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"In 1934, Webster's Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work. In 1961, Webster's Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America's newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary's editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam's...
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First published in 1931, "Black No More" is a clever and important satirical novel by George S. Schuyler which was written during the creative time of the Harlem Renaissance. This humorous and insightful work explores what would happen if blackness could be erased and black people could choose to become white. The novel begins with the central character Max Disher, a young, intelligent and ambitious black man, finding himself lonely and rejected on...
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Loving finds in the lives and works of the two writers a symbiosis of spirit that transcends the question of literary influence. Tracing the parallel careers of Emerson and Whitman, the author shows how each served his literary apprenticeship, moved beyond his vocation, prospered, and, finally, declined in his literary achievements. In both cases, Loving follows his subject from vision to wisdom and, along the way, examines the aspects of the relationship...
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Most of the readers and writers we know, far from being the sort to only haunt the recesses of their town's library or curl up on the couch when the sun's shining, like to get out and visit the places they've read about. Or the places that inspire them.
Lone Star Literary Life polled our staff about the places in Texas that fueled their bookish imaginations. What literary destinations called to them, to get out the map, get in the car, and go? Was...
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Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories-A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun-entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging. The book listens...
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Although the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 shocked the world, America has confronted terrorism at home for well over a century. With the invention of dynamite in 1866, Americans began to worry about anonymous acts of mass violence in a way that differed from previous generations' fears of urban riots, slave uprisings, and mob violence. Focusing on the volatile period between the 1886 Haymarket bombing and the 1920 bombing outside J. P. Morgan's...
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Why do modern Americans believe in something called a sense of humor, and how did they come to that belief? Daniel Wickberg traces the relatively short cultural history of the concept to its British origins as a way to explore new conceptions of the self and social order in modern America. More than simply the history of an idea, Wickberg's study provides new insights into a peculiarly modern cultural sensibility.
The expression "sense of humor" was...
9) The wild west of Louis L'Amour: an illustrated companion to the frontier fiction of an American icon
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"A commemoration of themes and characters found in Louis L'Amour's books. Explores geography of the west, lone heroes, gunfighters, mining and ranching, women, Native Americans, food, and transportation as portrayed in L'Amour's books"--
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"This book explores resilience by tracing the linked stories of how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James dealt with personal tragedy: for Emerson, the death of his young wife and, eleven years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, the death of his brother; and for James, the death of his beloved cousin Minny. Weaving together biographical detail with quotations from the writers' journals and letters, Richardson shows readers...
11) The New Midwest
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In the public imagination, Midwestern literature has not evolved far beyond heartland laborers and hardscrabble immigrants of a century past. But as the region has changed, so, in many ways, has its fiction. In this book, the author explores how shifts in work, class, place, race, and culture has been reflected or ignored by novelists and short story writers. From Marilynne Robinson to Leon Forrest, Toni Morrison to Aleksandar Hemon, Bonnie Jo Campbell...
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This book is dedicated to anyone who ever served in the military, and especially military combat, regardless of the conflict; and to those who returned disabled, and especially those who did not return. And, let us never forget the American tax payer, who continually and unknowingly, contributed trillions upon trillions of dollars to Uncle Sam's bank account; a bank account that no longer exists. Well, if you had a bank account and the bank kept requesting...
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2011
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Running away with the circus is one of the world's most enduring and romantic ideas. However, the reality of circus life during the Depression era was that it was hard and painful. Jacob Jankowski, now over ninety years old, looks back on that time of desperation, cruelty and prejudice, but at the same time, he recalls a magical atmosphere with the animals, the larger-than-life circus population, love, and, of course, a special elephant named Rosie.
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2011
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"Winner of the 14th Annual (2012) Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University" "Co-winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association" "Co-Winner of the 2011 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association" "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012" Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor...
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In the beginning, everything was America, but where did America begin? In many narratives of American nationalism (both popular and academic), the United States begins in print-with the production, dissemination, and consumption of major printed texts like Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, newspaper debates over ratification, and the Constitution itself. In these narratives, print plays a central role in the emergence of American nationalism,...
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Charles Dickens: A Critical Study was written in Siena, Italy in 1897 and first published by Blackie in the Victorian Era Series in February 1898. Any doubts that readers and critics harboured over the choice of Gissing as author were swept aside on the book's publication. It was hailed as a triumphant feat of original and incisive criticism allied to level-headed conclusions. Literature, the forerunner of the Times Literary Supplement, described...
17) John Brown
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Few figures are more seminal in the abolitionist movement in America than John Brown. His firebrand approach to the movement arose out of his religiously inspired and deep-seated belief that slavery was not only morally unjust but that its removal from American society could only be achieved through armed insurrection. Following his capture in 1859 during an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry and his subsequent hanging he became...
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Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. In The Portrait's Subject, Sarah Blackwood tells a wide-ranging story about how images of human surfaces came to signal expressions of human depth during this era in paintings, photographs, and illustrations, as well as in literary and cultural representations of portrait making and...
19) Queer Books
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This vintage book contains a collection of essays written by Edmund Pearson, and man at one time renowned as the most famous librarian in the United States. This intriguing volume contains essays on a variety of subjects ranging from temperance novels and 4th of July speeches to awful poetry, etiquette books, and beyond. A highly amusing volume, "Queer Books" will appeal to all with a love of language and literature, and it would make for a worthy...
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American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The...
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