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The Midwest region holds a pivotal place in the tapestry of American history. The Oxford Handbook of Midwestern History delves into this rich heritage with chapters on topics ranging from the early Native American and French Midwest to the impact of the Northwest Ordinance and the Great Lakes, the emergence of Midwest regional consciousness after the Civil War, and the role of the Midwest's natural resources in the region's economic success and later decline. It presents the newest research on race, ethnicity, culture, politics, and economic development. It also considers the role of religion, organized labor, the presence of a diverse population of Germans, Irish, Dutch, and Latinos, and th...
The study highlights several writers who have not received much, if any, attention among Gothic scholars. This allows readers exposure to writers they may have never encountered before or may realize dimensions to the authors’ works they have never considered. The study reconsiders scholarship’s understanding of post-war American literature. This gives readers, students, and scholars a new approach to discussing post-war fiction that is not delimited to widely accepted understanding of how Cold War anxieties were manifested in fiction. The study contextualizes the fiction it examines within each work’s respective region. This allows readers a new way of approaching not just post-war Gothic fiction but Gothic fiction in general.
Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon.com, World Trade Organisation, grunge music - all concepts that have now become synonymous with Seattle. Selling Seattle: Representing Contemporary Urban America is the first book to examine the impact of Seattle on contemporary culture and to account for the city's rapid rise to fame and influence since the early 1990s. Interdisciplinary in approach - broaching current debates from urban geography and interrogations of economic and cultural globalisation to cinema and media studies - this volume looks closely at the city's representation on film and television as well as in journalism and literature, and also considers the ways in which famous Seattle brands such as Microsoft, Starbucks and grunge worked to establish the city as a symbol of urban desire and fantasy in recent years. Selling Seattle is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the contemporary American city, and the powerful trends that shape the urban landscape and its place in the popular imagination.
At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature...
American democratic ideals, civic republicanism, public morality, and Christianity were the dominant forces at work during South Dakota’s formative decade. What? In our cynical age, such a claim seems either remarkably naïve or hopelessly outdated. Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality. Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the founding of our western states. Taking Dakota Territory as a laboratory for examining a formative stage of western...
In comparison to the South, the far West, and New England, the Midwest's history has been sadly neglected. The Lost Region demonstrates the regions importance, the depth of historical work once written about it, and the lessons that can be learned from some of its prominent historians, all with the intent of once again finding the forgotten center of the nation and developing a robust historiography of the Midwest. Book jacket.
A lucid and rewarding synthesis of cultural and western history. -- Richard W. Etulain, author of Writing Western History. Wrobel makes a fine contribution to the study of myth by analyzing the anxiety, or angst, Americans felt about the frontier in the half-century after 1890. This is an excellent book on a big subject, executed with much skill. -- Western Historical Quarterly. Direct, admirably brief, and crisply written. -- Journal of American History.
"Tracing the story of Red Lodge from the 1880s to the present, Christensen tells how a mining town managed to endure the vagaries of the West's unpredictable extractive-industries economy. She connects Red Lodge to a myriad of larger events and historical forces to show how national and regional influences have contributed to the development of local identities, exploring how and why westerners first rejected and then embraced "western" images, and how ethnicity, wilderness, and historic preservation became part of the identity that defined one town."--BOOK JACKET.
Examines a handful of famous ocean explorers and naturalists--including Jacque Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl, and Rachel Carson, among others--to demonstrate how their work helped shape the way many Americans would think about, and interact with, the ocean.
Focuses on the 19th-century transformation in San Francisco--from Gold Rush to earthquake--to show how the city's diverse residents created a modern American city through everyday "cultural frontiers," such as restaurants, hotels, and annual fairs and expositions, among others.