Women's voices, women's lives

Sample

Karen O'Brien

Is there a common European identity? If so, what kinds of history does it possess? Narratives of Enlightenment examines the literary and historical achievements of major figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon and the American historian David Ramsay in the light of eighteenth-century political and national debates in France, Scotland, England and America. Undertaking a comparative reappraisal of these writers, Karen O'Brien investigates the degree and nature of their intellectual investments in the idea of a common European civilisation. This original and incisive study intervenes from the perspective of literary criticism in contemporary debates about Enlightenments past and present, the political uses for narrative, and the European contexts of national awareness.

Sample

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Examines the lives of women in northern New England in the century from 1650 to 1750, discussing issues of housekeeping, childbearing, churchgoing, and other triumphs and tragedies of everyday life.

Sample

Todd Shallat

As the Mississippi and other midwestern rivers inundated town after town during the summer of 1993, concerned and often angry citizens questioned whether the very technologies and structures intended to "tame" the rivers did not, in fact, increase the severity of the floods. Much of the controversy swirled around the apparent culpability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the designer and builder of many of the flood control systems that failed. In this book, Todd Shallat probes the origins of the United States' oldest and largest water management agency and explores how the Corps' emphasis on scientific planning cut against the grain of a nation deeply committed to private enterprise and community rights. Combining extensive research with a lively, engaging style, Shallat follows the technological elite of the army from European antecedents through the boom years of river building after the Civil War. He tells the story of monumental construction and engineering fiascoes, public service and public corruption, and the rise of science and the army expert as agents of the state. Information on engineering during the Civil War, the influence of women and family on the political and organizational philosophy of the Corps, and numerous historical illustrations add interesting highlights to the story. . Much more than an institutional history, Structures in the Stream offers significant insights into American society, which has alternately supported the massive public works projects that are a legacy of our French heritage and opposed them based on the democratic, individualist tradition inherited from Britain. It will provide important reading for a wide audience in environmental and military history, the history of science and technology, policy studies, and American cultural history.

Sample

Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow

Contents: Washington Irving and the American Ghost Story • essay by G. Richard Thompson [as by G. R. Thompson ] Phantasms and Death in Poe's Fiction • essay by J. Gerald Kennedy Philanthropy and the Occult in the Fiction of Hawthorne, Brownson, and Melville • essay by Carolyn L. Karcher "I must have died at ten minutes past one": Posthumous Reverie in Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Amber Gods" • essay by Barton Levi St. Armand Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain, and Bellamy • essay by Jay Martin James's Last Early Supernatural Tales: Hawthorne Demagnetized, Poe Depoetized • essay by Howard Kerr Psychology and the Psychic in W. D. Howell's "A Sleep and a Forgetting" • essay by Charles L. Crow and John W. Crowley "When Other Amusements Fail": Mark Twain and the Occult • essay by Alan Gribben Jack London: Up from Spiritualism • essay by Charles N. Watson, Jr. The Color of "The Damned Thing": The Occult as the Supersensational • essay by Cruce Stark