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A radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition  Emancipating Pragmatism is a radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. It traces Emerson's philosophical legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse.  Emersons pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic thought that aspires toward democracy cannot ignore and must reckon with its racial roots. Magee looks at the ties between pragmatism and African-American culture as they manifest themselves in key texts and movements, such as William Carlos Williamss poetry; Ralph Ellisons discourse in Invisible Man and Juneteenth and his essays on jazz; the poetic works of Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O'Hara; as well as the new jazz being forged at clubs like The Five Spot in New York.  Ultimately, Magee calls into question traditional maps of pragmatist lineage and ties pragmatism to the avant-garde American tradition.  

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Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors

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Grief transformed into legacyhow loss shaped the soul of American literature. Harold K. Bush's Continuing Bonds with the Dead examines the profound transfiguration that the death of a child wrought on the literary work of nineteenth-century American writers. Taking as his subjects Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bush demonstrates how the death of a child became the defining "before-and-after moment" in their lives as adults and as artists. In narrating their struggles, Bush maps the intense field of creative energy induced by reverberating waves of parental grief and the larger nineteenth-century culture of mortality and grieving. Bush explores in detail how each of these five writers grappled with and were altered by the loss of a child. He writes, for example, with moving insights about how the famed author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn found himself adrift on a river of grief when meningitis struck down his daughter, Susy. In his deeply learned exploration of Twain's subsequent work, Bush illuminates how Twain wrote to cope with Susy's death, to make sense of her persistent presence in his life, and possibly to redeem her loss. Passionate and personal, Bush's insightful prose traces the paths of personal transformation each of these emblematic American writers took in order to survive the spiritual trauma of loss. The savage Civil War was America's shared "before and after moment," the pivot upon which the nation's future swung. Bush's account of these five writers' grief amplifies our understanding of America's evolving, national relationship to mourning from then to the present.

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A new collection of essays from a distinguished critic of contemporary poetry Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary American poetry writing today. Her works are credited by many with creating and sustaining new critical interest not only in the work of major modernist poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Williams but also in the postwar tradition of American poetic innovation that ranges from the Black Mountain poets, through the New York School and concrete poetry, to the Language Poets of the 1980s and '90s. In Differentials, Perloff explores and defends her belief in the power of close reading, a strategy often maligned as reactionary in today's critical climate but which, when construed differentially, is vital, she believes, to any true understanding of a literary or poetic work, irrespective of how traditional or experimental it is. Perloff also examines key issues in modernism, from Eliot's conservative poetics and Pound's nominalism to translation theory (Wittgenstein, Eugene Jolas, Haroldo de Campos), and the contemporary avant garde, as represented by writers like Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Ron Silliman, Ronald Johnson, Caroline Bergvall, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Perloff's most important offerings in Differentials are her remarkably original reflections on the aesthetic process: on how poetry works, and what it means, in and for our time.

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A Historical Narrative of the Genealogy, Traditions and Downfall of the Ispocoga or Creek Indian Tribe of Indians by One of the Tribe, George Stiggins (1788-1845)

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An essential narrative preserving the cultural memory, social life, and internal conflicts of the Creek people from an author within the tribe. George Stiggins, a Creek Indian half blood living in Alabama, wrote this history more than 150 years ago. Raised in the white culture by his father, an English trader, Stiggins nevertheless lived in close contact with the Creeks because his mother was a full blood of the Natchez tribe, part of the Creek Confederacy. Stiggins writes with firsthand knowledge of the tribes in the central southeastthe Alabamas, Natchez, Abekas, Uchees, and others. He tells of their origins, their towns and chiefs, and their way of life, he traces critical events leading to the Creek Warthe battles of Burnt Corn and Fort Mimsand details the roles of the Indian leaders involved. In Tecumseh and the Age of Prophecy, he describes how the powerful influence of prophets, such as Josiah Francis and Jim Boy, who incited the Creeks to civil war as the confederacy split into war and peace factions. Stiggins account of William Weatherfords controversial role in the Creek War has special value because Weatherford was Stigginss brother-in-law. His descriptions of religious and social aspects of the Creek lifeways make this work prime source material. William Wymans notes and introduction put the Stiggins account into historical perspective and trace its circuitous route to publication. First issued in 1989, Creek Indian History has become an important primary document for the study of Native American history and culture.

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George Stiggins, William Stokes Wyman, Virginia Pounds Brown, Virginia Pounds

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Attempts to answer difficult questions about battle tactics employed by the United States Army  Weapons improved rapidly after the Civil War, raising difficult questions about the battle tactics employed by the United States Army. The most fundamental problem was the dominance of the tactical defensive, when defenders protected by fieldworks could deliver deadly fire from rifles and artillery against attackers advancing in close-ordered lines. The vulnerability of these offensive forces as they crossed the so-called "deadly ground" in front of defensive positions was even greater with the improvement of armaments after the Civil War.

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Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907

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Explains how traditional Cherokee womens roles were destabilized, modified, recovered, and in some ways strengthened during three periods of great turmoil  American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuriesremoval, the Civil War, and allotment of their landsforced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.  Carolyn Johnston (who is related to John Ross, principal chief of the Nation) looks at how Cherokee women navigated these crises in ways that allowed them to retain their traditional assumptions, ceremonies, and beliefs and to thereby preserve their culture. In the process, they both lost and retained power. The author sees a poignant irony in the fact that Europeans who encountered Native societies in which women had significant power attempted to transform them into patriarchal ones and that American women struggled for hundreds of years to achieve the kind of equality that Cherokee women had enjoyed for more than a millennium.  Johnston examines the different aspects of Cherokee womens power: authority in the family unit and the community, economic independence, personal autonomy, political clout, and spirituality. Weaving a great-grandmother theme throughout the narrative, she begins with the protest of Cherokee women against removal and concludes with the recovery of the mother town of Kituwah and the elections of Wilma Mankiller and Joyce Dugan as principal chiefs of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.  

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European imperialists began to dream of other kinds of wealth besides gold in the New World The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden compiles three insightful lectures delivered by renowned historian Louis B. Wright at the Dancy Foundation in 1951. Wright explores the 17thcentury English colonial vision for the American Southnot as a gold rush, but as a fertile terrain primed for economic prosperity through wellplanned plantations and commercial crops.  Across its concise 75 pages, Wright charts the transformation of settlers aspirationsfrom hopes of quick wealth to cultivated visions of tobacco, silk, sugar, and cotton plantations meant to create a utopian "Southern Eden". These were carefully cultivated not just for their profitability but to establish structured, enduring societies complementary to English economic goals.  Wrighta Guggenheim Fellow, Benjamin Franklin Medalist, and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Librarybrings scholarly precision and elegant prose to this study, making it accessible to both historians and general readers. Publishers and reviewers have praised it as extremely interesting and well written, highlighting its focused yet comprehensive interpretation of colonial Southern motivations and their long-term implications. This work stands as a pivotal contribution to early American economic and colonial historyoffering a nuanced understanding of how idealistic and ideological goals shaped plantation culture and southern development in the Atlantic colonies.  With its concise structure and authoritative voice, The Colonial Search for a Southern Eden is ideal for historians, students, and enthusiasts seeking to understand the ideological underpinnings of colonial Southern society.  

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries

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Considers Gilmans place in American literary and social history by examining her relationships to other prominent intellectuals of her era By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman believed and preached that no life is ever led in isolation; indeed, the cornerstone of her philosophy was the idea that humanity is a relation.   Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period, including Mary Austin, Margaret Sanger, Ambrose Bierce, Grace Ellery Channing, Lester Ward, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William Randolph Hearst, Karen Horney, William Dean Howells, Catharine Beecher, George Bernard Shaw, and Owen Wister. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost.  

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Denise D. Knight, Cynthia J. Davis, Lisa A. Long, Mary M. Moynihan, Gary Scharnhorst, Jennifer S. Tuttle, Monika Elbert, Lawrence J Oliver, Charlotte Rich, Judith A Allen, Melody Graulich, Joanne B. Karpinski, Janice J. Kirkland, Denise D. Knight, Cynthia J. Davis

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Confederate States Policy for the United States Presidential Contest

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A fascinating study of Confederate perceptions of and attempts to manipulate the 1864 US presidential election  The Confederacy's hopes for independence were founded less on the belief that the South could defeat the North than on a strategy of staving off defeat long enough for the North to weary of the fight. The Souths single biggest opportunity to effect political change in the North was the presidential contest of 1864. If Lincolns support foundered and the North elected a president with a more flexible vision of peace on the continent, the South might realize its dream of independence.  Praised as an important contribution to understanding the Davis administration, in Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, Larry Nelson vividly brings to life the complex state of Northern and Southern internal politics during the election year of 1863. He recounts fluctuations in the value of the dollar, draft resistance and riots, protests against emancipation, political defeats suffered by the Republicans in the elections of 1862, and growing discontent in the border states and Midwest. This gripping account explores a mission Davis sent to Canada in 1864 seeking to influence the election of a new US president, a strategy Nelson's persuasive analysis shows to have been intelligent and reasonable. Nevertheless, Davis's haphazard leadership contributed to its failure. Nelson hypothesizes that had Davis drawn the North into negotiations before the Democratic convention for the upcoming elections, a temporary armistice might well have proved permanent.    Nelson offers an insiders look at the administration of Jefferson Davis as it searched for cracks in Northern unity and electoral opportunities to exploitand yet also as it overlooked war-weariness in the South itself. Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric is an engrossing account of a little-known but critical aspect of Civil War statecraft and politics.

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Christopher McIlwains Civil War Alabama is a landmark book that sheds invigorating new light on the causes, the course, and the outcomes in Alabama of the nations greatest drama and trauma. Based on twenty years of exhaustive research that draws on a vast trove of primary sources such as letters, newspapers, and personal journals, Civil War Alabama presents compelling new explanations for how Alabamas white citizens came to take up arms against the federal government.   A fledgling state at only forty years old, Alabama approached the 1860s with expanding populations of both whites and black slaves. They were locked together in a powerful yet fragile economic engine that produced and concentrated titanic wealth in the hands of a white elite. Perceiving themselves trapped between a mass of disenfranchised black slaves and the industrializing and increasingly abolitionist North, white Alabamians were led into secession and war by a charismatic cohort who claimed the imprimatur of biblical scripture, romanticized traditions of chivalry, and the military mantle of the American Revolution.   And yet, Alabamas white citizens were not a monolith of one mind. McIlwain dispels the received wisdom of a white citizenry united behind a cadre of patriarchs and patriots. Providing a fresh and insightful synthesis of military events, economic factors such as inflation and shortages, politics and elections, the pivotal role of the legal profession, and the influence of the press, McIlwains Civil War Alabama illuminates the fissiparous state of white, antebellum Alabamians divided by class, geography, financial interests, and political loyalties.   Vital and compelling, Civil War Alabama will take its place among the definitive books about Alabamas doomed Confederate experiment and legacy. Although he rigorously dismantles idealized myths about the Souths Lost Cause, McIlwain restores for contemporary readers the fervent struggles between Alabamians over their response to the epic crisis of their times.

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Christopher Lyle McIlwain, G. Ward Hubbs

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Constructing a New Society after the Angel Chiefdom Collapse

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An important case study of chiefdom collapse and societal reemergence  Caborn-Welborn, a late Mississippian (A.D. 1400-1700) farming society centered at the confluence of the Ohio and Wabash Rivers (in what is now southwestern Indiana, southeastern Illinois, and northwestern Kentucky), developed following the collapse of the Angel chiefdom (A.D. 1000-1400). Using ceramic and settlement data, David Pollack examines the ways in which that new society reconstructed social, political, and economic relationships from the remnants of the Angel chiefdom. Unlike most instances of the demise of a complex society led by elites, the Caborn-Welborn population did not become more inward-looking, as indicated by an increase in extraregional interaction, nor did they disperse to smaller more widely scattered settlements, as evidenced by a continuation of a hierarchy that included large villages.  This book makes available for the first time detailed, well-illustrated descriptions of Caborn-Welborn ceramics, identifies ceramic types and attributes that reflect Caborn-Welborn interaction with Oneota tribal groups and central Mississippi valley Mississippian groups, and offers an internal regional chronology. Based on intraregional differences in ceramic decoration, the types of vessels interred with the dead, and cemetery location, Pollack suggests that in addition to the former Angel population, Caborn-Welborn society may have included households that relocated to the Ohio/Wabash confluence from nearby collapsing polities, and that Caborn-Welborns sociopolitical organization could be better considered as a riverine confederacy.  

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Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico

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Unearthing the demographic past of the Caribbean to illuminate its cultural origins and transformations.  According to the European chronicles, at the time of contact, the Greater Antilles were inhabited by the Taino or Arawak Indians, who were organized in hierarchical societies. Since its inception Caribbean archaeology has used population as an important variable in explaining many social, political, and economic processes such as migration, changes in subsistence systems, and the development of institutionalized social stratification. In Caribbean Paleodemography, L. Antonio Curet argues that population has been used casually by Caribbean archaeologists and proposes more rigorous and promising ways in which demographic factors can be incorporated in our modeling of past human behavior. He analyzes a number of demographic issues in island archaeology at various levels of analysis, including inter- and intra-island migration, carrying capacity, population structures, variables in prehistory, cultural changes, and the relationship with material culture and social development. With this work, Curet brings together the diverse theories on Greater Antilles island populations and the social and political forces governing their growth and migration.

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Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 18161861

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Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature  Challenges the commonplace narrative that the African American experience of captivity in the United States is reducible to the legal institution of slavery, a status remedied through emancipation   In Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage, 18161861, Keith Michael Green examines key texts that illuminate forms of black bondage and captivity that existed within and alongside slavery. In doing so, he restores to antebellum African American autobiographical writing the fascinating heterogeneity lost if the historical experiences of African Americans are attributed to slavery alone.   The books title is taken from the assertion by US Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney in his 1857 Dred Scott decision that blacks had no rights that whites were bound to respect. This allusion highlights Greens critical assertion that the dehumanizing absurdities to which defenders of slavery resorted to justify slavery only brought into more stark relief the humanity of African Americans.   A gifted storyteller, Green examines four forms of captivity: incarceration, enslavement to Native Americans, child indentured servitude, and maritime capture. By illuminating this dense penumbra of captivity beyond the strict definitions of slavery, he presents a fluid and holistic network of images, vocabulary, narratives, and history. By demonstrating how these additional forms of confinement flourished in the era of slavery, Green shows how they persisted beyond emancipation, in such a way that freed slaves did not in fact partake of freedom as white Americans understood it. This gap in understanding continues to bedevil contemporary American society, and Green deftly draws persuasive connections between past and present.   A vital and convincing offering to readers of literary criticism, African American studies, and American history, Greens Bound to Respect brings fresh and nuanced insights to this fundamental chapter in the American story.

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A readable, exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War  Within four weeks of the fall of Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of over four thousand miles of Confederate coastline, from Cape Henry in Virginia to the Mexican border. In response, professional runners, lured by both profits and patriotism, built faster, sleeker, low-profile ships and piloted them through the ever-thickening Northern cordon. The tonnage they imported, including items ranging from straight pins to marine engines, sustained the South throughout the conflict. This exciting chronicle of the men and ships that ran federal naval blockades during the Civil War also provides an overall assessment of the blockades conception, effectiveness, and impact on the Southern populace.

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Hamilton Cochran, Robert M. Browning Jr.

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Traces the craft of pottery making among the Catawba Indians of North Carolina from the late 18th century to the present  When Europeans encountered them, the Catawba Indians were living along the river and throughout the valley that carries their name near the present North Carolina-South Carolina border. Archaeologists later collected and identified categories of pottery types belonging to the historic Catawba and extrapolated an association with their protohistoric and prehistoric predecessors.  In this volume, Thomas Blumer traces the construction techniques of those documented ceramics to the lineage of their probable present-day master potters or, in other words, he traces the Catawba pottery traditions. By mining data from archives and the oral traditions of contemporary potters, Blumer reconstructs sales circuits regularly traveled by Catawba peddlers and thereby illuminates unresolved questions regarding trade routes in the protohistoric period. In addition, the author details particular techniques of the representative pottersfactors such as clay selection, tool use, decoration, and firing techniqueswhich influence their styles.

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Examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries This book examines the effects of the Spanish mission system on population structure and genetic variability in indigenous communities living in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the 16th and 17th centuries. Data on tooth size were collected from 26 archaeological samples representing three time periods:  Late Precontact (~1200-1500), Early Mission (~1600-1650), and Late Mission (~1650-1700) and were subjected to a series of statistical tests evaluating genetic variability. Predicted changes in phenotypic population variability are related to models of group interaction, population demo-graphy, and genetic admixture as suggested by ethnohistoric and archaeological data. Results suggest considerable differences in diachronic responses to the mission environment for each cultural province. The Apalachee demonstrate a marked increase in variability while the Guale demonstrate a decline in variability. Demographic models of population collapse are therefore inconsistent with predicted changes based on population geneticsl, and the determinants of population structure seem largely local in nature. This book highlights the specificity with which indigenous communities responded to European contact and the resulting transformations in their social worlds.  

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Macrobotanical Remains and the Oliver Phase of Central Indiana, A.D. 1200-1450

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Prehistoric plant use in the Late Woodland Period of central Indiana This book explores the extent to which foodways, an important marker of group identity, can be recognized in charred macrobotanical remains from archaeological sites. From analysis of mere bits of burned plants we can discern what ancient people chose to eat, and how they cooked it, stored it, and preserved it. Leslie Bush compares archaeobotanical remains from 13 Oliver Phase sites in Indiana to other late prehistoric sites through correspondence analysis. The Oliver area is adjacent to the territories of three of the largest and best-known archaeological cultures of the regionMississippian, Fort Ancient, and Oneotaso findings about Oliver foodways have implications for studies of migration, ethnogenesis, social risk, and culture contact. Historical records of three Native American tribes (Shawnee, Miami, and Huron) are also examined for potential insights into Oliver foodways. The study determines that people who inhabited central Indiana during late prehistoric times had a distinctive signature of plant use that separates them from other archaeological groups, not just in space and time but also in ideas about appropriate uses of plants. The uniqueness of the Oliver botanical pattern is found to lie in the choice of particular crops, the intensity of growing versus gathering, and the use of a large number of wild resources.

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Rabbi Morris Newfield led Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham from 18951940 and was counted among the most influential religious and social leaders of that city. In Birminghams Rabbi, Mark Cowett chronicles Newfields astonishing career and uses it as a vehicle to trace the nature of ethnic leadership in America.  Taking a multidimensional approach, Cowett places Newfield's early life in the context of his Hungarian childhood and also relates Newfields career to those of fellow Hebrew Union College graduates and to national Reform Jewish history. The reader is made aware constantly of changing conditions in Birmingham, in Alabama, and in the south and how those changes affected Newfields congregants. Cowett illuminates Newfields efforts to help Jews maintain a sense of religious identity in a predominately Southern and Christian environment.  Based upon essential sources including interviews, newspapers, and manuscript collections in Alabama and at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Cowett shows Newfields struggle to support social welfare efforts in Alabama during the Progressive Era. He recognized the need for Jews to develop bonds with other American ethnic groups. Cowett portrays him as a mediator between not only Jew and Christian but also black and white, labor and capital, liberal and conservativein short, within the full spectrum of political and social exchange in an industrial city of the New South. 

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The Field Artillery of the Army of Tennessee

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A highly regarded resource on a critical aspect of the Civil War   This enlarged edition of Cannoneers in Gray provides new detail concerning the activities of artillery units operating in key campaigns of the western theater of the Civil Warat Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain, Shiloh, Peachtree Creek. Larry Daniel traces the four-year history of the artillery branch of the Army of Tennessee from its organization through its demise at the war's end. He shows that Civil War cannons were of little consequence when used as offensive weapons but could be highly effective in defense.   Includes five new maps of campaigns and battles central to his discussion of larger issues, such as command and strategy on the western front.  

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A comprehensive biography of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, one of the nineteenth-century Americas best-selling authors   A fascinating biography about Augusta Jane Evans, a nearly forgotten writer who was nevertheless one of the most popular writers of her era. She wrote nine novels about southern women, including St. Elmo, which sold a staggering one million copies within four months of its release in 1866. William Fidler traces the life of Augusta Jane Evans from her birth in 1835 in Columbus, Georgia till her death in Alabama in 1909.  