Download or read book Early American Almanac Humor written by Robert K. Dodge and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is a selection of comic items from almanacs published between 1776 and 1800. Dodge uses his smooth, astute writing style to unfold the humor in a section of American Heritage. The eight chapters are categorized by subject, including "Comic American Heroes," "The Tall Tale," and "Men, Women, Marriage, and Sex."
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin s Humor written by Paul Zall and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he called himself merely a “printer” in his will, Benjamin Franklin could have also called himself a diplomat, a doctor, an electrician, a frontier general, an inventor, a journalist, a legislator, a librarian, a magistrate, a postmaster, a promoter, a publisher—and a humorist. John Adams wrote of Franklin, “He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was pleasant and delightful . . . [and] talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill, to the promotion of moral and political truth.” In Benjamin Franklin’s Humor, author Paul M. Zall shows how one of America’s founding fathers used humor to further both personal and national interests. Early in his career, Franklin impersonated the feisty widow Silence Dogood in a series of comically moralistic essays that helped his brother James outpace competitors in Boston’s incipient newspaper market. In the mid-eighteenth century, he displayed his talent for comic impersonation in numerous editions of Poor Richard’s Almanac, a series of pocket-sized tomes filled with proverbs and witticisms that were later compiled in Franklin’s The Way to Wealth (1758), one of America’s all-time bestselling books. Benjamin Franklin was sure to be remembered for his early work as an author, printer, and inventor, but his accomplishments as a statesman later in life firmly secured his lofty stature in American history. Zall shows how Franklin employed humor to achieve desired ends during even the most difficult diplomatic situations: while helping draft the Declaration of Independence, while securing France’s support for the American Revolution, while brokering the treaty with England to end the War for Independence, and while mediating disputes at the Constitutional Convention. He supervised and facilitated the birth of a nation with customary wit and aplomb. Zall traces the development of an acute sense of humor throughout the life of a great American. Franklin valued humor not as an end in itself but as a means to gain a competitive edge, disseminate information, or promote a program. Early in life, he wrote about timely topics in an effort to reach a mass reading class, leaving an amusing record of early American culture. Later, Franklin directed his talents toward serving his country. Regardless of its origin, the best of Benjamin Franklin’s humor transcends its initial purpose and continues to evoke undying laughter at shared human experiences.
Download or read book Poor Richard s Almanac written by Benjamin Franklin and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Early American Almanacs the Colonial Weekday Bible written by Marion Barber Stowell and published by New York : B. Franklin. This book was released on 1977 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard s Almanack written by Benjamin Franklin and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hundreds of delightful aphorisms, carefully selected from many issues of Franklin's popular 18th-century publication: "He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas" and many others.
Download or read book Ben Franklin s Almanac written by Candace Fleming and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What good shall I do today?" How Ben Franklin answered that question -- through his work as a writer, printer, statesman, and inventor -- forever established him as one of America's greatest figures. On one day in 1729 he published the first edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette; on another day he changed the Declaration of Independence by adding the famous words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident"; and it was all in a day's work when he planted the first willow trees in America. Modeled on his own Poor Richard's Almanack, this unique scrapbook captures Franklin's countless accomplishments. Biography and anecdote, cartoon and etching mesh to create a fascinating portrait of this most fascinating man. Anyone interested in the birth of American democracy...or curious about the rise of the U.S. postal system...or wondering how paper money came to be...or wanting to know how Ben Franklin was part of it all, is sure to pore over Ben Franklin's Almanac.
Download or read book Poor Richard s Almanack written by Benjamin Franklin and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Tale Type and Motif Index of Early U S Almanacs written by Michael Stitt and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1991-07-19 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early American almanacs are fascinating resources for insight into the life, attitudes, and culture of the new nation. Along with calendars and maps, political events, agricultural advice, medicinal cures, and other information, many almanacs printed tales, stories, and jokes designed to entertain. Never before systematically organized, most of this narrative material has remained obscure for two hundred years. Here a literary scholar and a folklorist combine skills to catalog and index this material from over a thousand almanacs according to the standard methodology established by the Aarne-Thompson Type and Motif Indexes. The volume illuminates much of the richness in content and form of this materials. In content, there are stories dealing with ethnic and racial groups; with animals; with members of professions and trades; servants, bumpkins, and tricksters--often stereotypical and antifeminist. In form, there are puns; humorous anecdotes; and comic, tragic, and fabulous tales, including tales with literary counterparts and tales with folk counterparts, notably the classic American tall tales. The Motif Index and a shorter Tale Type Index comprise the heart of the volume. Also included are a bibliography of the almanacs indexed and an index of subjects. The work begins with detailed information on how the index was constructed and how to use it. Of value to folklorists and students of American humor and popular culture, the volume should also expose an interesting body of material for further study and enjoyment.
Download or read book Cuneiform to Computer written by William A. Katz and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a brief history of how reference works developed, but concentrates on how they reflect attitudes of their particular period of publication. Each chapter focuses on a basic reference form and highlights the major titles in its evolution.
Download or read book What s So Funny written by Nancy A. Walker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical studies attempting to define and dissect American humor have been published steadily for nearly one hundred years. However, until now, key documents from that history have never been brought together in a single volume for students and scholars. What's So Funny? Humor in American Culture, a collection of 15 essays, examines the meaning of humor and attempts to pinpoint its impact on American culture and society, while providing a historical overview of its progres-sion. Essays from Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner, Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, William Keough, Roy Blount, Jr., and others trace the development of American humor from the colonial period to the present, focusing on its relationship with ethnicity, gender, violence, and geography. An excellent reader for courses in American studies and American social and cultural history, What's So Funny? explores the traits of the American experience that have given rise to its humor.
Download or read book So Ole Says to Lena written by James P. Leary and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an introduction to the most important recent court decisions affecting women in the United States. Abortion, sexual harrassment, pornography, surrogate motherhood, rape, custody rights - the legal and social questions surrounding these issues are brought to life in this casebook.
Download or read book The Humor Prism in 20th century America written by Joseph Boskin and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some jokes evaporate after the telling while others are transmitted to subsequent generations? Just what property of humor allows it to touch diverse members of a culture at a given time? As a penetrating and refracting angle of history, humor illuminates the expectations and contradictions of society, its anxieties and confusions, and permits perspective into any historic moment. The Humor Prism in Twentieth-Century America explores to what extent and in what ways American humor in the twentieth century reflects history, examining the dynamics and disguised messages behind humor. The first section of this volume concentrates on patterns of humor in the twentieth century. Section two looks at the power and politics of women's humor, and at multicultural humor. The final section presents and evaluates the major joke cycles from the post-World War II period to the 1990s as responses to profound social and economic change, such as Polish jokes and JAP jokes.
Download or read book A Mixed Race written by Frank Shuffelton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-29 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of new essays enters one of the most topical and energetic debates of our time--the subject of ethnicity. The recent vigorous debates being waged over questions raised by the phenomenon of multiculturalism in America highlight the fact that American culture has arisen out of an unusually rich and interactive ethnic mix. The essays in A Mixed Race suggest that American society was inescapably multicultural from its very beginnings and that this representation of cultural differences fundamentally defined American culture. While recent scholarship has looked extensively at the ethnic formation of modern American culture, this study focuses on the eighteenth century and colonial American values that have been previously overlooked in the debate, arguing that a culture shaped by responses to ethnic and racial difference is not merely a modern circumstance but one at the base of American history. Written by a group of first-class contributors, the essays in this collection discuss the representation of cultural differences between European immigrants and Native Americans, the circumstances of the first African-American autobiographical narratives, rhetorical negotiations among different European-American cultural groups, ethnic representation in the genre literature of jest books and execution narratives, and the ethnic conceptions of Michel de Crevecoeur, Phillis Wheatley, and Thomas Jefferson. A Mixed Race offers agile and original yet scholarly readings of ethnicity and ethnic formation from some of our best critics of early American culture. Moving from questions of race and ethnicity to varieties of ethnic representation, and finally to individual confrontations, this volume sheds light on the confrontations of ethnically diverse peoples, and launches a timely, full-scale investigation of the construction of American culture.
Download or read book Bodies Politic written by John Wood Sweet and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping analysis of colonialism and its legacies, John Wood Sweet explores how the ongoing interaction of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in New England produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, society. The coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North, and the making of American democracy writ large. Critically engaged with current debates about the dynamics of culture, racial identity, and postcolonial politics, this innovative and intellectually capacious work is grounded in a remarkable array of evidence. What emerges from this analysis of colonial and early national censuses, newspapers, diaries, letters, court records, printed works, and visual images are the dramatic confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians, Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early New England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting houses as well as in courthouses, in bedrooms as well as on battlefields, in land disputes as well as on streets. Bodies Politic reveals how the legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the nineteenth-century North and continues, even to this day, to shape all our lives.
Download or read book The First American written by H. W. Brands and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-05-26 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the pivotal figure in colonial and revolutionary America, comes vividly to life in this “thorough biography of ... America’s first Renaissance man” (The Washington Post) by the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War. "The authoritative Franklin biography for our time.” —Joseph J. Ellis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers Wit, diplomat, scientist, philosopher, businessman, inventor, and bon vivant, Benjamin Franklin's "life is one every American should know well, and it has not been told better than by Mr. Brands" (The Dallas Morning News). From penniless runaway to highly successful printer, from ardently loyal subject of Britain to architect of an alliance with France that ensured America’s independence, Franklin went from obscurity to become one of the world’s most admired figures, whose circle included the likes of Voltaire, Hume, Burke, and Kant. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and a host of other sources, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands has written a thoroughly engaging biography of the eighteenth-century genius. A much needed reminder of Franklin’s greatness and humanity, The First American is a work of meticulous scholarship that provides a magnificent tour of a legendary historical figure, a vital era in American life, and the countless arenas in which the protean Franklin left his legacy. Look for H.W. Brands's other biographies: ANDREW JACKSON, THE MAN WHO SAVED THE UNION (Ulysses S. Grant), TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS (Franklin Roosevelt) and REAGAN.
Download or read book African American Almanac written by Lean'tin Bracks and published by Visible Ink Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most complete and affordable single-volume reference of African American culture available today, this almanac is a unique and valuable resource devoted to illustrating and demystifying the moving, difficult, and often lost history of black life in America. Celebrating centuries of achievements, the African American Almanac: 400 Years of Triumph, Courage, and Excellence provides insights on the influence, inspiration, and impact of African Americans on U.S. society and culture. A legacy of pride, struggle, and triumph is presented through a fascinating mix of biographies—including 750 influential figures—little-known or misunderstood historical facts, enlightening essays on significant legislation and movements, and 445 rare photographs and illustrations. Covering politics, education, religion, business, science, medicine, the military, sports, literature, music, dance, theater, art, film, and television, chapters address the important events and social and cultural changes that affected African Americans over the centuries, followed by biographical profiles of hundreds of key figures, including Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, Amiri Baraka, Daisy Bates, George Washington Carver, Ray Charles, Bessie Coleman, Gary Davis, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michael Eric Dyson, Duke Ellington, Medgar Evers, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric H. Holder Jr., Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, LeBron James, Mae C. Jemison, Martin Luther King Jr., Queen Latifah, Jacob Lawrence, Kevin Liles, Thurgood Marshall, Walter Mosley, Elijah Muhammad, Barack Obama, Gordon Parks, Rosa Parks, Richard Pryor, Condoleezza Rice, Smokey Robinson, Wilma Rudolph, Betty Shabazz, Tavis Smiley, Clarence Thomas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Ross Tubman, C. Delores Tucker, Usher, Denmark Vesey, Alice Walker, Booker T. Washington, Kanye West, Reggie White, Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and Malcolm X. Explore a wealth of milestones, inspiration, challenges met, and lasting respect! The African American Almanac’s helpful bibliography and extensive index add to its usefulness.
Download or read book Early African American Print Culture written by Lara Langer Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem. In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars ranges over periods, locations, and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's chapters consider domestic novels and gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers. Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation, and reading—and how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.
