Author: N. J. Higham File Type: pdf This seminal new studyexplores how and why historians and writers from the Middle Ages to the present day have constructed different accounts of this well-loved figure. N. J Higham offers an in-depth examintaion of the first two Arthurian texts the History of the Britons and the Welsh Annals. He argues that historians have often been more influenced by what the idea of Arthur means in their present context than by such primary sources King Arthur Myth-making and History illuminates and discusses some central points of debate * What role was Arthur intended to perform in the political and cultural worlds that constructed him? * How did the idea of King Arthur evolve?*What did the myth of Arthur mean to both authors and their audiences? King Arthur Myth-making and History is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the origins and evolution of the Arthurian legend.

Author: Jon Reyhner File Type: pdf Before Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous peoples spoke more than three hundred languages and followed almost as many distinct belief systems and lifeways. But in childrearing, the different Indian societies had certain practices in commonincluding training for survival and teaching tribal traditions. The history of American Indian education from colonial times to the present is a story of how Euro-Americans disrupted and suppressed these common cultural practices, and how Indians actively pursued and preserved them. American Indian Education recounts that history from the earliest missionary and government attempts to Christianize and civilize Indian children to the most recent efforts to revitalize Native cultures and return control of schools to Indigenous peoples. Extensive firsthand testimony from teachers and students offers unique insight into the varying experiences of Indian education. Historians and educators Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder begin by discussing Indian childrearing practices and the work of colonial missionaries in New France (Canada), New England, Mexico, and California, then conduct readers through the full array of government programs aimed at educating Indian children. From the passage of the Civilization Act of 1819 to the formation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824 and the establishment of Indian reservations and vocation-oriented boarding schools, the authors frame Native education through federal policy eras treaties, removal, assimilation, reorganization, termination, and self-determination. Thoroughly updated for this second edition, American Indian Education is the most comprehensive single-volume account, useful for students, educators, historians, activists, and public servants interested in the history and efficacy of educational reforms past and present. **

Author: Jo Walton File Type: epub Jo Walton is an award-winning author of, inveterate reader of, and chronic re-reader of science fiction and fantasy books. What Makes This Book So Great? is a selection of the best of her musings about her prodigious reading habit.Jo Waltons many subjects range from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. Among them, the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge the question of what genre readers mean by mainstream the under-appreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh the fields many approaches to time travel the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany Salman Rushdies Midnights Children the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read.Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.**

Author: Robin Black File Type: epub Amazon.com ReviewA Conversation Between Karen Russell and Robin Black Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. Lucys Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia!, both published by Knopf. Recently she was selected by the National Book Foundation as one of their 5 under 35 and by The New Yorker as one of their 20 under 40. She is the Writer in Residence at Bard College.KR Robin, these stories are so rich, and fed by so many different streams of life experiencethey may be short, relative to, say, The Brothers Karamazov, but they have all the insight, heartbreak, and complexity of the best novels. In your acknowledgments, you mention that it took you eight years to write the ten stories in the collection. Do you feel like the gestation period for the stories has something to do with their emotional depth?RB In part, I think the whole process took a long time because I never set out to write a story collection. I wrote each story as its own thing without focusing on how it would fit into a manuscript, so I didnt feel hurried to finish a book. And I am remarkably inefficient. I honestly think I throw out a good 80% of what I write. On a less logistical level, I think that some of what you call complexity and depth thank you, Karen! comes from a childhood spent trying to figure out the familial complexities into which I was born. So many of my stories deal with aftermath, years of history echoing down, and I can see now that I grew up with a sense of a household still trying to deal with its own history. Maybe this is true of all families, but in mine anyway, the stories from the past seemed to loom incredibly large and I was always aware that my parents and my grandmother, who lived with us, were carrying the legacies of these complex narratives within them. There had been deaths before my birth that were still being grieved, injuries and illnesses from which people had never recovered. I know that isnt unique and my preoccupation with those things is probably the strange part, but for better and worse, I have always been obsessed with the question of how personal history determines the present moment. KR Your characters felt very real to me, some more real than many people I know, as though they had a secret life beyond the page. I got the sense that every one of them casts a shadow, has a past and will have a future. How much do you know about your characters when you sit down to begin a draft? Do you draft out biographies for them? Or do their histories, quirks and preoccupations become clearer to you as you write?RB My characters definitely reveal themselves to me in process. Going into a story, I know almost nothing about the people, the events, the reason it feels urgent to me. And I like that. Characters develop in a kind of conversation that takes place between actions or plot elements that occur to me as I go along and the responses the characters have to those which then in turn spark on more plot developments. In the sort of stories I write, the story grows out of character, meaning the people do things because it makes some kind of psychological sense to me that they would, but the characters also evolve to serve the story. Like so much of fiction writing its a messy and inexact process. KR So many of the stories in this collection focus on an emotional or spiritual blind spottheir characters inability to accurately see themselves, or their failure to fully apprehend a lover, a parent, a child, or, in the case of the title story, the neighbor who lives behind your cunningly-erected fence. Im thinking of the sort of intimate one-upmanship of the conversation between Clara and her ex-husband, Harold, in Immortalizing John Parker or Jeremys startling discovery in A Country Where You Once Lived. How can we be so wrong in our judgments of those to whom we are closestour parents, our children? What blinds these characters in your opinion, what prevents them from truly seeing one another?RB I honestly think its just how we all bungle through life. We make mistakes We assume we know whats going on and we dont. Every person carries a vast number of secrets, even people who dont think of themselves as secretive. We withhold from one another as a kindness or to be in control of some situation or because we dont want to violate someone elses confidence. Or because its not even theoretically possible to tell someone everything you know. So much of life is conducted in this kind of strange murky darkness. I think I may be more attuned to that than some people or I may be naturally drawn to it as an area of narrative potential, but I think its a condition that exists for us all. Whats amazing to me, and continually beautiful, is that we manage ever to connect to one another at all. KR Memory, in your stories, felt suddenly so precious and so terrifyingly fragile to me. These characters suffer losses in the present, but often its their version of the past that is most at risk. In Immortalizing John Parker, there is a wonderful dinner scene between Clara and her ex-husband where reminiscing becomes a heart-stoppingly dangerous activity Harold has just taken from her a part of George she thought she heldas effortlessly as she has just rewritten decades of Harolds life for him. Is this a loss or a betrayal that you wanted to explore in the collection--how even the past can be taken from us?RB Definitely. And also how it can be preserved and how we conspire to create the past. In Immortalizing John Parker, Clara robs her former husband of his version of events, but she also offers to preserve John Parker for his wife, agrees to try and keep the past alive that way. In Tableau Vivant, Jean and her daughter tell and retell the story of a shared evening to one another because doing so preserves a moment of happiness. Its a kindness they give each other. I think theres something inherently hurtful to someone saying Really? Thats not how I remember it at all. It strikes a very deep chord. I imagine that we all want to believe we are reliable witnesses to our own lives. Maybe because it makes time itself seem more like something we are able to hold.From Publishers WeeklyThe stories in Blacks solid debut collection are fraught with loss, usually of a loved one. Evocative and lyrical, the characters introspections, while sometimes overwrought, are balanced by the sharp dialogue. In The Guide, a father takes his blind teenage daughter to meet her new seeing-eye dog and is forced to confront her independence. While painting a portrait of a man with Alzheimers, the aging main character of Immortalizing John Parker grapples with the recent death of her lover. The title story is the tale of neighboring couples battling over a fence, told from the perspective of the wife with terminal cancer. In Pine, a woman must decide whether to move on from the memory of her dead husband to begin a love affair with her male best friend. Each story is carefully crafted, though Black is at her best when she resists the impulse toward tidiness. (Apr.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.