Download or read book Everyday Things in American Life 1776 1876 written by William Chauncy Langdon and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines various aspects and items of everyday life in early America, from 1607 to 1876, including homes, furniture, farms, bridges, clothing, and metals; and discusses what those things reveal about the country's citizens.
Download or read book Everyday Things in American Life written by William Chauncy Langdon and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Everyday Life in Early America written by David F. Hawke and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1989-01-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this clearly written volume, Hawke provides enlightening and colorful descriptions of early Colonial Americans and debunks many widely held assumptions about 17th century settlers."--Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Book of More Delights written by Ross Gay and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.
Download or read book American Story written by Bob Dotson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “These are remarkable and poignant stories that need to be told.” —Ken Burns More than six million people watch Bob Dotson’s Emmy award-winning segment, American Story, on NBC’s Today Show. For the last four decades, Dotson has traveled the country searching out inspiring individuals who quietly perform everyday miracles. In the process, he has become the treasured cartographer of America’s heart and soul. Today’s news is overwhelmingly grim; it’s also told by journalists who travel in herds as they trail politicians and camp out at big stories. In American Story, Dotson shines a light on America’s neglected corners, introducing readers to the ordinary Americans who have learned to fix what really matters.
Download or read book Everyday Life written by Joseph A. Amato and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Everyday Life Joseph A. Amato offers a panoramic account of the evolution of our daily existence and reflects on the complex and changing textures of everyday life. Beginning with societies of scarcity and relative lack of change and ending with our own twenty-first-century lives, he ranges widely through topics as varied as dirt and muck, walking and the charm of spices, and through time from early agriculture to mechanization and the modern urban existence. Amato argues that what seems to be ordinary is in fact extraordinary, and shows how life, even in the very recent past, differed from life in our present-day societies of abundance and of remorseless change. The result is a challenging and thought-provoking introduction to change and continuity in daily life"--Publisher's description.
Download or read book American Innovations written by Rivka Galchen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BRILLIANT NEW COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES FROM THE "CONSPICUOUSLY TALENTED" (TIME) RIVKA GALCHEN Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka's Galchen's American Innovations, a young woman's furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated pains and loves of a family. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, reimagined from the perspective of female characters. Just as Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" responds to John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Galchen's "The Lost Order" covertly recapitulates James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," while "The Region of Unlikeness" is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph." The title story, "American Innovations," revisits Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose." By turns realistic, fantastical, witty, and lyrical, these marvelously uneasy stories are deeply emotional and written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer like none other today.
Download or read book The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790 1840 written by Jack Larkin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Compact and insightful. "--New York Times Book Review "Jack Larkin has retrieved the irretrievable; the intimate facts of everyday life that defined what people were really like."--American Heritage
Download or read book The Design of Everyday Things written by Don Norman and published by Constellation. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
Download or read book As Seen on TV written by Karal Ann Marling and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America in the 1950s: the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked--and how we looked--mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, this book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.
Download or read book Brief Histories of Everyday Objects written by Andy Warner and published by Picador. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilarious, entertaining, and illustrated histories behind some of life's most common and underappreciated objects - from the paperclip and the toothbrush to the sports bra and roller skates In the tradition of A Cartoon History of the Universe and, most recent, Randall Munroe's What If? comes Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, a graphic tour through the unusual creation of some of the mundane items that surround us in our daily lives. Chapters are peppered with ballpoint pen riots, cowboy wars, and really bad Victorian practical jokes. Structured around the different locations in our home and daily life—the kitchen, the bathroom, the office, and the grocery store—award-nominated illustrator Andy Warner traces the often surprising and sometimes complex histories behind the items we often take for granted. Readers learn how Velcro was created after a Swiss engineer took his dog for a walk; how a naval engineer invented the Slinky; a German housewife, the coffee filter; and a radical feminist and anti-capitalist, the game Monopoly. This is both a book of histories and a book about histories. It explores how lies become legends, trade routes spring up, and empires rise and fall—all from the perspective of your toothbrush or toilet.
Download or read book Me Talk Pretty One Day written by David Sedaris and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors. Sedaris is an amazing reader whose appearances draw hundreds, and his performancesincluding a jaw-dropping impression of Billie Holiday singing I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weinerare unforgettable. Sedariss essays on living in Paris are some of the funniest hes ever written. At last, someone even meaner than the French! The sort of blithely sophisticated, loopy humour that might have resulted if Dorothy Parker and James Thurber had had a love child. Entertainment Weekly on Barrel Fever Sidesplitting Not one of the essays in this new collection failed to crack me up; frequently I was helpless. The New York Times Book Review on Naked
Download or read book Life at Home in the Twenty First Century written by Jeanne E. Arnold and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2012-12-31 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.
Download or read book Fewer Better Things written by Glenn Adamson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, a timely and passionate case for the role of the well-designed object in the digital age. Curator and scholar Glenn Adamson opens Fewer, Better Things by contrasting his beloved childhood teddy bear to the smartphones and digital tablets children have today. He laments that many children and adults are losing touch with the material objects that have nurtured human development for thousands of years. The objects are still here, but we seem to care less and know less about them. In his presentations to groups, he often asks an audience member what he or she knows about the chair the person is sitting in. Few people know much more than whether it's made of wood, plastic, or metal. If we know little about how things are made, it's hard to remain connected to the world around us. Fewer, Better Things explores the history of craft in its many forms, explaining how raw materials, tools, design, and technique come together to produce beauty and utility in handmade or manufactured items. Whether describing the implements used in a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the use of woodworking tools, or the use of new fabrication technologies, Adamson writes expertly and lovingly about the aesthetics of objects, and the care and attention that goes into producing them. Reading this wise and elegant book is a truly transformative experience.
Download or read book Material Culture in America written by Helen Sheumaker and published by ABC-CLIO. This book was released on 2008 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You can tell a lot about people by looking at their stuff - the things they make, process, and value. That is the idea that drives the field of material culture, in which scholars explore the meaning of objects of a given society. This book is the first encyclopedia to look at the study of material culture and what it reveals about life in the United States."--Jacket.
Download or read book Daily Life in the United States 1920 1939 written by David E. Kyvig and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of course people were not all alike even way back then, admits Kyvig (history, Northern Illinois U.), and there was too much distinction in location, occupation, economic circumstances, race, gender, and other factors than he can accommodate. Still, he wants to avoid the emphasis historians usually give to dramatic events, and focus instead on what daily life was like for a sampling of Americans in what we now know, but they did not, was a mere lull between world wars. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Annotation. During the 1920s and 1930s, changes in the American population, increasing urbanization, and innovations in technology exerted major influences on the daily lives of ordinary people. Explore how everyday living changed during these years when use of automobiles and home electrification first became commonplace, when radio emerged, and when cinema, with the addition of sound, became broadly popular. This enjoyable read brings the period clearly into focus. Annotation. Discover what everyday life was like for ordinary Americans during the decades of development and depression in the 1920s and 1930s. Annotation. During the 1920s and 1930s, changes in the American population, increasing urbanization, and innovations in technology exerted major influences on the daily lives of ordinary people. Explore how everyday living changed during these years when use of automobiles and home electrification first became commonplace, when radio emerged, and when cinema, with the addition of sound, became broadly popular. This enjoyable read brings the period clearly into focus.
Download or read book A Spectacular Secret written by Jacqueline Goldsby and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America's national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse culmination of racist politics. Rather, lynching—a highly visible form of social violence that has historically been shrouded in secrecy—was in fact a fundamental part of the national consciousness whose cultural logic played a pivotal role in the making of American modernity. To pursue this argument, Goldsby traces lynching's history by taking up select mob murders and studying them together with key literary works. She focuses on three prominent authors—Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson—and shows how their own encounters with lynching influenced their analyses of it. She also examines a recently assembled archive of evidence—lynching photographs—to show how photography structured the nation's perception of lynching violence before World War I. Finally, Goldsby considers the way lynching persisted into the twentieth century, discussing the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the ballad-elegies of Gwendolyn Brooks to which his murder gave rise. An empathic and perceptive work, A Spectacular Secret will make an important contribution to the study of American history and literature.
