Author: John D. Kerkering File Type: pdf John D. Kerkerings study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain groups in a diffuse social landscape. Kerkering explores poetrys formal properties, its sound effects, as they intersect with the issues of race and nation. He shows how formal effects, ranging from meter and rhythm to alliteration and melody, provide these writers with evidence of a collective identity, whether national or racial. Through this shared reliance on formal literary effects, national and racial identities, Kerkering shows, are related elements of a single literary history. This is the story of how poetic effects helped to define national identities in Anglo-America as a step toward helping to define racial identities within the United States. This highly original study will command a wide audience of Americanists. **Review While we are used to thinking about language representing an identity, Kerkering forces us to acknowledge the extent to which poetic forms create these identities. He supports this assertion through a set of nuanced readings that move eloquently from discursive context to textual analysis. American Literature to the extent that Kerkering traces a pattern in his examples he succeeds admirably and often draws illuminating and sometimes suprising connections - Modern Philology Book Description Examining the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America, Kerkering tells the story of how poetry helped define America as a nation before helping to define America into distinct racial categories. Through formal literary effects, national and racial identities become related elements of a single literary history.

Author: John Benton Hart File Type: pdf In 1918, urged on by his son Harry, John Benton Hart began to tell stories of a three-year period in his youth. He recalled his days as a trooper in the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, fighting in Missouri and on the frontier, and his time as a civilian jack-of-all-trades doing risky work for the U.S. Army on the Wyoming-Montana Bozeman Trail in the middle of the Indian resistance campaign known as Red Clouds War. Once started, John Benton Hart became an enthusiastic raconteur, describing events with an almost cinematic vividness, while his son, an aspiring writer, documented his fathers testimony in what became several manuscripts. Compiled and reproduced here, edited by historian John Hart, John Benton Harts great-grandson, this memoir is a singular document of living history. As a young Kansas cavalryman, John Benton Hart participated in two momentous episodes of the Civil War eraSterling Prices Missouri Expedition of 1864, including the Battle of Westport, and such engagements in the Plains Indian Wars as the Battle of Platte Bridge in July 1865 and the Hayfield Fight near Fort C. F. Smith in 1867. In the engaging style of a natural storyteller, Hart re-creates these events as he experienced them, giving readers a rare glimpse at moments of historical import from the point of view of the ordinary soldier. In arresting detail, he also tells of crossing the Plains as a bullwhacker, carrying the mail between the beleaguered forts on the Bozeman Trail, and befriending scout Jim Bridger and Mountain Crow Chief Blackfoot. Framed and supplemented with the editors biographical, historical, and explanatory notes, Harts memoir offers a new perspective on events long fixed in the historical imagination. As history writ large or on a personal scale, Bluecoat and Pioneer tells a remarkable story. **Review John Hart offers scholars and general readers alike perhaps the most important original memoir of an enlisted soldier and plains frontiersman. This book will forever take its place alongside other outstanding scholarship and original reminiscences related to the 1864 Kansas Border War and Red Clouds War of 18661868 along the Bozeman Trail.John H. Monnett, author of Tell Them We Are Going Home The Odyssey of the Northern Cheyennes and editor of Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight Indian Views John Benton Harts recollectionsalong with his great-grandsons accompanying contextual narrativedescribe and reflect on his experience with the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry in 1864 and as a soldier and private citizen on the postCivil War western frontier. Bluecoat and Pioneer adds to our understanding and is simply a delightful read.Virgil W. Dean, past editor of Kansas History A Journal of the Central Plains John Benton Hart and his wild-eyed, daredevil bunch of Union cavalry battled Confederates in Missouri and Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors later in present-day Wyoming. This young horse soldier left an old mans intensely personal reminiscence, rescued from oblivion by his great-grandson, that reads true.Eli Paul, author of All Because of a Mormon Cow Historical Accounts of the Grattan Massacre, 18551856 About the Author John Hart is an independent historian specializing in environmental policy and history. His articles have been widely published, and he is the author of sixteen books, including Storm over Mono The Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future and San Francisco Bay Portrait of an Estuary.

Author: Jason Felch File Type: mobi In recent years, several of Americas leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. The monetary value is estimated at over half a billion dollars. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the worlds richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and frank interviews, Felch and Frammolino give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum and tell the story of the Gettys dealings in the illegal antiquities trade. The outlandish characters and bad behavior could come straight from the pages of a thrillerthe wealthy recluse founder, the cagey Italian art investigator, the playboy curator, the narcissist CEObut their chilling effects on the rest of the art world have been all too real, as the authors show in novelistic detail. Fast-paced and compelling, Chasing Aphrodite exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished facade of the museum business. **

Author: David Grann File Type: mobi Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism. Whether hes reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone- tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries. Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the worlds foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York Citys water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Granns hypnotic accounts display the powerand often the willful perversityof the human spirit. Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.From the Hardcover edition.