Author: Thomas Merton File Type: epub Here this concern finds expression in poetic irony and in meditations intentionally dour. In these brief, challenging pieces, Father Merton does not offer consolation or easy remedies. He looks candidly and without illusions at the world of his time. Though he sees dark horizons, his ultimate answer is one of Christian hope. To vary the perspective, he writes in many forms, using parable and myth, the essay and the meditation, satire and manifesto, prose poetry and even adaptations from a medieval Arab mystic (Ibn Abbad) to humanize and dramatic his philosophical themes. The themes of Raids on the Unspeakable are as old as the myths of Prometheus and Atlas, and as timely as the human evils of today. They range from the Message written for an international congress of poets to the beautiful yet disturbing Christmas meditation, The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room. And there are essays inspired by the world of three significant contemporary writers Flannery OConnor, the French novelist Julien Green, and the playwright Eugene Ionesco. A number of Father Mertons own drawings are also included in the booknot as illustrations, but as signatures or abstract writings, which stand in their own right as another personal statement.

Author: Andrew Lih File Type: pdf Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Thats what were doing. --Jimmy WalesWith more than 2,000,000 individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is the #8 site on the World Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone with access to a computer, this impressive assemblage of knowledge is growing at an astonishing rate of more than 30,000,000 words a month. Now for the first time, a Wikipedia insider tells the story of how it all happened--from the first glimmer of an idea to the global phenomenon its become.Andrew Lih has been an administrator (a trusted user who is granted access to technical features) at Wikipedia for more than four years, as well as a regular host of the weekly Wikipedia podcast. In The Wikipedia Revolution, he details the sites inception in 2001, its evolution, and its remarkable growth, while also explaining its larger cultural repercussions. Wikipedia is not just a website its a global community of contributors who have banded together out of a shared passion for making knowledge free.Featuring a Foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and an Afterword that is itself a Wikipedia creation.

Author: Susan Courtney File Type: pdf Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantinos Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka home movies), and military and civil defense films featuring tests of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nations most paradoxical narratives--namely, land of the freeland of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart to offer convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic--including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films--and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only Americas past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future. **

Author: Stephanie McCurry File Type: pdf Pulitzer Prize FinalistWinner of the Frederick Douglass PrizeWinner of the Merle Curti PrizeThe story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people-white women and slaves-and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena.The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders state.Confederate Reckoningis the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.__ReviewCombining the best of the tradition of writing history from the bottom up,with prodigious research, and a red thread of analytical brilliance, Confederate Reckoning dramatically reshapes our understanding of the history of slavery and the Civil War. (Walter Johnson, author of Soul by Soul Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market ) This is a major book [that] permanently rewrites the history of the Confederacy. (James L. Roark, author of Masters Without Slaves Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction ) Analyzing the experience of women, African Americans, and others often placed at the margins of Confederate history, McCurry powerfully challenges readers to get beyond high politics and storied military campaigns to engage a profoundly complicated, and often surprising, story of struggle and change amid seismic events. (Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War ) McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read. (Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War ) [McCurry] has written a staggeringly smart analysis of the politics of the Confederacy--indeed, she has written one of the most illuminating and creative studies of 19th-century American political life, period...I have been waiting for McCurrys second book to be published since I read Masters of Small Worlds over a decade ago it is a triumph of political history, and it was well worth the wait. (Lauren Winner Books & Culture 2010-04-28) Forceful and elegantly written...this book [is] a landmark piece of Civil War historiography. (Jim Cullen History News Network 2010-06-11) Good history teaches readers about the past, excellent history offers perspective on the present. By this standard, Stephanie McCurrys Confederate Reckoning surely achieves excellence...McCurry offers a carefully researched and well-grounded frontal assault, examining secessions causes and actualities. She quickly disposes of the claims that the war was really about anything other than slavery, demonstrating that fanciful patinas such as states rights merely meant linguistic obfuscation of that brutal reality...As modern citizens decry government actions and hearken back to an ideal that never was, so too did the South assert a wish to return to a fictional revolutionary era utopia. This desire allowed them to not only ignore the long odds against their success, just as Tea Partiers fail to consider their programs (such as it is) absurd contradictions...McCurry shines a light on the Souths brutal reality and thus encourages us to cast a cold analytical eye on our own. (Jordan Magill San Francisco Book Review 2010-06-22) The sesquicentennial of the Civil War now looms on the horizon, promising its own deluge of books of every size, shape and description. We will be fortunate indeed if in sheer originality and insight they measure up to Confederate Reckoning...McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation--white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves... Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front. (Eric Foner The Nation 2010-07-14) Building upon her work over almost two decades, McCurry presents a new history of the Souths experience during the war. It is an account that foregrounds social history as contrasted with military history, and in this respect it is of a piece with much of the pathbreaking new scholarship on the war. It moves political history from the study of elected politicians and government institutions to an exploration of power in all its dimensions...Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurrys work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise... Confederate Reckoning Power and Politics in the Civil War South is a book about politics that stretches far beyond the ballot and the statehouse, all the way into plantations and farms and families and communities across the South...McCurry has helped to transform our understanding of the Confederacy--and of its impossibility...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacys undoing, she has in fact accomplished exactly that. And in doing so McCurry has written also a paean to social justice and to democracy, commitments and aspirations we would be well-served to make the heart of our Sesquicentennial commemorations. (Drew Gilpin Faust New Republic 2010-10-28)About the Author Stephanie McCurry is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.