In her fiction, Jessie Brown Pounds preserved the flavor of Ohio's rural village culture as the nineteenth century drew to a close. This anthology rediscovers Pounds's varied works and reminds modern students that Middle-Western culture included women writers as social critics and mythmakers. Included are short stories, sketches, one undated short story published posthumously in 1921, and Rachael Sylvestre, a first-person historical novel written in 1904.
An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction—the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators. Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.
This volume collects essays and documents from a wide selection of sources--many now out of print and difficult to locate--to provide a highly readable story of the settlement and development of the "New Connecticut" region of Ohio. Four divisions in the book logically organize the social, economic, and political study of the region: "Conquest and Settlement: Native Americans to New Englanders"; "The Pioneers: Town Building, Society, and the Emergence of an Economy"; "The Transition Years; Slavery, the Civil War, and the Reserve in National Politics, 1850-1880"; and "A Changing Legacy: Industrialism, Ethnicity, and the Age of Reform." The volume ends in 1920, when the unique features of the Western Reserve of Ohio--the architecture, the landmarks, the New England lifestyle--had largely faded into American history as a result of industrialism, urbanism, and the pressure of a changing ethnic base.
Why a strong mission and inspired leadership are vital to the success of America’s colleges and universities In 1998, soon after assuming the presidency of Tulane University, Scott Cowen was confronted with a setback. Despite an undefeated football season and putting the best financial deal on the table, Cowen was unable to retain the school's football coach. The coach wanted something the president didn't have--a football program so popular, as the coach put it, that fans would line up their Winnebagos on Wednesdays in anticipation of Saturday games. In that moment, Cowen improbably found himself in the entertainment business—and his university was deemed wanting. At a time when schools seem overrun by sports programs, spiraling costs, and absurd ranking systems, Winnebagos on Wednesdays argues that colleges and universities of all stripes and sizes can achieve their educational aims if they possess two things: visionary leadership and a strong mission. Cowen, named one of the nation's top university presidents by Time magazine in 2009, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the critical demands faced by many education leaders. He profiles a range of situations, from how Diana Natalicio of the University of Texas at El Paso expanded a school serving a specific demographic into an academic powerhouse to how Michael Sorrell shifted Paul Quinn College's mission to urban entrepreneurship in order to save the institution. Cowen also draws from his own hard-won experiences, including the rebuilding of Tulane and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the decision to maintain Tulane's football program. He shows how crucial choices in tough situations shape organizations, for better or ill. A sweeping overview of the higher education landscape, Winnebagos on Wednesdays demonstrates that the courage of transformative leadership is essential for colleges and universities to remain vital.
Simeon and Katharine Prior were married 10 months before the end of the American Revolution and for twenty years they made a life in New England, where their ancestors had lived since 1634. And then in 1802, Simeon having heard about the land beyond the Ohio during his service in the American Revolution, suddenly traded his land for a track of wilderness identified only as lot 25 in the Connecticut Western Reserve. He along with Katharine and their ten children spent more than forty days traveling to their new home on America's western frontier. The Prior Family established their settlement in 1802. And then almost nobody else settled in this remote location of the Cuyahoga Valley wilderness, directly adjacent to Indian territory, until after the Treaty of Fort Industry was signed. between the United States and the Indian nations of Wyandot (Huron), Ottawa, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Munsee, Lenape (Delaware), Potawatomi, and Shawnee on July 4, 1805. Significant numbers of settlers did not arrive until after the War of 1812. For the Priors, this meant their isolation at the edge of the frontier continued for ten years after their arrival. Simeon's musings about what lead him and Katharine to move their family into what they knew to be harm's way is poignant: "What of the many chances against us and should we survive the perils of the boisterous lake and the distressing sickness usually attendant in a new settlement, we might fall before the tomahawk and scalping knife, for well I knew that many a settlement was established in blood." Going further back in this family's history, it is sobering to think about what has transpired in the 385 years since these first pioneer families arrived on the shores of what is now the United States. The New World that the first colonists and their offspring found was a fundamentally difficult and generally violent place all the way up until after the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the American military finally began to focus outside of its borders. Bloody conflicts large and small on American soil between rival colonial powers, rival colonies, communities, neighbors, and indigenous peoples all shaped the colonial era and the first hundred years of United States history. To paint this span of time with a single brush that portrays in simplistic terms what happened or how people thought and behaved is astonishingly deceptive. What is amazing is that anyone survived at all. But survive they did.
Tucked into the southwestern corner of Cuyahoga County, Olmsted Falls and Olmsted Township are steeped in rich Ohio history. Dating back to the late eighteenth century, the two communities grew to become a place of idyllic beauty and fascinating stories. Uncover the myth of the infamous letter "a" in the Olmsted name, and learn how Olmsted became a leader in public education in Cuyahoga County. Weather battles over saloons and attempts to annex all or part of Olmsted Township to neighboring communities, and survive Rocky River floods that destroyed bridges, dams, mills and factories. Join Bruce Banks and Jim Wallace as they provide a captivating account of these two historical communities.
A firsthand account of the immigrant experience in America Frank Mendez, a child of Mexican immigrants begins his memoir with the story of his father's harrowing migration from Mexico to Texas in 1920 as he escaped from Zapata's guerrrillos and continues with his story of growing up in northeast Ohio. He recounts the Mendez family's experience with the Depression, living in the Lorain, Ohio barrio, labor issues, racism, and World War II. Mendez dropped out of high school in 1943 and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he served twenty-two months in the Pacific theatre. When he returned to Lorain, he received his high school diploma, bachelor's and master's degrees, and a professional engineering license. With an easy, engaging style, Mendez deals directly with the matter of personal identity, addressing the issues that confronted him as he tried to sort out his sometimes conflicting Mexican and American heritage. You Can't Be Mexican comments on the social and political issues of the twentieth century and will appeal to those interested in immigrant studies and ethnicity studies and modern social history. " Every immigrant group which has ever come to this country has its own story to tell. Many of the stories have common threads, however, and Mendez's detailed recollection of the personalities, the emotions, the disappointments and joys relate to the understanding that this is a country of immigrants, whose experience is woven into a shared culture. I know others will enjoy this book as much as I did."--Ambler H. Moss Jr., Professor of International Studies, University of Miami (former U.S. Ambassador to Panama, 1978- 1982)
Designing Victory tracks Madison from his native Cleveland and several points further south in his extraordinary journey to a first-class education in domestic and international institutions. One prize at the end of Madison's struggles was an opportunity to collaborate with and learn from virtually every one of the twentieth century's most storied architects, including Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson, Walter Gropius, and I.M. Pei. Among Madison's signature design achievements are the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal, the Engineering & Nuclear Facility at Tuskegee Institute, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Designing Victory also recounts Madison's adventures in love and war-he's a Buffalo Soldier and a Purple Heart medal awardee-and explores his rise to become a cultural and civic leader in Cleveland. Designing Victory tells the tale of a talented, courageous man who learned early on how to win the long game and become one of the most celebrated living architects by refusing to listen to those who told him that a black architect would starve.
