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Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? What are the privileges and pleasures of fandom? Do celebrities ever deserve the outsized attention they receive? In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive...
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English
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"Because of the unrestrained slaughter of cougars on Buckskin Mountain, the deer population has increased so fast that they begin to starve. But when Thad Eburne, chief forest ranger, hears the government's plan to open a massive deer hunt to hundreds of indiscriminate hunters, he worries that it will only worsen man's dangerous meddling with nature. Then, when Eburne decides to save a deer herd from a cattleman bent on selling illegal deer meat for...
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English
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A narrative history about Anthony Comstock, US Postal Inspector and vice hunter, and the remarkable women who opposed him. Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. The Comstock law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. Between 1873 and Comstock's death in 1915, eight women were charged with...
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English
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"Award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796-1833), the enslaved mixed-race wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her management of his property, including Choctaw Academy,...
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English
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Jacob Riis's classic is an open window into a world unknown to most. Originally published in 1890, this classic inditement of slum life remains an outstanding example of the value of investigative journalism and its potential to change the world for the better.
Riis was one of the earliest "muck-rakers," which President Theodore Roosevelt defined as, "taking the rake to uncover the most unpleasant conditions in American society." In the case of Riis,...
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English
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A history of the powerful Potawatomi tribe. They were persistent enemies of the Miamis. Pictures and biograpies of their leading chiefs, marks their trails, locates their chief villages, and tells the story of many events that much to do with American history.
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English
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These acerbic, poignant, and thought-provoking essays concern mankind, its relationship with God, and how the mind works. Twain himself considered them dark and cynical, delaying their publication for many years before finally releasing them as an anonymous, limited-edition collection.
The title essay constitutes a deeply felt blow against religious hypocrisy, written in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a young idealist and an elderly, world-weary...
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Lexile measure
1310L
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English
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Description
"Classic analysis of America's unique political character, quoted heavily by politicians and perennially popping up on history professors' reading lists. The book's enduring appeal lies in the eloquent, prophetic voice of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), a French aristocrat who visited the United States in 1831. A thoughtful young man in a still-young country, he succeeded in penning this penetrating study of America's people, culture, history,...
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English
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In the country, holidaymakers were a rarity. The railways could take you almost anywhere, but it was only the middle classes who went. So there were no crowds, and many of our pictures show tourist hotspots before they were hot, before there was any such thing as a car park. The text provides local knowledge and background to the photographs and is an enjoyable read in itself, but the real pleasure is in seeing Brighton, Margate, Scarborough, Broadstairs,...
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A classic early example of "muck-racking" journalism, or reporting by reform-minded American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt, "How the Other Half Lives" is a chronicle of the conditions of abject poverty that the residents of the slums of New York endured at the end of the 19th century. Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis saw first-hand the horrible conditions of the Lower East Side of Manhattan following his immigration...
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Pub. Date
2011
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English
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Description
"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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English
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“The Theory of the Leisure Class” is criticism of capitalism. Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. The book is a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labour, which are the social institutions of the feudal...
14) Celia, a slave
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English
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Originally published in 1991, “Celia, a Slave” illuminates the moral dilemmas that lie at the heart of a slaveholding society by telling the story of a young slave who was sexually exploited by her enslaver and ultimately executed for his murder. Melton A. McLaurin uses Celia's story to reveal the tensions that strained the fabric of antebellum southern society by focusing on the role of gender and the manner in which the legal system was used...
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English
Description
Sheds new light on both pro and antislavery politics in the nineteenth-century Americas.
The creation of new frontiers of slave commodity production and the expansion and intensification of slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the southern United States were an integral part of the expansion of the world economy during the nineteenth century. Beginning from this vantage point, The Politics of the Second Slavery brings together a group of international scholars...
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English
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Chronicles of the filth, foulness, and public health disasters found by "inspectors of nuisances" in a newly industrialized world.
In the nineteenth century, as towns grew, Britain became increasingly grimy. The causes of dirt and pollution were defined legally as "nuisances" and, in 1835, the new local authorities very rapidly appointed an army of "inspectors of nuisances."
This book reveals the Victorian era from a very different point of view:...
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English
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Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.9 - AR Pts: 7
Lexile measure
550L
Language
English
Description
"An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials. The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838, how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and driver, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew...
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English
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Henry Bibb (1815-1854) was born to an enslaved woman named Mildred Jackson in Shelby County, Kentucky. His father was a state senator who never acknowledged him. His narrative documents his persistent attempts to escape to freedom, beginning at age ten, offering an insider's view of the degradation and varieties of slavery as well as its bitter legacies within families. Having finally settled in Detroit in 1842, Bibb joined the abolitionist lecture...
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