Book picks similar to
The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 by Annette Kolodny
history
literary-criticism
american
western
It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
Richard White - 1991
Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
Leo Marx - 1964
His research helped to define--and continues to give depth to--the area of American studies concerned with the links between scientific and technological advances, and the way society and culture both determine these links. The Machine in the Garden fully examines the difference between the pastoral and progressive ideals which characterized early 19th-century American culture, and which ultimately evolved into the basis for much of the environmental and nuclear debates of contemporary society.This new edition is appearing in celebration of the 35th anniversary of Marx's classic text. It features a new afterword by the author on the process of writing this pioneering book, a work that all but founded the discipline now called American Studies.
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
William Cronon - 1991
By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination
Lawrence Buell - 2005
A critical summary of the emerging discipline of "ecocriticism". Written by one of the world's leading theorists in ecocriticism. Traces the history of the ecocritical movement from its roots in the 1970s through to its diversification and proliferation today. Takes account of different ecocritical positions and directions. Describes major tensions within ecocriticism and addresses major criticisms of the movement. Looks to the future of ecocriticism, proposing that discourses of the environment should become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
F.O. Matthiessen - 1941
Centering the discussion around five literary giants of the mid-nineteenth century-Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Matthiessen elucidates their conceptions of the nature and function of literature, and the extent to which these were realized in their writings.
21 Months a Captive: Rachel Plummer and the Fort Parker Massacre (Annotated)
Rachel Plummer - 2016
Some residents were brutally murdered, others taken prisoner.Among those captured was eleven year old Cynthia Parker, who would remain with the Comanche for 24 years and give birth to famed Chief Quanah.Another captive was 17-year-old Rachel Plummer, mother of one, pregnant with her second child. She would soon have her first-born ripped from her arms, never to be seen again, and later watched as her second-born was killed before her eyes.After twenty-one months of captivity that destroyed her health, she was purchased and returned to her family. In this extraordinary account, her father tells of that horrible day when the fort was attacked, and his desperate efforts to find and retrieve the captives. Rachel details her terrible enslavement and how she eventually fought back.For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860
Jane Tompkins - 1985
The texts the author examines are viewed not as works of art embodying enduring themes, but as attempts to redefine the social order.
The Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner - 1920
historian, who is best known for his "frontier thesis," which proposed that American democracy was profoundly shaped by the existence of an undeveloped frontier area from the founding through the 1880s. He originally put forth his idea in the essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," published just three years after the frontier was "officially closed" in 1890. He continued to elaborate on the frontier thesis as well as the influence of sectionalism, and the unique contributions of the Midwest to American democracy. His theory and other writings are still debated by modern day historians. This work, The Frontier in American History, collects a number of Turner's essays and speeches, including "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature a limited edition collection is published under the auspices of The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860
Richard Slotkin - 1973
Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.
Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
Carlos Baker - 1952
Professor Baker has also written two new chapters in which he discusses Hemingway's two posthumously published books, A Movable Feast and Islands in the Stream.CONTENTS: Introduction. I. The Slopes of Montparnasse. II. The Making of Americans. III. The Way It Was. IV. The Wastelanders. V. The Mountain and the Plain. VI. The First Forty-Five Stories. VII. The Spanish Earth. VIII. The Green Hills of Africa. IX. Depression at Key West. X. The Spanish Tragedy. XI. The River and the Trees. XII. The Ancient Mariner. XIII. The Death of the Lion. XIV. Looking Backward. XV. Islands in the Stream.
The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin - 1982
In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
On Photography
Susan Sontag - 1973
Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
Mary Todd Lincoln: A Life from Beginning to End
Hourly History - 2020
Melville: His World and Work
Andrew Delbanco - 2005
With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.
The Season: A Social History of the Debutante
Kristen Richardson - 2019
In this brilliant history of the phenomenon, Richardson shares debutantes’ own words—from diaries, letters, and interviews—throughout her vivid telling, beginning in Henry VIII’s era, sweeping through Queen Elizabeth I’s court, crossing back and forth the Atlantic to colonial Philadelphia, African American communities, Jane Austen’s England, and Mrs. Astor’s parties, ultimately arriving at the contemporary New York Infirmary and International balls.Whether maligned for its archaic attitude and objectification of women or praised for raising money for charities and providing a necessary coming-of-age ritual, the debutante tradition has more to tell us in this entertaining and illuminating book.