Although numerous books have been written about the Adirondacks and Adirondackers, not very many have become regional classics. Early authors such as John Todd, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Jeptha R. Simms, S. H. Hammond, J. T. Headly, Alfred B. Street, William H.H. Murray and Verplanck Colvin earned well-deserved popularity in their day and their literary output still exerts a potent appeal more than a century later. One more volume is eminently entitled to consideration as top-bracket upstate literature...and that is Adirondack French Louie by the late Harvey L. Dunham of Utica.
After his friends Harvey Dunham and Mortimer Norton passed away, Lloyd Blankman dreamed of organizing his newspaper and magazine articles, along with articles by his friends, into a book. Sadly, Lloyd died before getting very far into the project.Author William J. O?Hern has resurrected Blankman?s vision, by joining his original writing with the enduring works of Blankman and his contemporaries in Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns, a mosaic history of the lives and traditions of the settlers of the Southern Adirondacks. Venture into the wilderness with French Louie and Alvah Dunning and learn about lesser known characters such as Old Lobb of Piseco Lake and Moose River Plains guide Slim Murdock. Travel the trapline with Richard Woods, E. J. Dailey and Burt Conklin, "the greatest trapper." Explore the turbulent waters of the West Canada Creek in search of trout, learn about the tools of the spruce gum trade, and find out why "the liars club" of Forestport called their get-togethers "parting with the dog." Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns not only fulfills Blankman?s dream, it fills a void in the recorded history of a seldom written-about region and the people who settled it.Over 80 vintage photographs!
At 33, Noah John Rondeau took to the Adirondack high peaks and lived there nearly the rest of his life. DeSormo and Rondeau himself put down on paper the experiences of an especially rugged and unusual life lived. Firsthand accounts of hermits are few in number, making this book quite an individual entry in the biography field.
Long celebrated as a symbol of the country's origins, Plymouth Rock no longer receives much national attention. In fact, historians now generally agree that the Pilgrims' storied landing on the Rock never actually took place--the tradition having emerged more than a century after the arrival of the Mayflower. In Memory's Nation, however, John Seelye is not interested in the factual truth of the landing. He argues that what truly gives Plymouth Rock its significance is more than two centuries of oratorical, literary, and artistic celebrations of the Pilgrims' arrival. Seelye traces how different political, religious, and social groups used the image of the Rock on behalf of their own specific causes and ideologies. Drawing on a wealth of speeches, paintings, and popular illustrations, he shows how Plymouth Rock changed in meaning over the years, beginning as a symbol of freedom evoked in patriotic sermons at the start of the Revolution and eventually becoming an icon of exclusion during the 1920s. Originally published in 1998. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Dr. Audry Lynch, a Steinbeck scholar, has gathered together twenty reminiscences from people who knew John Steinbeck personally. The interviews cover three periods in Steinbeck's life in California: his childhood in Salinas, his life as a fun-loving crony of Ed "Doc" Ricketts in Cannery Row, and his residence in Los Gatos as an established writer. They show a life lived fully, and a man who knew how to live. These portraits don't sugar-coat or beatify the man John Steinbeck. They are honest and frank views of a person who could be described as an odd boy, a hell-raiser, a drinker and womanizer, and a proud reclusive celebrity. Nevertheless all the people interviewed remember the man fondly, and the composite portrait that comes across is of a brilliant, talented artist and fun-loving loyal friend.
This book situates its contemplation of the nineteenth-century Trinidadian landscape in the context of an emerging sub-field of Caribbean postcolonial studies, by connecting the visual representation and indexing of colonial landscapes and peoples with the making of colonial power. Emphasis is placed on three pivotal image catalogues which span the pre and post emancipation periods and which connect the projects of British slavery and indentureship. The book unearths sketches, paintings, lithographs and engravings and analyzes them as central to the iconic framing and disciplining of colonized subjects, tropical nature and the plantation landscape. Focusing on the image works of British travellers Richard Bridgens and Charles Kingsley and Creole artist, Michel Jean Cazabon, the chapters consider how an aesthetic logic was not only illustrative but constitutive of racialized and gendered scripts of colonial landscapes, nature and identity. While these various strands of aesthetic reasoning reveal a seemingly coherent operation of colonial power, they also register the very ambiguity of these disciplinary projects in moments of uncertainty regarding the amelioration of African slavery, the emancipation of slavery, and the highly contested project of Indian indentureship in the Caribbean. The book reflects the dynamic instability of colonial inventive projects manifest in a period of experimental and troubled British rule that potentially frustrates any attempt to recover the truth of Caribbean colonial reality.
