Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views
Author: Mary Louise Kete File Type: pdf During her lifetime, Lydia Sigourney was acclaimed as nineteenth-century Americas most popular woman poet and published widely as a historian, travel writer, essayist, and educator. While serious critical attention to her work languished following her death and into the twentieth century, a growing number of critics and writers have reexamined Sigourney and her large body of writing and have given her a central place in the new canon. This first collection of original essays devoted to the poets work puts many of the best scholars on Sigourney together in one place and in conversation with one another. The volume includes critical essays examining her literary texts as well as essays that unpack Sigourneys participation in the cultural movements of her day. Holding powerful opinions about the role of women in society, Sigourney was not afraid to advocate against government policies that, in her view, undermined the promise of America, even as she was held up as a paragon of American womanhood and middle-class rectitude. The resulting portrait promises to engage readers who wish to know more about Sigourneys writing, her career, and the causes that inspired her. Along with the volume editors, contributors include Ann Beebe, Paula Bernat Bennett, Janet Dean, Sean Epstein-Corbin, Annie Finch, Gary Kelly, Paul Lauter, Amy J. Lueck, Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, Jennifer Putzi, Angela Sorby, Joan Wry, and Sandra Zagarell. **
Author: Jules Verne
File Type: pdf
At the Weldon Institute in Philadelphia, a mob of zealous balloon enthusiasts plans to conquer the sky in a state-of-the-art dirigible. When a stranger, the mysterious Robur, declares that the future belongs not to balloons but to heavier-than-air flying machines, the Institute scornfully dismisses the idea. But Robur demands vengeanceand has a unique flying machine that will allow him to take it. By turns an impassioned argument for aviation, a wild proto-steampunk adventure, and a jubilant celebration of the dream of flight, Robur the Conqueror ranks among Jules Vernes most iconic and influential works. Its technological speculations, including the unforgettable aircraft Albatross, are a vibrant snapshot of nineteenth-century scientific innovation. This, the first complete English translation of Vernes 1886 novel, includes an insightful introduction, explanatory chapter notes, never-before-published glimpses of Vernes original manuscript, all the first-edition illustrations by Leon Benett, and an up-to-date Verne biography and primary and secondary bibliography. It is an essential new edition of a seminal science fiction classic. **
Author: Robert M. Sapolsky
File Type: epub
They should put Behave in hotel rooms instead of the Bible the world would be a much better, wiser place Kate Fox, author of Watching the EnglishA ground-breaking synthesis of the entire science of human behaviour by one of the best scientist-writers of our time (Oliver Sacks) -- Its no exaggeration to say that Behave is one of the best nonfiction books Ive ever read Wall Street JournalWhy do we do what we do? Behave is at once a dazzling tour and a majestic synthesis of the whole science of human behaviour. Brought to life through simple language, engaging stories and irreverent wit, it offers the fullest picture yet of the origins of tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, war and peace.Robert Sapolskys ingenious method is to move backwards in time from the moment at which a behaviour occurs, layer by layer through the myriad influences that led to it- We begin with the split-second reactions of the brain and nervous system...- Then we consider our response to sight, sound and smell in the minutes and seconds beforehand...- Next he explains the interactions of hormones, which prime our behaviour in the preceding hours and days...- He proceeds through the experiences of adolescence, childhood and foetal development that shape us over our lifespans...- And continues over centuries and millennia through the profound influences of genetic inheritance, cultural context and ultimately the evolutionary origins of our species.Throughout, Sapolsky considers the most important question what causes acts of aggression or compassion? What inspires us to terrible deeds and what might help foster our best behaviour?Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, that is unlikely to be surpassed for many years.
Author: Daniel S. Margolies
File Type: pdf
Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal during the tumultuous decades between the Civil War and World War I, was one of the most influential and widely read journalists in American history. At the height of his fame in the early twentieth century, Watterson was so well known that his name and image were used to sell cigars and whiskey. A major player in American politics for more than fifty years, Watterson personally knew nearly every president from Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson. Though he always refused to run, the renowned editor was frequently touted as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, the Kentucky governors office, and even the White House. Shortly after his arrival in Louisville in 1868, Watterson merged competing interests and formed the Courier-Journal, quickly establishing it as the paper of record in Kentucky, a central promoter of economic development in the New South, and a prominent voice on the national political stage. An avowed Democrat in an era when newspapers were openly aligned with political parties, Watterson adopted a defiant independence within the Democratic Party and challenged the Democrats consensus opinions as much as he reinforced them. In the first new study of Wattersons historical significance in more than fifty years, Daniel S. Margolies traces the development of Wattersons political and economic positions and his transformation from a strident Confederate newspaper editor into an admirer of Lincoln, a powerful voice of sectional reconciliation, and the nations premier advocate of free trade. Henry Watterson and the New South provides the first study of Wattersons unique attempt to guide regional and national discussions of foreign affairs. Margolies details Wattersons quest to solve the sovereignty problems of the 1870s and to quell the economic and social upheavals of the 1890s through an expansive empire of free trade. Wattersons political and editorial contemporaries variously advocated free silverism, protectionism, and isolationism, but he rejected their narrow focus and maintained that the best way to improve the Souths fortunes was to expand its economic activities to a truly global scale. Wattersons New Departure in foreign affairs was an often contradictory program of decentralized home rule and overseas imperialism, but he remained steadfast in his vision of a prosperous and independent South within an American economic empire of unfettered free trade. Watterson thus helped to bring about the eventual bipartisan embrace of globalization that came to define Americas relationship with the rest of the world in the twentieth century. Margolies groundbreaking analysis shows how Wattersons authoritative command of the nations most divisive issues, his rhetorical zeal, and his willingness to stand against the tide of conventional wisdom made him a national icon.(Topics in Kentucky History)
Author: Bardwell L. Smith
File Type: pdf
Bardwell L. Smith offers a fresh perspective on c, the Japanese ceremony performed to bring solace to those who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. Showing how old and new forms of myth, symbol, doctrine, praxis, and organization combine and overlap in contemporary mizuko kuy?, Smith provides critical insight from many angles the sociology of the family, the power of the medical profession, the economics of temples, the import of ancestral connections, the need for healing in both private and communal ways and, perhaps above all, the place of women in modern Japanese religion. At the heart of Smiths research is the issue of how human beings experience the death of a life that has been and remains precious to them. While universal, these losses are also personal and unique. The role of society in helping people to heal from these experiences varies widely and has changed enormously in recent decades. In examples of grieving for these kinds of losses one finds narratives not only of deep sorrow but of remarkable dignity. **
Author: Wendell Potter
File Type: epub
In June 2009, Wendell Potter made national headlines with his scorching testimony before the Senate panel on health care reform. This former senior VP of CIG NA explained how health insurers make promises they have no intention of keeping, how they flout regulations designed to protect consumers, and how they skew political debate with multibillion-dollar PR campaigns to mislead the press and public. Potter had walked away from a six-figure salary and two decades as an insurance executive because he could no longer abide the routine practices of an industry where the needs of sick and suffering Americans take a backseat to the bottom line-leading Michael Moore to call him the Daniel Ellsberg of corporate America. In Deadly Spin, Potter takes readers behind the scenes to show how a huge chunk of our absurd health care spending actually bankrolls a propaganda campaign and lobbying effort focused on protecting one thing profits. Potter shows how relentless PR assaults play an insidious role in our political process anywhere that corporate profits are at stake-from climate change to defense policy. Deadly Spin tells us why- and how-we must fight back. Praise for Deadly Spin The health insurance industrys worst nightmare.-Portfolio.com A gripping indictment.-Kate Pickert, *Time* Wendell Potter is a straight shooter-and he hits the bulls-eye here with an expose of corporate power that reveals why real health care reform didnt happen, cant happen, and wont happen until that power is contained.-Bill Moyers **
Author: Michelle Burnham
File Type: pdf
Transoceanic America offers a new approach to American literature by emphasizing the material and conceptual interconnectedness of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. These oceans were tied together economically, textually, and politically, through such genres as maritime travel writing, mathematical and navigational schoolbooks, and the relatively new genre of the novel. Especially during the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, long-distance transoceanic travel required calculating and managing risk in the interest of profit. The result was the emergence of a newly suspenseful form of narrative that came to characterize capitalist investment, political revolution, and novelistic plot. The calculus of risk that drove this expectationist narrative also concealed violence against vulnerable bodies on ships and shorelines around the world. A transoceanic American literary and cultural history requires new non-linear narratives to tell the story of this global context and to recognize its often forgotten textual archive. **About the Author Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University, where she specializes in early American literature, Native American literature, transoceanic studies, and popular culture. She is the author of Folded Selves Colonial New England Writing in the World System and Captivity and Sentiment Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861 (both with the Univ. Press of New England). She has edited A Separate Star Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson (Heyday Press) and the 1767 novel The Female American (Broadview Press). She is currently working on a project that brings together literary history, book history, and digital humanities to recover the transoceanic genre of castaway fiction.