transatlantic discord was ultimately minor and neither side seriously considered war against the other.Myers further extends his study into the postwar period to see how that bond strengthened and grew, culminating with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. As Myers points out, that relationship only grew in the decades and century to come. The Civil War was not, as so many have believed for so long, an unpleasant interruption in British-American affairs; instead, it was an event that helped bring the two countries closer together seal the friendship.Soundly researched and cogently argued, ""Caution and Cooperation"" will surely prompt discussion among Civil War historians, foreign relations scholars, and readers of history.

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An anthology celebrating the biodiversity and staggering beauty of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Light Enters the Grove collects 81 poems, each of which reflects its author's unique connection to a living organism found within the parkranging from white-tailed deer to brown bats and from Japanese honeysuckle to bloodroot.

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Discusses the work of the United States Christian Commission (USCC), a civilian relief agency established by northern evangelical Protestants to minister to Union troops during the American Civil War.

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The haunting debut collection by poet Colin Dekeersgieter, whose lyric poems scrutinize a family's history with addiction, death, and mental illness. With many poems written in emergency departments, behavioral wards, and intensive care units, Dekeersgieter does not just honestly chronicle a family crisis but seeks to survive through poetry.

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Close reading and analysis of Hemingway's most ambitious posthumous novel Published in 1986, Ernest Hemingway's novel The Garden of Eden is a literary landmark. Hemingway periodically worked on the novel from 1946 until his death in 1961, and the result is a complex novel that explores the origins and uses of creativity and grapples with issues of gender, sexuality, and race. Set in the 1920s, a young American writer, David Bourne, and his wife, Catherine, test the heteronormative expectations of their time through nighttime experiments with gender identity and when they both fall in love with the same woman.In Reading Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, Carl P. Eby examines Hemingway's original unrevised manuscript in relation to Scribner's highly edited edition. The product of 30 years of research, this volume is the first to clarify for readers which parts of the original work had been retained, altered, and discarded in the publisher's text. No other treatment of the text has been so thorough in its analysis and annotations. This volume gives the Scribner's edition and the original manuscript equal consideration, helping readers to better understand the relationship between both versions of the novel.Reading Hemingway's The Garden of Eden will be an essential text in Hemingway criticism, offering new, exciting insights into how the book was written, edited, and received by audiences.

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How Malabar Farm pioneered soil conservation and grew the sustainable agriculture movementEstablished in 1939 by Pulitzer Prize–winning author and farmer Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm was once considered "the most famous farm in the world." Farmers, conservationists, politicians, businessmen, and even a few Hollywood celebrities—including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who married there—flocked to rural Ohio to see how Bromfield restored worn-out land to lush productivity using conservation practices. Permanent, sustainable agriculture, Bromfield preached, was the "New Agriculture" that would transform the postwar world.Anneliese Abbott tells the story of Malabar Farm within the context of the wider histories of soil conservation and other environmental movements, especially the Ohio-based organization Friends of the Land. As one of the few surviving landmarks of this movement, which became an Ohio state park in 1976, Malabar Farm provides an intriguing case study of how soil conservation began, how it was marginalized during the 1950s, and how it now continues to influence the modern idea of sustainable agriculture.To see Malabar strictly as a modern production farm—or a nature preserve, or the home of a famous novelist—oversimplifies the complexity of what Bromfield actually did. Malabar wasn't a conventional farm or an organic farm; it was both. It represents a middle ground that is often lacking in modern discussions about sustainability or environmental issues, yet it remains critically important. Today, as Malabar Farm State Park remains a working farm with a new interpretive center that opened in 2006, its importance and impact continue for current and future generations.

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Devoted to Tolkien, the teller of tales and co-creator of the myths they brush against, these essays focus on his lifelong interest in and engagement with fairy stories, the special world that he called faërie, a world they both create and inhabit, and with the elements that make that world the special place it is. They cover a range of subjects, from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings and their place within the legendarium he called the Silmarillion to shorter works like "The Story of Kullervo" and "Smith of Wootton Major."From the pen of eminent Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, the individual essays in this collection were written over a span of twenty years, each written to fit the parameters of a conference, an anthology, or both. They are revised slightly from their original versions to eliminate repetition and bring them up to date. Grouped loosely by theme, they present an unpatterned mosaic, depicting topics from myth to truth, from social manners to moral behavior, from textual history to the micro particles of Middle-earth.Together these essays present a complete picture of a man as complicated as the books that bear his name—an independent and unorthodox thinker who was both a believer and a doubter able to maintain conflicting ideas in tension, a teller of tales both romantic and bitter, hopeful and pessimistic, in equal parts tragic and comedic. A man whose work does not seek for right or wrong answers so much as a way to accommodate both; a man of antitheses.Scholars of fantasy literature generally and of Tolkien particularly will find much of value in this insightful collection by a seasoned explorer of Tolkien's world of faërie.

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A devastating loss of life and a community's response.March 4, 1908, was an ordinary morning in Collinwood, Ohio, a village about ten miles outside of Cleveland. Children at Lakeview Elementary School were at work on their lessons when fifth-grader Emma Neibert noticed wisps of smoke, a discovery that led to a panicked stampede inside the school—the chaos of nine teachers trying to control and then save pupils in overcrowded classrooms. Outside, desperate parents and would-be rescuers fought to save as many children as possible, while Collinwood's inadequate volunteer fire department—joined by members of the Cleveland fire department—fought a losing battle with the rapidly spreading blaze.While some inside jumped from the building to safety, most were trapped. Ultimately, 172 children, two teachers, and one rescue worker were killed, and the Collinwood community was irrevocably changed.The fire's staggering death toll shocked the entire country and resulted in impassioned official inquiries about the fire's cause, the building's structure, and overall safety considerations. Regionally, and eventually nationwide, changes were implemented in school structures and construction materials.The Collinwood Tragedy: The Story of the Worst School Fire in American History describes not only the events of that fateful day but also their lingering effects. James Jessen Badal's extensive research reveals how the citizens of Collinwood were desperate to find someone to blame for the tragedy. Rumor and suspicion splintered the grieving community. And yet they also rose to the challenge of healing: officials reached out to immigrant families unsure of their rights; city charities, churches, and relief agencies responded immediately with medical help, comfort for the bereaved, and financial support; and fundraising efforts to assist families totaled more than $50,000—more than $1 million in today's terms.

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It s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category. – Mark Doty, from the Foreword

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On August 21, 1863, William Quantrill led 400 Confederate irregulars to a rise on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas. For two years, the 3,000 inhabitants of this prosperous frontier community had managed to escape the Civil War which raged in the East. At Quantrill's command, the horrors of that war were brought directly into their homes. The attack began at dawn. When it was over, more than 150 townsmen were dead and most of the settlement burned to the ground.In Bloody Dawn, Thomas Goodrich considers why this remote settlement was signaled out to receive such brutal treatment. He also describes the retribution that soon followed, which in many ways surpassed the significance of the Lawrence Massacre itself. The story that unfolds reveals an event unlike anything our nation has experienced before or since.

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In 1936, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Almost all of America believed Hauptmann guilty; only a few magazines and tabloids published articles questioning his conviction. In the ensuing decades, many books about the Lindbergh case have been published. Some have declared Hauptmann the victim of a police conspiracy and frame-up, and one posited that Lindbergh actually killed his own son and fabricated the entire kidnapping to mask the deed. Because books about the crime have been used as a means to advance personal theories, the truth has often been sacrificed and readers misinformed.Hauptmann's Ladder is a testament to the truth that counters the revisionist histories all too common in the true crime genre. Author Richard T. Cahill Jr. puts the true back in true crime, providing credible information and undistorted evidence that enables readers to form their own opinions and reach their own conclusions.Cahill presents conclusions based upon facts and documentary evidence uncovered in his twenty years of research. Using primary sources and painstakingly presenting a chronological reconstruction of the crime and its aftermath, he debunks false claims and explodes outrageous theories, while presenting evidence that has never before been revealed.Hauptmann's Ladder is a meticulously researched examination of the Lindbergh kidnapping that restores and preserves the truth of the crime of the century.

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When it came to football in the 1930s, the college sport was king. But in 1933, former boxer and minor league baseball player Art Rooney, who had quarterbacked the squad at Duquesne University, purchased a team for Pittsburgh for $2,500. Thus began the legacy we know as "Steeler Nation."At the time, no one could have imagined that the Pirates, as they were originally named, would become a treasured possession for Pittsburghers. For the first 40 years, the franchise was a national joke. With only one playoff performance—a 21–0 defeat at the hands of the Philadelphia Eagles for the eastern division title in 1947—highlights were minimal for a team that regularly found itself at the bottom of the standings.Then in 1969, Art Rooney's son Dan hired Chuck Noll from the Baltimore Colts to coach his team. Noll replaced undisciplined players with future hall of famers. By 1974 the team won its first world championship and went on to capture four Super Bowl titles in six years. Noll's legacy for excellence continued with four more Super Bowl appearances and two championships in 2005 and 2008, garnering the franchise a league record of six Super Bowl wins.Classic Steelers includes these six championship tilts and takes citizens of the Steeler Nation on a play-by-play tour of the most memorable games in the team's history. Author David Finoli recounts in vivid detail the thrilling gridiron performances that have made the Steelers so special to their legions of fans.

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The rise of Adolf Hitler, America’s Great Depression in the heartland, the bombing of Pearl Harbour, American life following World War II, the Korean War, America’s development of atomic weapons in the Cold War age, the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Mariel boatlift. Captain Allen Brady not only witnessed all of these events but actually participated in them, in many instances as a US Naval Aviator. So many Americans and global citizens alike are not even aware of the importance of these pivotal moments; as generations age and pass on, without important accounts like this one, much is forgotten. More than just a memoir, Brady’s book is an important document from one of the last of his generation, reminding us of the pivotal moments that should not be lost to history. Witnessing the American Century is Captain Brady’s firsthand account of his incredible life, and his memories elucidate America’s role in the most significant world events from the previous century.

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