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American Messiahs: False Prophets Of A Damned Nation
by Adam MorrisA history with sweeping implications, American Messiahs challenges our previous misconceptions about “cult” leaders and their messianic power. Mania surrounding messianic prophets has defined the national consciousness since the American Revolution. From Civil War veteran and virulent anticapitalist Cyrus Teed, to the dapper and overlooked civil rights pioneer Father Divine, to even the megalomaniacal Jim Jones, these figures have routinely been dismissed as dangerous and hysterical outliers. After years of studying these emblematic figures, Adam Morris demonstrates that messiahs are not just a classic trope of our national culture; their visions are essential for understanding American history. As Morris demonstrates, these charismatic, if flawed, would-be prophets sought to expose and ameliorate deep social ills—such as income inequality, gender conformity, and racial injustice. Provocative and long overdue, this is the story of those who tried to point the way toward an impossible “American Dream”: men and women who momentarily captured the imagination of a nation always searching for salvation.
American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World
by Ronnie PontiacAn in-depth exploration of four centuries of American occult and spiritual history, from colonial-era alchemists to 20th-century teachers• Details how, from the very beginning, America was a vibrant blend of beliefs from all four corners of the world• Looks at well-known figures such as Manly P. Hall and offers riveting portraits of many lesser known esoteric luminaries such as the Pagan Pilgrim, Tom Morton• Reveals the Rosicrucians among the first settlers from England, the spiritual influence of enslaved people, the work of mystical abolitionists, and how Native Americans and Latinx people helped shape contemporary spiritualityMost Americans believe the United States was founded by pious Christians. However, as Ronnie Pontiac reveals, from the very beginning America was a vibrant blend of beliefs from all four corners of the world. Based on the latest research, with the assistance of leading scholars, this in-depth exploration of four centuries of American occult and spiritual history looks at everything from colonial-era alchemists, astrologers, and early spiritual collectives to Edgar Cayce, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and St. Germain on Mount Shasta. Pontiac shows that Rosicrucians were among the first settlers from England and explores how young women of the Shaker community fell into trances and gave messages from the dead. He details the spiritual influence of the African diaspora, the work of mystical abolitionists, and how Indigenous groups and Latinx people played a large role in the shaping of contemporary spirituality and healing practices. The author looks at well-known figures such as Manly P. Hall and lesser known esoteric luminaries such as the Pagan Pilgrim, Tom Morton. He examines the Aquarian Gospel, the Sekhmet Revival, A Course in Miracles, the School of Ageless Wisdom, and mediumship in the early 20th century. He explores the profound influence of the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles and looks at the evolution of female roles in spirituality across the centuries. He also examines the right wing of American metaphysics from the Silver Legion to QAnon. Revealing the diverse streams that run through America&’s metaphysical landscape, Pontiac offers an encyclopedic examination of occult teachers, esotericists, and spiritual collectives almost no one has heard of but who were profoundly influential.
American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry
by John Michael CorriganThe “transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.” With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history’s chronology in themselves—because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record. Whereas scholarship has tended to minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson’s notion of the self, his depictions of “the metempsychosis of nature” reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended template to understand human development.In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson’s conception of metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet’s ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own person so that he can speak for every man and woman.
American Meteor
by Norman Lock“[Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights. ” —NPR “[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. ” —Reader’s Digest “Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth. ” —Shelf Awareness In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln’s funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days. By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America’s fabulous and murderous history. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His recent works of fiction include Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition hailed for “mak[ing] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone. ” He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
American Methodism Revised and Updated
by Russell E. Richey Kenneth E. Rowe Jean Miller Schmidt Ashley BogganThe essential guide to American Methodism revised and updated through 2020.Four of Methodism’s most respected teachers give us a vivid picture of 260 years of Methodist experience in America. The revised edition updates the Methodist movement’s story through 2020, including the social, political, economic, technological, and global disruptions that cause faith communities and denominations to pull apart.American Methodism Revised and Updated begins with the explosion of evangelical Pietism and revolutionary Methodism, the First Great Awakening, as an independent nation was formed.It then highlights key 19th century themes and Methodist contributions, such as spreading scriptural holiness through missions and literature, planting tens of thousands of Sunday schools and churches by Circuit Riders, the pivotal Methodist schism between abolitionists and enslavers, the innovative building of schools and hospitals into the next century, and the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.Finally it explores the movements of 20th century Methodism, including the expansion of home and foreign missions, the Methodist drive for Prohibition, the decision for nationwide reunification on the cusp of World War II, reunification with the United Brethren during the Vietnam War, the Methodist ordination of women during the 1950s, Black Methodist leadership in the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and the liturgical renewal or reformation of worship (ancient and future).
American Methodism: A Compact History
by Russell E. Richey Kenneth E. Rowe Jean Miller SchmidtIn this engaging and artful overview, Russell Richey, Kenneth Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, some of Methodism’s most respected teachers, give readers a vivid picture of soulful terrain of the Methodist experience in America. The authors highlight key themes and events that continue to shape the Church. Knowing their history, Methodists are better positioned, prepared, and inspired for faithful witness and holy living.
American Midnight: Tales of the Dark (Pushkin Collection)
by VariousA chilling collection of classic weird and supernatural tales from the dark heart of American literatureA masquerade ball cut short by a mysterious plague; a strange nocturnal ritual in the woods; a black bobcat howling in the night: these ten tales are some of the most strange and unsettling in all of American literature, filled with unforgettable imagery and simmering with tension. From Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Zora Neale Hurston, the authors of these classics of supernatural suspense have inspired generations of writers to explore the dark heart of the land of the free.The stories in this collection have been selected and introduced by Laird Hunt, an author of seven acclaimed novels which explore the shadowy corners of American history.Contains:'The Masque of the Red Death', Edgar Allan Poe'Young Goodman Brown', Nathaniel Hawthorne'The Eyes', Edith Wharton'The Mask', Robert Chambers'Home', Shirley Jackson'A Ghost Story', Mark Twain'Spunk', Zora Neale Hurston'The Yellow Wallpaper', Charlotte Perkins Gilman'An Itinerant House', Emma Frances Dawson
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
by Adam HochschildSelected as one of the most anticipated books of Fall 2022 by the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Chicago TribuneFrom legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labo"A riveting, resonant account of the fragility of freedom.”—Kirkus, STARRED reviewThe nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.
American Militarism on the Small Screen (Routledge Advances in Television Studies)
by Anna Froula Stacy TakacsAnna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at East Carolina University, USA Stacy Takacs is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University, USA
American Military History Volume 2: The United States Army In A Global Era, 1917-2008
by Richard StewartThe story of the United States Army is always growing and changing. Historians constantly seek to reinterpret the past while accumulating new facts as America’s Army continues to be challenged on new foreign battlefields. Nor does the Army, as an institution, ever stand still. It necessarily changes its organization, materiel, doctrine, and composition to cope with an ever-changing worldof current conflict and potential danger. Thus, the Center of Military History is committed topreparing new editions of American Military History as we seek to correct past mistakes, reinterpretnew facts, and bring the Army’s story up to date. This new edition of that textbook, an importantelement in soldier and officer education since 1956, seeks to do just that.This edition of American Military History builds on the previous edition, published in 2005, andexpands its coverage to include an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.This expanded section is necessarily only an initial survey of the first eight years of the war onterrorism; it is far from the final word on the subject. It may take an additional decade or more to collect sufficient documents, interviews, memoirs, and other sources to know the details of military and political planning, the implementation of those plans on the global battlefield, and the impact on the Army as an institution and on the nation. The events of the past eight years are more like current events than they are history. History—the detailed telling of a story over time based upon all the extant evidence—requires more time to find and analyze the documents and facts and bring to bear on that evidence the insight that comes only from perspective. However, today’s soldiers need their story told. The events in which they participate and in which they are such important elements need to be given some form and order, no matter how tentative. The Army continues to be the nation’s servant, and the soldiers that make up that Army deserve their recognition. They continue to protect our freedom at great personal risk to themselves and incalculable cost to their loved ones.This is their continuing story.
American Military History: A Documentary Reader
by Brad D. LookingbillAmerican Military History: A Documentary Reader presents a comprehensive collection of primary documents relating to America's armed forces from the colonial period to the present. Features documents which introduce key people, events, and turning points in American military history Explores the importance of events not only in terms of military history, but also on a social and cultural level for the country at large.
American Military History: A Documentary Reader
by Brad D. LookingbillA collection of primary documents that explore the many facets of the American military from the colonial period to the present The second edition of American Military History offers an exceptional collection of primary documents relating to history of the military of the United States from 1607 through the present. The writings offer insight into the armed forces in relation to the social, cultural, economic, political, and territorial development of the United States. Several documents comment on strategic initiatives, combat operations, force structure, public policy, and home fronts. The writings also present firsthand testimony of extraordinary men and women in uniform and most of the documents explore the connections between combatants and the societies that produced them. From the beginnings of the war against the natives through the tragedy of the Civil War and up to the current Global War on Terror, American Military History offers a chronological account of the evolution of the United States military. This vital text: Includes writings that explore the diversity of the armed forces Explores leadership in America’s military affairs Traces America’s ways of war beginning in 1607 through the present Examines the patterns of design and purpose of the American military over time Reveals the vitality of civil-military relations in the United States Written for academics and students of military history, American Military History is an important text that draws on primary sources to explore the many facets of America’s military history.
American Military History: A Survey From Colonial Times to the Present
by Jeffrey Grey Janet G Valentine William Thomas AllisonAmerican Military History is uniquely tailored to American military history courses. Organized chronologically, the text begins at the point of European conflict with Native Americans and concludes with military affairs in the early 21st century.The content and style will appeal to history majors and non-majors and is designed to allow instructors flexibility in the structure of their course.
American Military History: A Survey From Colonial Times to the Present
by William Thomas Allison Janet G. Valentine Jeffrey G. GreyNow in its third edition, American Military History examines how a country shaped by race, ethnicity, economy, regionalism, and power has been equally influenced by war and the struggle to define the role of a military in a free and democratic society. Organized chronologically, the text begins at the point of European conflict with Native Americans and concludes with military affairs in the early 21st century, providing an important overview of the military’s role on an international, domestic, social, and symbolic level. The third edition is fully updated to reflect recent developments in military policy and the study of military history and war and society, thus providing students a foundational understanding of the American military experience. This book will be of interest to students of American history and military history. It is designed to allow instructors flexibility in structuring a course.
American Military History: The United States Army and the Forging of a Nation, 1775-1917 (Army Historical Ser.)
by Richard Winship Stewart Center of Military History U. S. Army StaffThis latest edition of an official U.S. Government military history classic provides an authoritative historical survey of the organization and accomplishments of the United States Army. This scholarly yet readable book is designed to inculcate an awareness of our nation's military past and to demonstrate that the study of military history is an essential ingredient in leadership development. It is also an essential addition to any personal military history library. This text is used in military ROTC training courses as a basic military history textbook. Volume 1 of 2 volume set.
American Military Intervention in Unconventional War
by Wayne BertA study of the major U. S. military interventions in unconventional war, this book looks at four wars that occurred while the U. S. was a superpower in the post-war WW II period and one in the Philippines in 1898.
American Military Life In The 21st Century: Social, Cultural, And Economic Issues And Trends
by Eugenia Weiss Carl CastroAmerican Military Life in the 21st Century <P><P> Social, Cultural, and Economic Issues and Trends <P><P> VOLUME I: Active Duty Life
American Military Life In The 21st Century: Social, Cultural, And Economic Issues And Trends
by Eugenia Weiss Carl CastroAmerican Military Life in the 21st Century <P><P> Social, Cultural, and Economic Issues and Trends <P><P> VOLUME 2: Life of Military Families, National Guardsmen and Reservists, and Veterans
American Military Policy (Point Counterpoint)
by Alan Allport"The debates presented in POINT/COUNTERPOINT are among the most interesting and controversial in contemporary American society, but studying them is more than an academic activity. They affect every citizen; they are the issues that today's leaders debate and tomorrow's will decide. The reader may one day play a central role in resolving them." -Introduction
American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume I: Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms
by George D. MollerAmerican Military Shoulder Arms, Volume I: Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms focuses on the arms used from the early exploratory period throughout the colonial period and the American Revolution. Arranged chronologically, it contains definitive descriptions of the pre-flintlock and flintlock shoulder arms used in North America and detailed accounts of the development and progression of military regulation shoulder arms of the major colonial powers from the early eighteenth century through the Revolutionary War. Lavishly illustrated with more than four hundred vivid photographs of muskets, rifles, carbines, and other arms, this book offers an intelligent analysis of the shoulder arms procured and used by the colonists, colonial and state governments, and the Continental Congress.
American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume II: From the 1790s to the End of the Flintlock Period
by George D. MollerNew data surrounding the procurement and modifications of arms produced by the national armories, and under federal contract procured by the individual states and by individual members of militias, is presented here for the first time. This information, interwoven with military, political, economic, and social factors, results in new and better definitions and a clearer understanding of the arms&’ historical context. Though this work focuses on military flintlock shoulder arms, details on the federal government&’s procurement of arms for Indians during rapidly changing military policies of the period is also included. American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume II, contains more than three hundred photographs. As with the previous volume, Volume II is written primarily for students of arms, but also contains material of interest to historians, museum specialists, collectors, and dealers of antique arms.
American Military Shoulder Arms, Volume III: Flintlock Alterations and Muzzleloading Percussion Shoulder Arms, 1840-1865
by George D. MollerThis third volume in Moller&’s authoritative reference work describes muzzleloading percussion shoulder arms procured by the U.S. government for issue to federal and state armed forces in the period that includes the Civil War. These twenty-five years were an exciting time in the history of shoulder arms. During the 1840s, only a handful of American manufacturers were capable of producing significant quantities of arms having fully interchangeable components. By the early 1850s, at least one firm was producing rifles with close enough tolerances to be considered fully interchangeable. And thanks to the invention of the expanding bullet, rifled arms could be used by an army&’s entire infantry. For the first time, line infantry were equipped with arms capable of rapid reloading and of consistently hitting a man-sized target at distances as great as three hundred yards. Like the first two volumes of American Military Shoulder Arms, this exhaustive reference work will be a must for serious arms collectors, dealers, and museum specialists.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
by Deborah SolomonA NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY"Welcome to Rockwell Land," writes Deborah Solomon in the introduction to this spirited and authoritative biography of the painter who provided twentieth-century America with a defining image of itself. As the star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Norman Rockwell mingled fact and fiction in paintings that reflected the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of American democracy. Freckled Boy Scouts and their mutts, sprightly grandmothers, a young man standing up to speak at a town hall meeting, a little black girl named Ruby Bridges walking into an all-white school—here was an America whose citizens seemed to believe in equality and gladness for all.Who was this man who served as our unofficial "artist in chief" and bolstered our country's national identity? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking façade lay a surprisingly complex figure—a lonely painter who suffered from depression and was consumed by a sense of inadequacy. He wound up in treatment with the celebrated psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. In fact, Rockwell moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts so that he and his wife could be near Austen Riggs, a leading psychiatric hospital. "What's interesting is how Rockwell's personal desire for inclusion and normalcy spoke to the national desire for inclusion and normalcy," writes Solomon. "His work mirrors his own temperament—his sense of humor, his fear of depths—and struck Americans as a truer version of themselves than the sallow, solemn, hard-bitten Puritans they knew from eighteenth-century portraits."Deborah Solomon, a biographer and art critic, draws on a wealth of unpublished letters and documents to explore the relationship between Rockwell's despairing personality and his genius for reflecting America's brightest hopes. "The thrill of his work," she writes, "is that he was able to use a commercial form [that of magazine illustration] to thrash out his private obsessions." In American Mirror, Solomon trains her perceptive eye not only on Rockwell and his art but on the development of visual journalism as it evolved from illustration in the 1920s to photography in the 1930s to television in the 1950s. She offers vivid cameos of the many famous Americans whom Rockwell counted as friends, including President Dwight Eisenhower, the folk artist Grandma Moses, the rock musician Al Kooper, and the generation of now-forgotten painters who ushered in the Golden Age of illustration, especially J. C. Leyendecker, the reclusive legend who created the Arrow Collar Man.Although derided by critics in his lifetime as a mere illustrator whose work could not compete with that of the Abstract Expressionists and other modern art movements, Rockwell has since attracted a passionate following in the art world. His faith in the power of storytelling puts his work in sync with the current art scene. American Mirror brilliantly explains why he deserves to be remembered as an American master of the first rank.
American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation (America in the World #58)
by Roberto SabaHow slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and BrazilIn the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system’s demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital.Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians—which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others—consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade.Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.
American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability
by Robert WuthnowHow American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the gradeHow did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply?The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms.Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering.Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.