Search results for ""Author James"

Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers, determined to leave a record of her family history, excavates the stories of four generations of women. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family’s totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird and perched on top, Raven. As she pieces together their stories, Myers weaves in tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and the larger story of how, as she puts it, her “culture is being bleached out”, offering sharp vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds. Crisp and powerful, Thinning Blood is a bold reclamation of one woman’s identity that raises urgent questions about heritage, family and what it means to belong.

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Chloe Chard assembles fascinating passages from late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century accounts of travel in Italy, by Northern Europeans, writing in English (or, in some cases, translated into English at the time); it includes writings by Charles Dupaty, Maria Graham, Anna Jameson, Sydney Morgan, Henry Matthews and Hester Lynch Piozzi. The extracts often focus on the labile moods that contribute to the ‘triste plaisir’ of travelling (as Madame de Staël termed it): moods such as restlessness, anxiety, exhaustion, animal exuberance, sexual excitement and piqued curiosity. The introduction considers some of these responses in relation to the preoccupations and rhetorical strategies of travel writing during the Romantic period and introductory commentaries examine the ways in which the passages take up a series of themes, around which the five chapters are ordered: ‘Pleasure’, ‘Rising and sinking in sublime places’, ‘Danger and destabilization’, ‘Art, unease and life’, and ‘Gastronomy, Gusto and the Geography of the Haunted’.

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When Stan Lee first pitched the idea of Spider-Man in 1962, his boss was full of objections: People hate spiders. Teenagers aren’t lead characters; they’re sidekicks. He should be glamorous and successful, not a friendless loser. But Stan persisted and Martin Goodman let him give the unlikely hero a tryout in Amazing Fantasy, which was already slated for cancellation. With Spider-Man on the cover, No. 15 shot to the top of Marvel’s best-seller list for the year, and the rest is history. Amazing Spider-Man, which debuted seven months later, broke the comics mold. Peter Parker lived in uncool Queens, was always broke, continually worried about his Aunt May, was unlucky in love, and was constantly getting yelled at by his boss, Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson. Spider-Man had the quips and confidence that Parker lacked, but learning to use his powers wasn’t always easy. He often seemed on the verge of defeat against the rogue’s gallery of classic foes that debuted in the first couple of years: Vulture, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Lizard, Electro, Kraven the Hunter, Mysterio, and the Green Goblin. Much of the credit for Spider-Man’s greatness goes to co-creator and artist Steve Ditko, who had a knack for portraying teenagers and their problems. His artwork infused Spider-Man with a loose-limbed energy, and, while maybe everyone was scared of spiders, Ditko made swinging through New York seem like the coolest adventure ever. This XXL-sized collector’s dream, close in size to the original artworks, features the first 21 stories of the world’s favorite web slinger from 1962–1964. Rather than recolor the original artwork (as has been done in previous decades’ reprints of classic comics), TASCHEN has attempted to create an ideal representation of these books as they were produced at the time of publication. The most pristine pedigreed comics have been cracked open and photographed for reproduction in close collaboration with Marvel and the Certified Guaranty Company. Each page has been photographed as printed more than half a century ago, then digitally remastered using modern retouching techniques to correct problems with the era’s inexpensive, imperfect printing—as if hot off of a world-class 1960s printing press. A custom paper stock was exclusively developed for this series to simulate the feel of the original comics. With an in-depth historical essay by Marvel editor Ralph Macchio, an introduction by uber-collector David Mandel, and original art, rare photographs, and other gems, these 698 pages of wall-crawling wonder will make anyone’s spider-sense tingle with anticipation. © 2021 MARVEL

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An examination of how women's writings shaped public opinion and morality from the Victorians to the mid-twentieth century. In nineteenth-century Britain, public debates about the nation's moral health and about men's and women's responsibility for it were shaped decisively by a tradition of female moralists. This book looks at the cultural criticism of eight of the most significant of these writers: Anna Jameson, Hannah Lawrance, Margaret Oliphant, Marian Evans ("George Eliot"), Eliza Lynn Linton, Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, providing a detailed and compelling account of how their writing on history, literature and visual art changed contemporaries' understanding of the lessons to be drawn from each field at the same time as they contested and redefined contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity. It recovers these moralists' understanding of themselves as part of a tradition of women of letters stretching from eighteenth-century bluestockings to their own time, and the growing consensus across the political range of periodicals that women's intellectual potential was equal to men's, and not determined by their sex. Benjamin Dabby is an independent historian.

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An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description.

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An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description.

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As delicious and classy and intoxicating as a cool glass of Sancerre. Heavenly!'' Veronica Henry''What a gem of a book! Such an accomplished first novel' Erica JamesA story full of secrets, the weight of family expectations and the love that binds us together, this is a brilliantly readable debut' FabulousA glamorous family drama If you love books about rich, beautiful people behaving badly then you are going to adore The Garnett Girls'RedLove makes you do things you never thought you were capable ofMargo and Richard's love affair was fiery, forbidden and all-consuming, but ultimately doomed. When it imploded, Margo was left broken.Margo never spoke a word about the man who abandoned his young family so easily. She's forged a new life which she's determined to live her own way, despite the disapproval of her daughters.Her eldest, Rachel longs to escape the responsibility of caring for Sandcove, the crumbling house where she and her sisters were left to run wild.Dreamy Imogen should be

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Some of Spider-Man''s earliest and most classic stories, written by none other than Stan ''The Man'' Lee himself! Two of the fiercest crime lords in New York City are on a quest to decipher an ancient petrified tablet - whose secrets promise great power! It''s an indisputable classic by two of Marvel''s greatest creators, Stan Lee and John Romita Sr. - and that''s not all they have in store! J. Jonah Jameson has the Daily Bugle working overtime to brand Spider-Man as public enemy number one, the Prowler hits the scene, the Black Widow debuts her sultry new spy gear - and the origin of Peter''s parents is revealed! Plus: The Kingpin comes back for more, and this time it''s a family affair! Also featuring Gwen Stacy and the gang -whose heads are really going to turn when an ill Peter Parker strolls into a party in his Spider-Man costume! Collecting: Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #68-85 and material from Amazing Spider-Man Annual (1964) #5-6

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Including nearly nine hundred new and replacement markers that have been installed along the commonwealth's roadways since the last edition was published in 1994, this third edition of ""A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers"" brings together and updates the texts of more than 1,850 official state historical markers placed along Virginia's highways since 1927. Divided for the first time into six geographic-cultural regions, this edition contains maps and three individual indexes that assist the reader in locating markers by title, number, or subject matter. The subject index covers African American, Native American, and women's history; maps out key places in such areas as European exploration and settlement, industry and agriculture, and transportation and communication; and canvasses the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and such notable sites as courthouses, houses of worship, educational institutions, forts, and famous homes and homesites. Vacationers and those simply out for a drive will stumble across sites as diverse as Jamestown and the birthplace of Booker T. Washington, the graves of country music's Carter family and the original locations of northern Virginia's Nike missile installations, the places where paramount chief Powhatan first met with the English and where the artist Georgia O'Keeffe taught art, and Langley Field, which played a significant role in the history of manned space flight. Virginia has one of the oldest marker systems in the country, established in 1927. The markers are no longer state funded, and so the program illustrates a collaborative effort between committed sponsors who offer financial support, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and the Virginia Department of Transportation. The network holds great appeal for tourists and serves as a source of pride for local citizens. Travelers along Virginia's highways will find this guide both useful and informative. The great legacy of Virginia's past is revealed on these markers, making the book both a handy reference and a stimulus to greater study of the history of the commonwealth. It is published in association with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

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There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing “New World” as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction. Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counter-narrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, colour-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome. Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.

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Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

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The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water—from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida’s Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity. Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.

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The prize was great -- not just land, but the riches it held, in the form of diamonds and gold. What became a country called South Africa was, until 1910, a vast and untamed land where great fortunes could be made (and lost); where great battles were fought (and lost); and where great men had their reputations forged, or dashed, or sometimes both. Martin Meredith's follow-up to his magisterial The State of Africais an equally epic new history of the making of South Africa. Covering the extraordinarily eventful four decades leading up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, it covers some of the most iconic tales of imperial history. The Zulus at Rorke's Drift; the Jameson Raid; the diamond and gold rushes at Kimberley and Witwatersrand; the Boer wars; the titanic struggle between the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his Boer rival, Paul Kruger -- DIAMONDS, GOLD AND WARbrings all of these and more together in a stunningly coherent and compelling narrative. History, somehow, just isn't as colourful any more.

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In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories--from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address--to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression. From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men—known in local parlance as sasso—residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World’s Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries.

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The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida's Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity. Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.

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This book examines the ways six remarkably disparate novels formulate critiques of a late-capitalist consumer culture proclaimed in recent years to be all but unassailable. Beginning with a consideration of John Gardner’s October Light and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho—two novels demonstrating the poverty of traditional (or essentialist) right- and left-wing attacks on mass culture—the volume later turns its attention to the more postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques of Thomas Pynchon (Vineland), Mark Leyner (Et Tu, Babe), Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country) and Don DeLillo (White Noise), connecting these novelists’ ideas to those of such cultural theorists as Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others. With their assertions that neither capital (which becomes analogous to language itself) nor the simulation-laden culture it spawns must be razed or escaped before we can build a more humane society, these novelists and thinkers illuminate the “post-Marxist” habits of mind our culture’s most serious dissenters will have to employ from now on. Offering close and insightful readings of the aforementioned novels and providing a refreshingly lucid introduction to significant critical and philosophical trends of recent decades, History and Refusal will be useful to both instructors and students of contemporary literature and theory. It will also be of interest to thinkers in any field concerned with how best to advance progressive political interests in a United States—and, indeed, a world—as thoroughly corporatized a the present one. Like the novelists and postmodern theorists it examines, this book draws out attention to the progressive possibilities inherent in the market and the susceptibility of “dominant” discourses and media to appropriation by those with non-corporate agendas. In doing so, it works to alleviate the “politics of resignation and despair” Douglas Kellner has named, illustrating that corporatism and progressivism do not have to be mutually exclusive terms; that media-shaped subjectivity does not have to be passive subjectivity; and that capital is a language that can be used to speak any will, forward any cause. It is a book well-suited to a cultural moment when more and more citizens want alternatives to the over-reductive, left-versus-right paradigm that has dominated our critical and cultural imaginations too long.

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READERS LOVE YOUNG WOMEN:'Hands down, this is an absolutely phenomenonal book! I recommend Young Women to everyone out there, one you'll be hearing about for a long time to come''Young Women instantly grabbed me from the first chapter. I devoured this novel''Incredibly powerful . . . essential reading for all.''Sharp, beautifully written and powerful'AN INTOXICATING FRIENDSHIP.AN UNFORGIVABLE BETRAYAL.From the Observer debut novelist of the year, an addictive new novel where a fierce new female friendship will unearth a secret that could change everything . . .When Emily meets enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable.But after a bombshell news article breaks, Emily begins to realise that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her past. A secret that threatens to unravel everything . . .'Confirms Jessica Moor as one of the most exciting new voices of the decade' Erin KellyAmbitious and arresting' Beth Underdown 'Vividly engaging' Winnie M. Li'Brilliantly written' Kate Sawyer 'Painfully real' Hanna Jameson'Provocative, thought-provoking' Bexy Cameron 'Visceral' Stylist'A timely read' Prima 'A slick cautionary tale' Sunday Times'Utterly engrossing' Louise Nealon

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The Reification of Desire takes two critical perspectives rarely analyzed together—formative arguments for Marxism and those that have been the basis for queer theory—and productively scrutinizes these ideas both with and against each other to put forth a new theoretical connection between Marxism and queer studies. Kevin Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. Reading the work of these theorists together with influential queer work by such figures as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and alongside reconsiderations of such texts as The Sun Also Rises and Midnight Cowboy, Floyd reformulates these two central categories that have been inseparable from a key strand of Marxist thought and have marked both its explanatory power and its limitations. Floyd theorizes a dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social reification enforced by capitalism. Developing a queer examination of reification and totality, Kevin Floyd ultimately argues that the insights of queer theory require a fundamental rethinking of both.

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National treasure Sheridan Smith returns to the role of Lucie Miller in these four new adventures with the Eighth Doctor! 1. The Dalek Trap by Nicholas Briggs. The thing about black holes is, they’re big and they’re black and they’re deadly, and you’d have to be mad to go anywhere near them. Because anything that falls inside a black hole ends up crushed in the singularity. Unfortunately, the Doctor just went mad, or so it seems, and flew his TARDIS beyond a black hole’s event horizon, causing him and his companion Lucie Miller to end up marooned on a planetoid just inside the event horizon. Along with a Dalek saucer… and something else. Because this is no ordinary black hole… This is the Cradle of the Darkness. 2. The Revolution Game by Alice Cavender. It’s Lucie’s birthday, and her birthday treat awaits. But whatever she’s expecting, it’s not what she’s getting on the colony world of Castus Sigma in the year 3025: ringside seats for the interplanetary Retro Roller Derby – sponsored by Heliacorp, “turning sunlight into gold”! It’s more than just a game, though. For the competitors, it’s a matter of life or death – a New Life with Heliacorp, or a living death on Castus Sigma. Or, on this fateful day, a very actual death. Because there are strange creatures living out on the plain, beyond the colony. Creatures with every reason to want to sabotage the games. Creatures with a grudge. 3. The House on the Edge of Chaos by Eddie Robson. The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Lucie to a vast house on the planet known as Horton’s Orb. The only house on Horton’s Orb, in fact. Outside its outsized windows there’s nothing. No land. No sea. No sky. No life. Just an endless expanse of static. Inside the house, there’s an upstairs and a downstairs – servants below, gentlefolk from the finest of the house’s families above. Alas, there are altogether too few eligible ladies on the upper floors these days. Meaning there’s a vacancy for Miss Lucie Miller, single and unattached…Outside the house, the static howls on. Except now, the static wants to get in. 4. Island of the Fendahl by Alan Barnes. The Fendahl is the death of evolution, the horror that lies in wait at the far end of the food chain. The Fendahl is death itself. And the Fendahl is dead. The Doctor destroyed it many years ago, in another incarnation, when he encountered it in a place called Fetchborough. But if the Fendahl is dead… how can it live again, on the remote island of Fandor? CAST: Paul McGann (The Doctor), Sheridan Smith (Lucie Miller), Matt Lloyd Davies (Jik Gelliska), Amanda Hurwitz (Raz Kalisto), Jonathan Keeble (Clegg), Madeline Duggan (Sash), Tom Alexander (George), Alicia Ambrose-Bayly (Tallulah / Alana Kelly), Carla Mendonca (Evangeline Horton), Rupert Vansittart (Darius Horton), Emily Woodward (Frances Horton), Joe Jameson (Berrigan Horton), Carlyss Peer (Diane Howard), Atilla Akinci (Dieter Fendelman), Paul Panting (Freddie), Lauren Cornelius (Maxine Mitchell), Bethan Dixon Bate (Landlady) and Nicholas Briggs (The Daleks). Other parts played by members of the cast.

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Napoleon arrived on St Helena in October 1815 aboard the British 74-gun warship HMS Northumberland. For the first six weeks he stayed at the Briars, a property in the Upper Jamestown Valley where he enjoyed the hospitality of the Balcombe family. By the end of December, the re-building work on his destined home, Longwood, was completed, and Napoleon accompanied by his entourage moved there, much to Napoleon's annoyance. He found the site bleak, inhospitable, and considered it conducive to rheumatism. The British Government was paranoid about Napoleon being rescued and maintained a large military presence on the island, and numerous warships anchored offshore. This paranoia extended to the new Governor, Sir Hudson Lowe. He ran a typrannical and petty campaign against the residents at Longwood and had violent arguments with Napoleon, who refused to cooperate with him. This book is one of the best accounts of Napoleon's five-and-a-half years' imprisonment, which ended with his death from a stomach ulcer. It details all of the personalities, Napoleon's household, the domestic arrangements, the island residents, the military residents and the long-standing feud between Plantation House and Longwood. It also covers Betsy Balcombe, the Deadwood Races, Napoleon's habits and his garden and much, much more. The book has eighty colour and black & white illustrations.

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READERS LOVE YOUNG WOMEN:'Hands down, this is an absolutely phenomenonal book! I recommend Young Women to everyone out there, one you'll be hearing about for a long time to come''Young Women instantly grabbed me from the first chapter. I devoured this novel''Incredibly powerful . . . essential reading for all.''Sharp, beautifully written and powerful'AN INTOXICATING FRIENDSHIP.AN UNFORGIVABLE BETRAYAL.From the Observer debut novelist of the year, an addictive new novel where a fierce new female friendship will unearth a secret that could change everything . . .When Emily meets enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable.But after a bombshell news article breaks, Emily begins to realise that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her past. A secret that threatens to unravel everything . . .'Confirms Jessica Moor as one of the most exciting new voices of the decade' Erin KellyAmbitious and arresting' Beth Underdown 'Vividly engaging' Winnie M. Li'Brilliantly written' Kate Sawyer 'Painfully real' Hanna Jameson'Provocative, thought-provoking' Bexy Cameron 'Visceral' Stylist'A timely read' Prima 'A slick cautionary tale' Sunday Times'Utterly engrossing' Louise Nealon*Observer best debut novelists of 2020 - 26th Jan 2020

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A wide-ranging reevaluation of utopian literature and philosophy, from Plato to Chang-Rae LeeExamining literary and philosophical writing about ideal societies from Greek antiquity to the present, Inventions of Nemesis offers a striking new take on utopia’s fundamental project.Noting that utopian imagining has often been propelled by an angry conviction that society is badly arranged, Douglas Mao argues that utopia’s essential aim has not been to secure happiness, order, or material goods, but rather to establish a condition of justice in which all have what they ought to have. He also makes the case that hostility to utopias has frequently been associated with a fear that they will transform humanity beyond recognition, doing away with the very subjects who should receive justice in a transformed world. Further, he shows how utopian writing speaks to contemporary debates about immigration, labor, and other global justice issues. Along the way, Inventions of Nemesis connects utopia to the Greek concept of nemesis, or indignation at a wrong ordering of things, and advances fresh readings of dozens of writers and thinkers—from Plato, Thomas More, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. G. Wells to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Chang-Rae Lee.Ambitious and timely, Inventions of Nemesis offers a vital reconsideration of what it really means to imagine an ideal society.

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The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing on sources from dozens of archives in the United States and England, it provides a fresh perspective on how capital and labor were mobilized to help build the colony—not from the perspective of elite investors alone, but from the point of view of ordinary people across the country. Women and the laboring poor have been overlooked in these efforts: The Virginia Venture brings them center stage. As well as exploring how society at home supported colonization, the book examines the impact that colonization had on English society, including changes in attitudes and behaviors—from the provision of poor relief to domestic tobacco cultivation. The book shows that as English society became more tightly invested in colonization in America, this sparked contestations over the prioritization of “English” and “American” interests. English social history in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without this imperial perspective. The Virginia Venture is essential reading for scholars of English social and imperial history and early American history. It draws on the methods of transatlantic history, showing the intimate connections between England and America, but it is deeply rooted in the social history archive of England. It demonstrates how English archives can be used, to their fullest extent, to illuminate this crucial period of American history.

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This in-depth narrative history of the interactions between English settlers and American Indians during the Virginia colony’s first century explains why a harmonious coexistence proved impossible. While the romanticized story of the Jamestown colony has been retold many times, the events following the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe are less well known. The peace and goodwill did not last; within one hundred years of the English settlers’ arrival in Virginia, the Indian population had been reduced by more than 90 percent through warfare, disease, and indiscriminate extermination. Britain’s first successful settlements in America occurred more than four hundred years ago. Not surprisingly, the historical accounts of these events have often contained inaccuracies. This compelling study of colonial Virginia, based on the latest research, sheds new light on the tensions between the English and the American Indians and clarifies the facts about several storied relationships. In Lethal Encounters, Alfred A. Cave examines why the Anglo settlers were unable to establish a peaceful and productive relationship with the region’s native inhabitants and explains how the deep prejudices harbored by both whites and Indians, the incompatibility of their economic and social systems, and the leadership failures of protagonists such as John Smith, Powhatan, Opechancanough, and William Berkeley contributed to this breakdown.

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Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects--and with it critical distance-- and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.

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Recommended by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy as an exemplary informational text. All kinds of people are coming to America. If you're European, you come in search of freedom or riches. If you're African, you come in chains. And what about the Indians, what is happening to them? Soon with the influx of so many people, thirteen unique colonies are born, each with its own story. Meet Pocahontas and John Smith in Jamestown. Join William Penn and the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Sit with the judges at the Salem witch trials. Hike over the mountains with Daniel Boone. And let Ben Franklin give you some salty advice in his Poor Richard's Almanac in this remarkable journey through the dynamic creation of what one day becomes the United States. About the Series: Master storyteller Joy Hakim has excited millions of young minds with the great drama of American history in her award-winning series A History of US. Recommended by the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy as an exemplary informational text, A History of US weaves together exciting stories that bring American history to life. Hailed by reviewers, historians, educators, and parents for its exciting, thought-provoking narrative, the books have been recognized as a break-through tool in teaching history and critical reading skills to young people. In ten books that span from Prehistory to the 21st century, young people will never think of American history as boring again.

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Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hard-nosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and often from the world at large.In the freewheeling spirit of Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Manny Farber, Hampton calls up the extremist, underground tendencies and archaic forces simmering beneath the surface of popular forms. Ranging from the kinetic poetry of Hong Kong cinema and the neo–New Wave energy of Irma Vep to the punk heroines of Sleater-Kinney and Ghost World, Born in Flames plays odd couples off one another: pitting Natural Born Killers against Forrest Gump, contrasting Jean-Luc Godard with Steven Spielberg, defending David Lynch against aesthetic ideologues, invoking The Curse of the Mekons against Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and introducing D. H. Lawrence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “We are born in flames,” sang the incandescent Lora Logic, and here those flames are a source of illumination as well as destruction, warmth as well as consumption.From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents Plastic People of the Universe, Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.

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Though a good deal is known about the remediation of dyslexics of all ages, there is growing awareness among teachers and others that there is much more to their work that teaching literacy skills. Most of us experience stress at some point in our lives, but experience suggests that dyslexics are particularly vulnerable to it. This book presents documented evidence on the subject. The second edition has been substantially rewritten and contains contributions from both dyslexics and non-dyslexics. Many of the contributors to the first edition have substantially rewritten their original chapters. Among the new contributors are Morag Kiziewicz, herself dyslexic and a learning support manager at the University of Bath; Michael Lea, a professional musician; and Julian Cox, who, in the editor' s view, was unjustly convicted of murder by the courts when the whole event leading to this was a tragic accident brought about by his disabilities. All describe the ways in which dyslexia has influenced their lives. There are also chapters by Lindsay Peer, who writes from her standpoint as education office of the British Dyslexia Association and Melanie Jameson, who is advisor to the Adult Dyslexia organization and speaks of the way dyslexics' stresses in the lawcourts sometimes lead to serious miscarriages of justice.

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In the 1600s, over 350,000 intrepid English men, women, and children migrated to America, leaving behind their homeland for an uncertain future. Whether they settled in Jamestown, Salem, or Barbados, these migrants-entrepreneurs, soldiers, and pilgrims alike-faced one incontrovertible truth: England was a very, very long way away.In Between Two Worlds , celebrated historian Malcolm Gaskill tells the sweeping story of the English experience in America during the first century of colonization. Following a large and varied cast of visionaries and heretics, merchants and warriors, and slaves and rebels, Gaskill brilliantly illuminates the often traumatic challenges the settlers faced. The first waves sought to recreate the English way of life, even to recover a society that was vanishing at home. But they were thwarted at every turn by the perils of a strange continent, unaided by monarchs who first ignored then exploited them. As these colonists strove to leave their mark on the New World, they were forced-by hardship and hunger, by illness and infighting, and by bloody and desperate battles with Indians-to innovate and adapt or perish.As later generations acclimated to the wilderness, they recognized that they had evolved into something distinct: no longer just the English in America, they were perhaps not even English at all. These men and women were among the first white Americans, and certainly the most prolific. And as Gaskill shows, in learning to live in an unforgiving world, they had begun a long and fateful journey toward rebellion and, finally, independence

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Three beloved novels by Edith Wharton, in a couture-inspired Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition designed by a fashion illustrator for Alexander McQueen. This edition celebrates the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton's birth in 2012.The House of Mirth: Nineteen year old Lily Bart is in need of a rich husband to safeguard her place in the social elite. Unwilling to marry without both love and money, Lily becomes vulnerable to gossip. Wharton charts the course of Lily's life, providing a wider picture of a society in transition; a changing New York where old manners, morals and family attitudes are being replaced by the view that an individual is an expendable commodity.The Custom of the Country: Mr and Mrs Spragg are hoping to forge an entrée into society and arrange a suitably ambitious match for their only daughter. Wharton's story of Undine Spragg affords us a detailed glimpse of the interior décor of upper-class America and its nouveau riche. Through a heroine who is as vain and spoiled as she is fascinating, Wharton conveys a vision of social behaviour that is both informed and disenchanted.The Age of Innocence: When the Countess Ellen Olenska flees Europe and her brutish husband, her rebellious independence stirs the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to the Countess's cousin May Welland. As the drama unfolds, Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit and Jamesian mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate picture of men and women caught in a society that denies humanity while desperately defending "civilisation".

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When Tony Roper discovered at the age of twenty- seven that acting could be a proper job, it changed his life forever. Having drifted from occasional schooling to various adventures on the bread vans, down the mines and in the shipyards, Tony then saw an advert in the newspaper for part-time actors to star opposite glamorous actresses. He liked the sound of that, and it was to be the start of a whole new life. Now, for the first time, Tony tells his colourful life story. There's his large extended family which had more than its fair share of characters, his father's secret war record, the incident with the bread knife and his brother, his narrow escapes from death, and plenty of unexpected family revelations. Then there's his time as the legendary Jamesie Cotter in Rab C. Nesbitt , his enduring friendship (and the odd fallout) with Rikki Fulton, hilarious appearances in Only an Excuse?, Scotch & Wry and Naked Video , in-depth discussions with Billy Connolly about who really makes the best pies, how he came to write his classic play The Steamie - and why it nearly didn't make it to the stage. Tony also describes his shocking recent health scares and his agonising decision about whether to go for a life-saving operation or play one last game for Dukla Pumpherston. I'll No Tell You Again is the inspiring and hilarious autobiography of one of our funniest and best-loved actors, known to millions as Tony Roper and to his family as... well, read it and you'll find out!

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Socially, politically, and artistically, the 1950s make up an odd interlude between the first half of the twentieth century-still tied to the problems and orders of the Victorian era and Gilded Age-and the pervasive transformations of the later sixties. In Revolution, Matthew Wilkens argues that postwar fiction functions as a fascinating model of revolutionary change. Uniting literary criticism, cultural analysis, political theory, and science studies, Revolution reimagines the years after World War II as at once distinct from the decades surrounding them and part of a larger-scale series of rare, revolutionary moments stretching across centuries. Focusing on the odd mix of allegory, encyclopedism, and failure that characterizes fifties fiction, Wilkens examines a range of literature written during similar times of crisis, in the process engaging theoretical perspectives from Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson to Bruno Latour and Alain Badiou alongside readings of major novels by Ralph Ellison, William Gaddis, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, and others. Revolution links the forces that shaped postwar fiction to the dynamics of revolutionary events in other eras and social domains. Like physicists at the turn of the twentieth century or the French peasantry of 1789, midcentury writers confronted a world that did not fit their existing models. Pressed to adapt but lacking any obvious alternative, their work became sprawling and figurative, accumulating unrelated details and reusing older forms to ambiguous new ends. While the imperatives of the postmodern eventually gave order to this chaos, Wilkens explains that the same forces are again at work in today's fracturing literary market.

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The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.

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All organisms and species are transitory, yet life endures. The origin, extinction, and evolution of species-interconnected in the web of life as "eternal ephemera"-are the concern of evolutionary biology. In this riveting work, renowned paleontologist Niles Eldredge follows leading thinkers as they have wrestled for more than two hundred years with the eternal skein of life composed of ephemeral beings, revitalizing evolutionary science with their own, more resilient findings. Eldredge begins in France with the naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1801 first framed the overarching question about the emergence of new species. The Italian geologist Giambattista Brocchi followed, bringing in geology and paleontology to expand the question. In 1825, at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Grant and Robert Jameson introduced the astounding ideas formulated by Lamarck and Brocchi to a young medical student named Charles Darwin. Who can doubt that Darwin left for his voyage on the Beagle in 1831 filled with thoughts about these daring new explanations for the "transmutation" of species. Eldredge revisits Darwin's early insights into evolution in South America and his later synthesis of knowledge into a theory of the origin of species. He then considers the ideas of more recent evolutionary thinkers, such as George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the young and brash Niles Eldredge and Steven Jay Gould, who set science afire with their concept of punctuated equilibria. Filled with insights into evolutionary biology and told with a rich affection for the scientific arena, this book celebrates the organic, vital relationship between scientific thinking and its subjects.

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There have always been mail-order brides in America—but we haven’t always thought about them in the same ways. In Buying a Bride, Marcia A. Zug starts with the so-called “Tobacco Wives” of the Jamestown colony and moves all the way forward to today’s modern same-sex mail-order grooms to explore the advantages and disadvantages of mail-order marriage. It’s a history of deception, physical abuse, and failed unions. It’s also the story of how mail-order marriage can offer women surprising and empowering opportunities. Drawing on a forgotten trove of colorful mail-order marriage court cases, Zug explores the many troubling legal issues that arise in mail-order marriage: domestic abuse and murder, breach of contract, fraud (especially relating to immigration), and human trafficking and prostitution. She tells the story of how mail-order marriage lost the benign reputation it enjoyed in the Civil War era to become more and more reviled over time, and she argues compellingly that it does not entirely deserve its current reputation. While it is a common misperception that women turn to mail-order marriage as a desperate last resort, most mail-order brides are enticed rather than coerced. Since the first mail-order brides arrived on American shores in 1619, mail-order marriage has enabled women to improve both their marital prospects and their legal, political, and social freedoms. Buying A Bride uncovers this history and shows us how mail-order marriage empowers women and should be protected and even encouraged.

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Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether the rising Asian power is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in America’s future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. For centuries, Americans have been convinced of China’s importance to their own national destiny. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America’s long and varied preoccupation with China.China has held a special place in the American imagination from colonial times, when Jamestown settlers pursued a passage to the Pacific and Asia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans plied a profitable trade in Chinese wares, sought Chinese laborers to build the West, and prized China’s art and decor. China was revered for its ancient culture but also drew Christian missionaries intent on saving souls in a heathen land. Its vast markets beckoned expansionists, even as its migrants were seen as a “yellow peril” that prompted the earliest immigration restrictions. A staunch ally during World War II, China was a dangerous adversary in the Cold War that followed. In the post-Mao era, Americans again embraced China as a land of inexhaustible opportunity, playing a central role in its economic rise.Through portraits of entrepreneurs, missionaries, academics, artists, diplomats, and activists, Chang demonstrates how ideas about China have long been embedded in America’s conception of itself and its own fate. Fateful Ties provides valuable perspective on this complex international and intercultural relationship as America navigates an uncertain new era.

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Innovation today . . . Practice tomorrow. PROGRESS in Inorganic Chemistry Today's cutting-edge chemical experimentation is a foretaste of thetechnical arsenal of tomorrow's chemist. Progress in InorganicChemistry affords instant and convenient access to every area ofinnovative chemical research and has long served as theprofessional chemist's index to the newest and influential turns ininorganic chemistry. Featuring the work of internationally renownedchemists, Volume 45 discusses: * Selective Recognition of Organic Molecules by Metallohosts (JamesW. Canary and Bruce C. Gibb, New York University) * Metallacrowns: A New Class of Molecular Recognition Agents(Vincent L. Pecoraro, Ann J. Stemmler, Brian R. Gibney, Jeffrey J.Bodwin, Hsin Wang, Jeff W. Kampf, and Almut Barwinski, Universityof Michigan) * The Interpretation of Ligand Field Parameters (Adam J. Bridgemanand Malcolm Gerloch, University Chemical Laboratories) * Chemistry of Transition Metal Cyanide Compounds: ModernPerspectives (Kim R. Dunbar and Robert A. Heintz, Michigan StateUniversity) * Assembling Sugars and Metals: Novel Architectures andReactivities in Transition Metal Chemistry (Umberto Piarulli andCarlo Floriani, University of Lausanne) * Oxygen Activation Mechanism at the Binuclear Site of Heme-CopperOxidase Superfamily as Revealed by Time-Resolved Resonance RamanSpectroscopy (Teizo Kitagawa and Takashi Ogura, Institute forMolecular Science) "This series is distinguished not only by its scope and breadth,but also by the depth and quality of the reviews." --Journal of theAmerican Chemical Society "This series is a valuable addition to the library of thepracticing research chemist, and is a good starting point forstudents wishing to understand modern inorganic chemistry."--Canadian Chemical News "[This series] has won a deservedly honored place on the bookshelfof the chemist attempting to keep afloat in the torrent of originalpapers on inorganic chemistry." --Chemistry in Britain

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This book explores how modernity gives rise to temporal disorders when time cannot be assimilated and integrated into the realm of lived experience. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's description of the shock experience of modernity through readings of Baudelaire, the book turns to Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to derive insights into the many temporal disorders (such as trauma, addiction, and fetishism) that pervade contemporary culture. Through close readings of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Elissa Marder argues that these nineteenth-century texts can, paradoxically, make us aware of aspects of present-day life that are not easily described or perceived. Following reflections by Benjamin, Jameson, and Lyotard, she shows that the ability to measure time increases in inverse proportion to the human ability to express it and create meaning through it. Although we have increased our ability to record events, we have become collectively less able to assimilate the experience of the very events that new technologies enable us to record. The literary articulations of addiction and fetishism in Baudelaire and Flaubert reveal that these temporal disorders can be understood structurally as expressions of an inability to live in time. At a psychic level, they can be read as attempts to ward off increased stimuli and unwanted aspects of reality by stopping time. The book also interrogates the relationship between misogyny and modernity. By revealing the privileged function assigned to feminine figures in Baudelaire and Flaubert, and engaging with contemporary writings in psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural studies, this work shows how the experience of time—and the attempts to stop it—become inscribed on a feminine or feminized body. Dead Time provides us with a way of understanding how our own collective temporal disorders may be part of the unassimilated legacy of nineteenth-century modernity.

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'One of the most exciting new voices of the decade' Erin Kelly'Ambitious and arresting' Beth Underdown'Utterly engrossing' Louise Nealon'Brilliantly written... compelling' Kate Sawyer'Painfully real' Hanna Jameson'A visceral slice of female friendship' StylistEveryone's got that history, I guess. Everyone's got a story.When Emily meets enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners, and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black and white to technicolour and the two women become inseparable.Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life - her work assisting vulnerable women, her old friend Lucy - to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past. A secret that threatens to unravel everything . . .Young Women is a razor sharp novel that slices to the heart of our most important relationships, and asks how complicit we all are in this world built for men.Praise for Jessica Moor'A fabulous new writer' Richard Osman'Compelling, tense and pacy read' The Observer, 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2020'Powerful and chilling, an important story, well told' Guardian'Vastly impressive . . . Deeply affecting and superbly told, it demands to be read' Daily Mail'Jessica Moor is a new young writer I believe in' Jeanette Winterson'Tense, beautiful and lyrical. Everyone should read this book' Sara Collins'Made me rage and weep and understand a little better. A powerful book telling stories that need to be heard' Rosamund Lupton

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What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

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Communities in Fiction reads six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean- Luc Nancy. The book’s topic is the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to modern to postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fiction as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter demonstrates that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the features both thematic and formal that recent critics and theorists such as Fredric Jameson and many others have found to characterize postmodern fiction are already present in Cervantes’s wonderful early-seventeenth-century “Exemplary Story,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, striving to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. The book attempts to communicate to its readers the joy of reading these works and to argue for the exemplary insight they provide into what Heidegger called Mitsein— being together in communities that are always problematic and unstable.

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Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times’ 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower Compact in 1620."1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America’s past is still America’s best future." —Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation"Peter Wood’s pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound." —Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy CenterWhen and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, most notably the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But the quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620.Schools across the country have already adopted the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

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