Author: Paul C. Gutjahr Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr., was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the Book of Mormon, the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world. Gutjahr looks at how the Book of Mormon emerged from the burned-over district of upstate New York, where revivalist preachers, missionaries, and spiritual entrepreneurs of every stripe vied for the loyalty of settlers desperate to scratch a living from the land. He examines how a book that has long been the subject of ridicule--Mark Twain called it chloroform in print--has more than 150 million copies in print in more than a hundred languages worldwide. Gutjahr shows how Smith's influential book launched one of the fastest growing new religions on the planet, and has featured in everything from comic books and action figures to feature-length films and an award-winning Broadway musical.
Author: John Mark Sibley-Jones
Fear and brutality grip Columbia, South Carolina, in the harsh winter of 1865 as General William TecumsehSherman continues his fiery march to the sea and advances on the capital city where secession began. John Mark Sibley-Joness By the Red Glare takes us into the lives of representative citizensblack and white, men and women, Confederates and Unionists, civilians and combatants, freed and shackled, sane and insaneon the eve of historic destruction. The Columbia hospital is overcrowded with wounded soldiers from both sides. As word of Shermans advance spreads, old animosities threaten an outbreak of violence in this place of healing. Less than two miles from the hospital stands the Lunatic Asylum, whose yard is occupied by more than twelve hundred federal prisoners guarded by old men and boys too young to join the Confederate army. The most violent madman in the asylum hatches an escape plan that requires the aid of prisoners who, knowing they cannot trust him, nevertheless will risk their lives to gain freedom. In the heart of the city, Confederate leaders gather around a table in the home of General James Chesnut to study a tattered map and plan a battle strategy, only to stare at one another in disbelief as the first sound of cannon fire announces the imminent arrival of Shermans troops. Sibley-Joness riveting story of the collapse of the Confederacy includes a cast of memorable characters: General Wade Hampton, stoic but fierce in his rage; Mary Boykin Chesnut, brilliant but suffering from bipolar disorder, who records the events of the war with eerie devotion; Louisa Cheves McCord, who maintains that slavery is Gods will and who promises to do all in her power to abet the war that took the life of her only son; a slave who vows to kill the man who beat him mercilessly at the whipping post in the town center; two sworn-enemy soldiers who must assist each other in their jaunts to the brothel district at the citys edge; and Joseph Crawford, the hospital steward troubled by his own shifting allegiances as he wonders whether these are the end of days. Rife with literary and historical merits, By the Red Glare is published on the eve of the sesquicentennial of the burning of Columbia, as monumental an episode in Civil War history as any other in the lore-soaked South. The novel includes a foreword by historian Marion B. Lucas, author of Sherman and the Burning of Columbia.
Author: Lisa L. Ossian
To many rural Iowans, the stock market crash on New Yorks Wall Street in October 1929 seemed an event far removed from their lives, even though the effects of the crash became all too real throughout the state. From 1929 to 1933, the enthusiastic faith that most Iowans had in Iowan President Herbert Hoover was transformed into bitter disappointment with the federal government. As a result, Iowans directly questioned their leadership at the state, county, and community levels with a renewed spirit to salvage family farms, demonstrating the uniqueness of Iowas rural life. Beginning with an overview of the state during 1929, Lisa L. Ossian describes Iowas particular rural dilemmas, evoking, through anecdotes and examples, the economic, nutritional, familial, cultural, industrial, criminal, legal, and political challenges that engaged the people of the state. The following chapters analyze life during the early Depression: new prescriptions for childrens health, creative housekeeping to stretch resources, the use of farm playlets to communicate new information creatively and memorably, the demise of the soft coal mining industry, increased violence within the landscape, and the movement to end Prohibition. The challenges faced in the early Great Depression years between 1929 and 1933 encouraged resourcefulness rather than passivity, creativity rather than resignation, and community rather than hopelessness. Of particular interest is the role of women within the rural landscape, as much of the increased daily work fell to farm women during this time. While the women addressed this work simply as making do, Ossian shows that their resourcefulness entailed complex planning essential for families emotional and physical health. Ossians epilogue takes readers into the Iowa of today, dominated by industrial agriculture, and asks the reader to consider if this model that stemmed from Depression-era innovation is sustainable.Her rich rural history not only helps readers understand the particular forces at work that shaped the social and physical landscape of the past but also traces how these landscapes have continued in various forms for almost eighty years into this century.
Author: Michael Corriero
At a time when America's court system increasingly tries juvenile offenders as adults, Michael Corriero draws directly from his experience as the founding judge of a special juvenile court to propose a new approach to dealing with youthful offenders.
Author: Sharon Block
In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.
Author: Linda Ray Pratt
Great Plains Literature is an exploration of influential literature of the Plains region in both the United States and Canada. It reflects the destruction of the culture of the first people who lived there, the attempts of settlers to conquer the land, and the tragic losses and successes of settlement that are still shaping our modern world of environmental threat, ethnic and racial hostilities, declining rural communities, and growing urban populations. In addition to featuring writers such as Ole Edvart Rolvaag, Willa Cather, and John Neihardt, who addressthe epic stories of the past, Great Plains Literature also includes contemporary writers such as Louis Erdrich, Kent Haruf, Ted Kooser, Rilla Askew, N. Scott Momaday, and Margaret Laurence. This literature encompasses a history of courage and violence, aggrandizement and aggression, triumph and terror. It can help readers understand better how todays threats to the environment, clashes with Native people, struggling small towns, and rural migration to the cities reflect the same forces that were important in the past.
Author: Alenka Zupancic
Consider sublimation -- conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around) -- even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, What is sex? rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupancic approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan orthopedists of the unconscious. Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a short circuit between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah are among the socalled deuterocanonical books of the Bible part of the larger Catholic biblical canon Except for a short article in the Womens Bible Commentary no detailed or comprehensive feminist commentary on these books is available so far MarieTheres Wacker reads both books with an approach that is sensitive to gender and identity issues The book of Baruchwith its reflections on guilt of the fathers with its transformation of wisdom into the Book of Gods commandments and with its strong symbol of mother and queen Jerusalemoffers a new and creative digest of Torah writings and prophets but seems to address primarily learned men The socalled Letter of Jeremiah is an impressive document that unmasks pseudodeities but at the same draws sharp lines between the groups identity and the others using women of the others as boundary markers From the Wisdom Commentary series Feminist biblical interpretation has reached a level of maturity that now makes possible a commentary series on every book of the Bible It is our hope that Wisdom Commentary by making the best of current feminist biblical scholarship available in an accessible format to ministers preachers teachers scholars and students will aid all readers in their advancement toward Gods vision of dignity equality and justice for all The aim of this commentary is to provide feminist interpretation of Scripture in serious scholarly engagement with the whole text not only those texts that explicitly mention women A central concern is the world in front of the text that is how the text is heard and appropriated by women At the same time this commentary aims to be faithful to the ancient text to explicate the world behind the text where appropriate and not impose contemporary questions onto the ancient texts The commentary addresses not only issues of gender which are primary in this project but also those of power authority ethnicity racism and classism which all intersect Each volume incorporates diverse voices and differing interpretations from different parts of the world showing the importance of social location in the process of interpretation and that there is no single definitive feminist interpretation of a text