Between 1967 and 1972, a previously obscure group of authors entered the US cultural spotlight. During this five-year period, at least thirty anthologies of poetry and prose by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American children came out of adult-led workshops, classrooms, and sites of juvenile incarceration. Mass-market ......
The significant archive of writing that came out of the women's liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading-personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and ......
Since fracking emerged as a way of extracting natural gas, through intense deep drilling and the use of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to fracture shale, it has been controversial. It is perceived in different ways by different people-by some as an opportunity for increased resources and possibly jobs and other income; by others as a ......
Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place
Henry David Thoreau's interest in Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of scholarly attention, yet it is also a source of debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as "more like an ......
In the mid-nineteenth century, Boston fashioned itself as a global hub. By the early 1970s, it was barely a dot on the national picture. It had gained a reputation as a decaying city rife with crime and dysfunctional politics, as well as decidedly retrograde race relations, prominently exemplified by white resistance to school integration. Despite ......
Continuity and Rupture in the Movements of Unity Emerging from the Struggle Against Portuguese Colonial Domination, 1911-1961
Exploring the development and structuring of African nationalist sentiment, the intellectual and sociological foundations of African nationalism, and the origins and social and cultural identities of the participants who helped form the anticolonial movements in the Portuguese colonial empire, Origins of African Nationalism captures the ......
In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois's trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work--his 1890 speech ......
Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper," and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform ......
Out there in the Atlantic between Europe and America, in the midst of often rough seas, the nine islands of the Azores rise above the surface, constantly transformed by overactive volcanoes and shaken by earthquakes. As John Updike observed, the islands of the archipelago resemble "Great green ships themselves," as "they ride at anchor forever; ......
