Studies in American Popular History and Culture
Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama
1st Edition
By Megan Sanborn Jones
December 11, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer...
Antebellum Slave Narratives: Cultural and Political Expressions of Africa
1st Edition
By Jermaine O. Archer
October 14, 2013
Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist ...
Agents of Wrath, Sowers of Discord: Authority and Dissent in Puritan Massachusetts, 1630-1655
1st Edition
By Timothy L. Wood
May 01, 2013
This book explores the authorities of Puritan Massachusetts balanced concern for the stability of the colony and the integrity of its Puritan mission with the hopes of reconciling dissidents back into the colonial community....
Cleaning Up: The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth Century New York
1st Edition
By Alana Erickson Coble
May 01, 2013
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; ...
Mistresses of the Transient Hearth: American Army Officers' Wives and Material Culture, 1840-1880
1st Edition
By Robin D. Campbell
May 01, 2013
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....
Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy and Charles Brockden Brown's Editorship of the Monthly Magazine and American Review
1st Edition
By Scott Slawinski
May 01, 2013
This book explores images of single and married men in C.B. Brown's Monthly Magazine and concludes that Brown used his periodical as a vehicle for validating bachelorhood as a viable alternative form of masculinity....
Black Women in New South Literature and Culture
1st Edition
By Sherita L. Johnson
March 11, 2013
Using the "the Negro Problem" in African American literature as a point of departure, this book focuses on the profound impact that racism had on the literary imagination of black Americans, specifically those in the South. Although the South has been one of the most enduring sites of criticism in ...
John Brown and the Era of Literary Confrontation
1st Edition
By Michael Stoneham
February 27, 2013
Radical abolitionist and freedom-fighter John Brown inspired literary America to confrontation during his short but dramatic career as a public figure in antebellum America. Emerging from obscurity during the violent struggle to determine how Kansas would enter the Union in 1856, John Brown ...
The Farm Press, Reform and Rural Change, 1895-1920
1st Edition
By John J. Fry
November 14, 2012
This project contributes to our understanding of rural Midwesterners and farm newspapers at the turn of the century. While cultural historians have mainly focused on readers in town and cities, it examines Midwestern farmers. It also contributes to the "new rural history" by exploring the ideas of ...
Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth Century Essex County, Massachusetts
1st Edition
By Else L. Hambleton
October 29, 2012
This study examines cases of fornication, bastardy, and paternity cases brought before the courts in Essex County, Massachusetts between 1640 and 1692. Prosecution and conviction rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic data, as well as attitudes, were analyzed to determine that women who ...
Narrative, Political Unconscious and Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina
1st Edition
By Leslie Hossfeld
October 29, 2012
This work examines the counter-narratives of social actors that may be used as resources to promote and create social change, particularly racial change. A policy implication emanating from this research is to institute an educational component for the North Carolina public school curriculum that ...
The Quiet Revolutionaries: How the Grey Nuns Changed the Social Welfare Paradigm of Lewiston, Maine
1st Edition
By Susan Hudson
September 25, 2012
The book recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. The founding of their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is significant today if one desires a more accurate and inclusive ...