Download or read book The American Adam written by R.W.B. Lewis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-09-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectual history is viewed in this book as a series of "great conversations"—dramatic dialogues in which a culture's spokesmen wrestle with the leading questions of their times. In nineteenth-century America the great argument centered about De Crèvecoeur's "new man," the American, an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Mr. Lewis reveals this vital preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind, illuminating history and theology as well as art, shaping the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. He traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and others, and in an Epilogue he exposes their continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.
Download or read book The American Adam written by R. W. B. Lewis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1955 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first really original book on the classical period in American writing that has appeared for a long time.
Download or read book Revisions of the American Adam written by Jonathan Mitchell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of the American Adam is a prevalent myth in US cultural history. Defined by R.W.B. Lewis in 1955 as "the hero of new adventure . . .an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources", the figure is discernable in the American renaissance writers and in the imagery of the frontiersman, cowboy, gangster as well as in the heroes of US action movies. Focusing on the American Adam as a paradigm of masculine identity formation, this monograph examines how this fantasy of an imaginary ideal identity has held an ideological sway over US identity in the main. Taking in a range of cultural texts, Jonathan Mitchell's study explores the complexities and contradictions of Adam's 'real' condition of existence to show how the paradigm influences both masculinity and subsequently hegemonic US identity as represented throughout twentieth-century US culture.
Download or read book America Love It Or Leave It So I Left written by Adam Bilzerian and published by Liberted Publications. This book was released on 2010-07-04 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famed professional poker player Adam Bilzerian had enough of the American government. He hated how it borrows trillions of dollars to fund unnecessary wars and how it imprisons its people for petty crimes; he hated how it interferes in the lives of citizens like his father, who was accused of financial impropriety and jailed in the 1980s. So, Adam did what many others have threatened to do, but few have acutally done: he left the United States for good. Sickened by American leaders' betrayel of the founder fathers' ideals and frustrated by the average citizen's inability to affect change, he gave up his citizenship and moved permanently to the Caribbean.
Download or read book Critical essays on the mith of the american Adam written by María Eugenia & Díaz and published by Universidad de Salamanca. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Adam Smith s America written by Glory M. Liu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention. Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher. Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.
Download or read book The Organs of Sense written by Adam Ehrlich Sachs and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is only for people who like joy, absurdity, passion, genius, dry wit, youthful folly, amusing historical arcana, or telescopes." —Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors and American Innovations In 1666, an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all of Europe into total darkness for four seconds. This astronomer is rumored to be using the longest telescope ever built, but he is also known to be blind—and not only blind, but incapable of sight, both his eyes having been plucked out some time before under mysterious circumstances. Is he mad? Or does he, despite this impairment, have an insight denied the other scholars of his day? These questions intrigue the young Gottfried Leibniz—not yet the world-renowned polymath who would go on to discover calculus, but a nineteen-year-old whose faith in reason is shaky at best. Leibniz sets off to investigate the astronomer’s claim, and over the three hours remaining before the eclipse occurs—or fails to occur—the astronomer tells the scholar the haunting and hilarious story behind his strange prediction: a tale that ends up encompassing kings and princes, family squabbles, obsessive pursuits, insanity, philosophy, art, loss, and the horrors of war. Written with a tip of the hat to the works of Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka, The Organs of Sense stands as a towering comic fable: a story about the nature of perception, and the ways the heart of a loved one can prove as unfathomable as the stars.
Download or read book American Messiahs False Prophets of a Damned Nation written by Adam Morris and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 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.
Download or read book The Rites of Assent written by Sacvan Bercovitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rites of Assent examines the cultural strategies through which "America" served as a vehicle simultaneously for diversity and cohesion, fusion and fragmentation. Taking an ethnographic, cross-cultural approach, The Rites of Assent traces the meanings and purposes of "America" back to the colonial typology of mission, and specifically (in chapters on Puritan rhetoric, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and the movement from Revival to Revolution) to the legacy of early New England.
Download or read book American Insecurity written by Adam Seth Levine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why economic insecurity spurs so little collective political action Americans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn't happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, American Insecurity sheds light on the public's inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals—asking them to devote money or time to politics—remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and nonparticipation. Adam Seth Levine explains why the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is therefore quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged. Scrutinizing the foundations of political behavior, American Insecurity offers a new perspective on collective participation.
Download or read book Spain In Our Hearts written by Adam Hochschild and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
Download or read book Pizza A Slice of American History written by Liz Barrett and published by Voyageur Press (MN). This book was released on 2014-09 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how this beloved food became the apple of our collective eye-or, perhaps more precisely, the pepperoni of our pie. Pizza journalist Liz Barrett explores how it is that pizza came to and conquered North America and how it evolved into different forms across the continent. Each chapter investigates a different pie: Chicago's famous deep-dish, New Haven's white clam pie, California's health-conscious varieties, New York's Sicilian and Neapolitan, the various styles that have emerged in the Midwest, and many others. The components of each pie-crust, sauce, spices, and much more-are dissected and celebrated, and recipes from top pizzerias provide readers with the opportunity to make and sample the pies themselves.
Download or read book Good Night America written by Adam Gamble and published by Good Night Books. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young children are invited to explore the wonders of America before bed with this beautifully illustrated board book. Simple, rhythmic language lulls little ones to sleep as they watch diverse people engage in community-oriented activities and journey to some of the nation’s majestic natural treasures—including the Everglades, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and redwood forests. Moving from the morning and spring through nighttime and winter, each image marks a specific period during the day and an associated season, making this book a perfect introduction to the concept of the passage of time.
Download or read book The American Adam written by Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blood from the Sky written by Adam Jortner and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods—and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo. In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that—as early Americans would have said—needed to be seen to be believed.
Download or read book Adam Sandler written by Bill Crawford and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the comedy clubs of New York to his big break on "Saturday Night Live" to block-buster films like "Big Daddy" and "Little Nicky" Adam Sandler has left America howling in their seats and peeing in their pants. Sandler has emerged as the decade's most unstoppable comedic-and the ladies love him! But how many people know the story behind this lovable comedic prodigy's ascent to fame? Bill Crawford takes you back to Sandler's childhood in a small New Hampshire Town, where his stand-up routines were always hits with his classmates but not necessarily the teachers! When Adam left his small town to take on the big city at New York University, it wasn't always easy, Sandler performed as a street musician crooning Springsteen songs to commuters, but he was destined to succeed. From his long friendship with then college classmate Tim Herlihy, who went on to co-write all Sandler's movies, to being discovered by Dennis Miller and eventually becoming America's funnyman, Bill Crawford looks behind the headlines and tabloid tales to shed new light on this decade's comedic darling.
Download or read book Imagine Me Gone written by Adam Haslett and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. "Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"-Wall Street Journal "Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone , Haslett has reached another level."-New York Times Book Review
