Public Sector Unionism and the Fight Against Sunshine State Conservatism
In early 1968, more than 27,000 teachers across Florida mailed their resignation letters, initiating the country's first statewide teachers' strike. The striking teachers fought for and won a monumental victory, improving education in the state and gaining collective bargaining rights for all public sector employees. Even as the influence of ......
Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and ......
Twenty-seven years in the making, Terra Cognita chronicles the author's continual travels-and problematic (if still, at times, ecstatic) encounters-in the "bel paese." Across nine richly evocative essays, Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy. As much a meditation on what home and away ......
Liz Skilton's innovative study tracks the naming of hurricanes over six decades, exploring the interplay between naming practice and wider American culture. In 1953, the U.S. Weather Bureau adopted female names to identify hurricanes and other tropical storms. Within two years, that convention came into question, and by 1978 a new system was ......
The extraction of raw turpentine and tar from the southern longleaf pine-along with the manufacture of derivative products such as spirits of turpentine and rosin-constitutes what was once the largest industry in North Carolina and one of the most important in the South: naval stores production. In a pathbreaking study that seamlessly weaves ......
F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, at the young age of twenty-eight. Despite this extraordinary early achievement, Fitzgerald finished just one novel in the next (and last) fifteen years of his life, ending as a mostly unemployed Hollywood screenwriter. Taking Things Hard reveals the story behind the ......
In Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sancton examines how the French left perceived and used the image of the United States against the backdrop of major historical developments in both countries between the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Along the way, he weaves in the voices of scores of French observers-including those of everyday ......
In Surprised by Sound, Roi Tartakovsky shows that the power of rhyme endures well into the twenty-first century even though its exemplary usages may differ from traditional or expected forms. His work uncovers the mechanics of rhyme, revealing how and why it remains a vital part of poetry with connections to large questions about poetic freedom, ......
Shaped by centuries of migration, enslavement, freedom, colonization, and cultural mixture, Louisiana Creole identity is often simplified or misunderstood to fit into today's ideas about race and nationality. In Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole, Wendy A. Gaudin fearlessly takes on the many meanings of Creole in a lyrical exploration of ......
