By Jonathan Hartmann
February 24, 2012
Edgar Allan Poe is today considered one of the greatest masters and most fascinating figures of the American literary world. However, an examination of Poe's essays and criticism throughout his prose publishing career (1831-1849) reveals that the author himself played a vital role in the creation ...
By Holly Berkley Fletcher
February 23, 2012
During the nineteenth century, the American temperance movement underwent a visible, gendered shift in its leadership as it evolved from a male-led movement to one dominated by the women. However, this transition of leadership masked the complexity and diversity of the temperance movement. Through ...
By Janice Ruth Wood
February 23, 2012
Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned 'obscene' materials from the mail without defining obscenity, leaving it open to interpretation by courts that were hostile to free speech. Literature that reflected changing attitudes toward sexuality, religion, and social institutions fell victim to the ...
By Neal Millikan
April 11, 2011
Lotteries in Colonial America explores lotteries in England and the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the founding of Jamestown to the financing of the American Revolution, lotteries played an important role in the economic life of the colonies. Lotteries provided ...
By Stephan Cohen
April 09, 2009
Between 1966 and 1975 North American youth activists established over 35 school- and community-based gay liberation youth groups whose members sought control over their own bodies, education, and sexual and social relations. This book focuses on three groundbreaking New York City groups -- Gay ...
By Lisa Krissoff Boehm
December 31, 2008
This book is an examination of the image of Chicago in American popular culture between the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention....
By Vikki Vickers
July 07, 2008
The first true intellectual biography of Thomas Paine, this book establishes the origins of his beliefs and their influence on his activism. For the past century, scholars have been studying Paine in piecemeal fashion; studies of limited scope focused on the minutiae of Paine's life and career, but...
By Alana Erickson Coble
March 21, 2006
Over the course of the 20th century, American domestic service changed from an occupation with a hierarchical, top-down structure to one in which relationships were more negotiated. Many forces shaped this transformation: shifts in women's role in society, both at home and in the work force; ...
By Robin D. Campbell
April 26, 2005
This book explores the ways in which mid-19th Century American army officers' wives used material culture to confirm their status as middle-class women....
By Nancy Hathaway Steenburg
January 10, 2005
This book presents an intelligent overview into the driving forces that shaped American history in the Northeast. It draws on primary documents such as farmer's diaries, small rural papers of the 19th century, and the publications of state agricultural societies....
By John Allen
October 31, 2003
This book analyzes the theme of homelessness in American literature from the Civil War through the depression. Drawing on the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horatio Alger, Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Jack London, Meridel Le Sueur and many others, it reveals how homelessness has been either ...
By Jane Ferry
July 03, 2003
Using an interdisciplinary approach combining film, semiotics, social-anthropology and history, this book examines food sciences in selected films to reveal food's power to direct and impose values and beliefs, to understand how dining venues may become sites of social contests and to reveal how ...