Download or read book American Dreams in Mississippi written by Ted Ownby and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2002-10-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South.
Download or read book River of Dreams written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
Download or read book The Pursuit of a Dream written by Janet Sharp Hermann and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating history set in the Reconstruction South is a testament to African-American resilience, fortitude, and independence. It tells of three attempts to create an ideal community on the river bottom lands at Davis Bend south of Vicksburg. There Joseph Davis's effort to establish a cooperative community among the slaves on his plantation was doomed to fail as long as they remained in bondage. During the Civil War the Yankees tried with limited success to organize the freedmen into a model community without trusting them to manage their own affairs. After the war the intrepid Benjamin Montgomery and his family bought the land from Davis and established a very prosperous colony of their fellow freedmen. Their success at Davis Bend occurred when blacks were accorded the opportunity to pursue the American dream relatively free from the discrimination that prevailed in most of society. It is a story worthy of celebration. Janet Hermann writes here of two men--Joseph Davis, the slaveholder and brother of the president of the Confederacy, and Benjamin Montgomery, an educated freedman. In 1866 Montgomery began the experiment at Davis Bend. The Pursuit of a Dream, published in 1981, received the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the McLemore Prize of the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Silver Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California. Historical writing at its best . . . her research is impressive and is presented in balanced, ironic prose. --David Bradley, New York Times Book Review. A marvelous story for all readers with a taste for the ironies, the ambiguities, and the surprises of history. --C. Vann Woodward. Janet Sharp Hermann, a freelance writer and historian, is the author of Joseph E. Davis: Pioneer Patriarch (University Press of Mississippi).
Download or read book American Dream written by Jason DeParle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle, author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don’t. To read American Dream is to understand why.
Download or read book Over Here written by Edward Humes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are the stories of some of the men and women returning from World War II, and how their lives changed because of the G.I. Bill of Rights, and how this country changed because of them. The effects were immediate and enduring--the suburbs, the middle class, America's ever-increasing number of college graduates, the lunar landing--all are tied to the G.I. Bill.
Download or read book American Dreams written by Williams College. Museum of Art and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Williams College, in Williamstown, MA, has collected art since the mid-19th century. In this chronological journey through American art in all media, each of 56 highlighted objects from the museum receives a mini-essay of several hundred words, signed by contributors who frequently are the acknowledged experts on particular artists or works. A full factual entry on each work appears at the back of the book, preceded by extremely brief summaries of the acquisitions histories of the overall collection's painting, drawing, sculpture, Williams portraits, prints, photographs, posters, and decorative arts. College alumni donated many items, including collections on Rube Goldberg, Thomas Nast, and the Prendergasts. This is not the definitive book on American art, but it is an excellent survey with many interesting objects not commonly reproduced. For art history collections. 64 colour & 65 b/w illustrations
Download or read book Catfish Dream written by Julian Rankin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catfish Dream centers around the experiences, family, and struggles of Ed Scott Jr. (born in 1922), a prolific farmer in the Mississippi Delta and the first ever nonwhite owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation. Both directly and indirectly, the economic and political realities of food and subsistence affect the everyday lives of Delta farmers and the people there. Ed’s own father, Edward Sr., was a former sharecropper turned landowner who was one of the first black men to grow rice in the state. Ed carries this mantle forth with his soybean and rice farming and later with his catfish operation, which fed the black community both physically and symbolically. He provides an example for economic mobility and activism in a region of the country that is one of the nation’s poorest and has one of the most drastic disparities in education and opportunity, a situation especially true for the Delta’s vast African American population. With Catfish Dream Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.
Download or read book Hattiesburg written by William Sturkey and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Zócalo Public Square Book Prize “Clear-eyed and meticulous...While depicting the terrors of Jim Crow, [Sturkey] also shows how Hattiesburg’s black residents, forced to forge their own communal institutions, laid the organizational groundwork for the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.” —New York Times “Sturkey’s magnificent portrait reminds us that Mississippi is no anachronism. It is the dark heart of American modernity.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. And he takes us across town into the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.
Download or read book Sleeping by the Mississippi written by Alec Soth and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected "third coast." Soth's richly descriptive, large format color photographs describe an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, his book elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing and reverie. "In the book's forty-six ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex... The coherence of the project places Soth's book exactly within the tradition of Walker Evans' American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans." Like Frank's classic book, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. This is the third print run and third new cover of a book which has become one of the most highly collected and widely acclaimed photo-books of recent times.
Download or read book River of Dark Dreams written by Walter Johnson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.
Download or read book A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945 written by Chris J. Magoc and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-29 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Progressive History of American Democracy Since 1945: American Dreams, Hard Realities offers a social, political, and cultural history of the United States since World War II. Unpacking a period of profound transformation unprecedented in the national experience, this book takes a synthetic approach to the history of the 1940s to the present day. It examines how Americans descended from a mid-century apogee of boundless expectations to the unsettling premise that our contemporary historical moment is fraught with a sense of crisis and national failure. The book’s narrative explores the question of decline and more importantly, how the history of this transformation can point the way toward a recovery of shared national values. Chris J. Magoc also gives extensive treatments to the following: Grassroots movements that have expanded the meaning of American democracy, from the 1950s human rights struggle in the South to contemporary movements to confront systemic racism and the existential crisis of climate change. The resilience of American democracy in the face of antidemocratic forces. The impacts of a decades-long economic transformation. The consequences of America’s expanding global military footprint and national security state. Fracturing of a nation once held together by a post-war liberal consensus and broadly shared societal goals to an America facing an attack from within on empirical truth and democracy itself. This book will be of interest to students of modern U.S. history, social history, and American Studies, and general readers interested in recent U.S. history.
Download or read book From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse written by Christopher M. Span and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years immediately following the Civil War--the formative years for an emerging society of freed African Americans in Mississippi--there was much debate over the general purpose of black schools and who would control them. From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse is the first comprehensive examination of Mississippi's politics and policies of postwar racial education. The primary debate centered on whether schools for African Americans (mostly freedpeople) should seek to develop blacks as citizens, train them to be free but subordinate laborers, or produce some other outcome. African Americans envisioned schools established by and for themselves as a primary means of achieving independence, equality, political empowerment, and some degree of social and economic mobility--in essence, full citizenship. Most northerners assisting freedpeople regarded such expectations as unrealistic and expected African Americans to labor under contract for those who had previously enslaved them and their families. Meanwhile, many white Mississippians objected to any educational opportunities for the former slaves. Christopher Span finds that newly freed slaves made heroic efforts to participate in their own education, but too often the schooling was used to control and redirect the aspirations of the newly freed.
Download or read book Maggie s American Dream written by James P. Comer and published by Dutton Adult. This book was released on 1988 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This inspiring black family success story centers on an exceptional woman, Maggie Comer, whose American dream brought her from abject poverty in the rural South to become the mother of five outstanding achievers. Told first through Maggie's own words, then through those of her son James - an award-winning child psychiatrist and brilliant educator - Maggie's American Dream is an unforgettable chronicle of courage and resourcefulness, of pride and achievement, of daring to dream despite the odds. Book jacket.
Download or read book Mississippi Solo written by Eddy Harris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-09-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a young black man's quest: to canoe the length of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.
Download or read book The Negro written by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Invisible Ball of Dreams written by Emily Ruth Rutter and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.
Download or read book The Hands of Peace written by Marione Ingram and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Hamburg in the 1930s, Marione Ingram fled Nazi Germany, only to find racism as pervasive in the American South as anti-Semitism was in Europe. Marione moved first to New York and then to Washington, D.C. where, in 1960, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality, protesting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and other aspects of life in the nation's capital, including the denial of voting rights. In D.C., Marione made a name for herself as a freedom fighter. She was a volunteer for the March on Washington and an organizer of an extended sit-in to support the Mississippi Freedom Party. A year later, at the urging of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Marione went south to Mississippi. She was part of a coalition to end segregation and extend civil rights to African Americans—and she was uncompromising in her demand for equality. In Mississippi, Marione became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as well as an educator at one of the country’s most influential Freedom Schools. The school was one of the targets of the Ku Klux Klan. When they burned a cross in front of it, she painted the word "FREEDOM" in bold letters on the charred crossbar, creating an icon in the struggle for equal rights. As a white woman and a Holocaust refugee, Marione was the most unlikely of heroes in the fight for civil rights for African Americans. This is her empowering story—a tale of courage, strength, and determination.
