Download or read book Myths America Lives By written by Richard T. Hughes and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six myths lie at the heart of the American experience. Taken as aspirational, four of those myths remind us of our noblest ideals, challenging us to realize our nation's promise while galvanizing the sense of hope and unity we need to reach our goals. Misused, these myths allow for illusions of innocence that fly in the face of white supremacy, the primal American myth that stands at the heart of all the others.
Download or read book American Samurai written by Craig M. Cameron and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the cultural dynamics of ground combat.
Download or read book Myth and Imagination in the American Story written by Jane MacLaren Walsh and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Modern Myths written by Philip Ball and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Modern Myths, brilliant science communicator Philip Ball spins a new yarn. From novels and comic books to B-movies, it is an epic exploration of literature, new media and technology, the nature of storytelling, and the making and meaning of our most important tales. Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time—fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them—and still living them—today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman, many stories written in the past few centuries are commonly, perhaps glibly, called “modern myths.” But Ball argues that we should take that idea seriously. Our stories of Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Sherlock Holmes are doing the kind of cultural work that the ancient myths once did. Through the medium of narratives that all of us know in their basic outline and which have no clear moral or resolution, these modern myths explore some of our deepest fears, dreams, and anxieties. We keep returning to these tales, reinventing them endlessly for new uses. But what are they really about, and why do we need them? What myths are still taking shape today? And what makes a story become a modern myth? In The Modern Myths, Ball takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our collective imagination, asking what some of its most popular stories reveal about the nature of being human in the modern age.
Download or read book Death by Petticoat written by Mary Miley Theobald and published by Andrews Mcmeel+ORM. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This myth-busting compendium sets the record straight on American history, from famous-but-false legends to weird-but-true stories. American history is full of oft-repeated errors and outright fabrications—as well as truths that are stranger than fiction. Collaborating with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Mary Miley Theobald has uncovered the real stories behind many well-known myth-understandings. Did pregnant women really seclude themselves indoors? Were uneven stairs made to trip up burglars? Did people only bathe once a year? Death by Petticoat reveals the truth about these and many other funny, surprising, and strange misapprehensions of history.
Download or read book The Myth of America written by Viola Sachs and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "The Myth of America".
Download or read book Heaven in the American Imagination written by Gary Scott Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.
Download or read book The Amish in the American Imagination written by David Weaver-Zercher and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enveloped in mystery, Amish culture has remained a captivating topic within mainstream American culture. In this volume, David Weaver-Zercher explores how Americans throughout the 20th century reacted to and interpreted the Amish. Through an examination of a variety of visual and textual sources, Weaver-Zercher explores how diverse groups - ranging from Mennonites to Hollywood producers - represented and understood the Amish.
Download or read book The Mythmaking Frame of Mind written by James Burkhart Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen essays, written by prominent cultural and intellectual historians, illustrate some of the directions of cultural and intellectual history as it is practiced in the United States. The essays are organized chronologically with many interconnecting themes. These themes include the rise of commercial culture, the rise of city and urban life, the formation of the middle class, and the ways in which social myths (the myth of Santa Claus, for example) function to interpret the meanings of modern life.
Download or read book The Myth of the American Dream written by D. L. Mayfield and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power—the central values of the American dream. But are they compatible with Jesus' command to love our neighbor as ourselves? In essays grouped around these four values, D. L. Mayfield asks us to pay attention to the ways they shape our own choices, and the ways those choices affect our neighbors.
Download or read book Johnny Appleseed written by Howard Means and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Finally, the cliché is peeled away and the essence of this utterly American character is so revealing. John Chapman comes alive here and it is a thrilling experience to escape the specific gravity of the decades of myth” (Ken Burns). This portrait of Johnny Appleseed restores the flesh-and-blood man beneath the many myths. It captures the boldness of an iconic American and the sadness of his last years, as the frontier marched past him, ever westward. And it shows how death liberated the legend and made of Johnny a barometer of the nation’s feelings about its own heroic past and the supposed Eden it once had been. Howard Means does for America’s inner frontier what Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage did for its western one.
Download or read book Postcolonial Love Poem written by Natalie Diaz and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Download or read book Mythic Imagination Today written by Terry Marks-Tarlow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythic Imagination Today is an illustrated guide to the interpenetration of mythology and science throughout the ages. This monograph brings alive our collective need for story as a guide to the rules, roles, and relationships of everyday life.
Download or read book Virgin Land written by Henry Nash Smith and published by Cambridge : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1950 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer--in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizesthe imaginative expression of Westernmyths and symbols in literature withtheir role in contemporary politics,economics, and society, embodiedin such forms as the idea of ManifestDestiny, the conflict in the Americanmind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progressand civilization on the other, theHomestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War. The myths of the American Westthat found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remaina part of every American's heritage,and Smith, with his insightinto their power and significance,makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.
Download or read book Madness at the Gates of the City written by Barry Spector and published by Regent Press Printers & Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By looking at American history, politics, and popular culture through the lenses of Greek mythology, indigenous wisdom, and archetypal psychology, the author discovers new hope in very old ways of thinking.
Download or read book The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest written by Paul Ashdown and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insightful exploration of the relentless myth of the famous Civil War general, this volume scrutinizes the collective public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest as it has evolved through the press, memoirs, biographies, and popular culture.
Download or read book The Myths That Made America written by Heike Paul and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-08-31 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.
