Through the Window, Out the Door

Through the Window, Out the Door

Author: Janis P. Stout

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0817360123

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This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists. An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political. Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience. Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.


The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way

The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way

Author: Mark Awakuni-Swetland

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-01-31

Total Pages: 736

ISBN-13: 1496233964

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Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way provides a comprehensive textbook for students, scholars, and laypersons to learn to speak and understand the language of the Omaha Nation. Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Vida Woodhull Stabler, Aubrey Streit Krug, Loren Frerichs, and Rory Larson have collaborated with elder speakers, including Alberta Grant Canby, Emmaline Walker Sanchez, Marcella Woodhull Cavou, and Donna Morris Parker, to write this book. The original and creative pedagogical method used in this textbook--teaching the Omaha language through Omaha culture--consists of a structured series of lesson plans. It is the result of a generous collaboration between the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Umóⁿhoⁿ Language and Culture Center at Umóⁿhoⁿ Nation Public School in Macy, Nebraska. The method draws on the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of Awakuni-Swetland to illustrate the Omaha values of balance and integration. The contents are shaped into two parts, each of which complements the other--just as the Earth and Sky do. This textbook features an introduction by Awakuni-Swetland on the history and phonology of the Omaha language; lessons from the Umóⁿhoⁿ Language and Culture Center at Macy, with a writing system quick sheet; situation quick sheets; lessons on games; lessons on spring, summer, fall, and winter; an Omaha language resource list; and a glossary in the standard Macy orthography of the Omaha language. The textbook also includes cultural lessons in the language by Awakuni-Swetland and lessons from the Omaha language class at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Omaha Language and the Omaha Way offers a linguistic foundation for tribal members, students, scholars, and laypersons, featuring Omaha community lessons, the standard Macy orthography, and UNL orthography all under one cover.


Eugenic Nation

Eugenic Nation

Author: Alexandra Minna Stern

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0520285069

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"With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details that demonstrate that the story is far from over. Alexandra Minna Stern explores the unauthorized sterilization of female inmates in California state prisons and ongoing reparations for North Carolina victims of sterilization, as well as the topics of race-based intelligence tests, school segregation, the U.S. Border Patrol, tropical medicine, the environmental movement, and opposition to better breeding. Radically new and relevant, this edition draws from recently uncovered historical records to demonstrate patterns of racial bias in California's sterilization program and to recover personal experiences of reproductive injustice. Stern connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies"--Provided by publisher.


Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Author: Janis P. Stout

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2000-12-29

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 9780813933603

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Previous biographies of Willa Cather have either recycled the traditional view of a writer detached from social issues whose work supported a wholesome view of a vanished America, or they have focused solely on revelations about her private life. Challenging these narrow interpretations, Janis P. Stout presents a Cather whose life and quietly modernist work fully reflected the artistic and cultural tensions of her day. A product of the South--she was born in Virginia--Cather went west with her family at an early age, a participant in the aspirations of Manifest Destiny. Known for her celebrations of immigrants on the prairie, she in fact shared many of the ethnic suspicions of her contemporaries. Loved by a popular audience for her pieties of family and religion, she was in her youth a freethinker who resisted traditional patterns for women's lives, cutting her hair like a boy's and dressing in men's clothing. Seen by critics since the 1930s as a practitioner of an escapist formalism, she was, in Stout's view, profoundly ambivalent about most of the important questions she faced. Cather structured her writing to control her uncertainty and project a serenity she did not in fact feel. Cather has at times been viewed as a writer preoccupied with the past whose literary project had little to do with the intellectual currents of her time. On the contrary, Stout argues, Cather was a full participant in the doubts and conflicts of twentieth-century modernity. Only in recoil from her distress at these conflicts did she turn to overt celebrations of the past and construct a retiring, crotchety persona. The Cather that emerges from Stout's treatment is a modernist conservative in the mold of T. S. Eliot, though more responsive to her time and simultaneously less assured in her pronouncements. Cather's sexuality, too, is more complicated in Stout's version than previous biographers have allowed. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World presents a woman and an artist who fully exemplifies the ambivalence, the foreboding, and above all the complexity that we associate with the twentieth-century mind.


Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

Author: Stephen Knadler

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1135247188

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Through a reading of periodicals, memoirs, speeches, and fiction from the antebellum period to the Harlem Renaissance, this study re-examines various myths about a U.S. progressive history and about an African American counter history in terms of race, democracy, and citizenship. Reframing 19th century and early 20th-century African-American cultural history from the borderlands of the U.S. empire where many African Americans lived, worked and sought refuge, Knadler argues that these writers developed a complicated and layered transnational and creolized political consciousness that challenged dominant ideas of the nation and citizenship. Writing from multicultural contact zones, these writers forged a "new black politics"—one that anticipated the current debate about national identity and citizenship in a twenty-first century global society. As Knadler argues, they defined, created, and deployed an alternative political language to re-imagine U.S. citizenship and its related ideas of national belonging, patriotism, natural rights, and democratic agency.


Passionate Nation

Passionate Nation

Author: James L. Haley

Publisher: University of North Texas Press

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 1574418688

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Utilizing many sources new to publication, James L. Haley delivers a most readable and enjoyable narrative history of Texas, told through stories—the words and recollections of Texans who actually lived the state’s spectacular history. From Jim Bowie’s and Davy Crockett’s myth-enshrouded stand at the Alamo, to the Mexican-American War, and to Sam Houston’s heroic failed effort to keep Texas in the Union during the Civil War, the transitions in Texas history have often been as painful and tense as the “normal” periods in between. Here, in all of its epic grandeur, is the story of Texas as its own passionate nation. “Texas native Haley does an outstanding job of narrating the outsized and dramatic history of the Lone Star State. John Steinbeck observed, ‘Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts.’ Cognizant of this, Haley takes pains to separate folklore from fact. He's a good storyteller, but then it's hard to go wrong with the colorful characters he has to work with: pioneer nationalists Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, a wagonload of liquored-up turn-of-the-century oilmen and such latter-day heroes as Lyndon Johnson, John Connally and Janis Joplin.”—Publishers Weekly Starred Review


The Pawnee Nation

The Pawnee Nation

Author: Judith A. Boughter

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780810849907

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The Pawnees have appeared in many historical documents, from early Spanish accounts and journals of American explorers and adventurers to fascinating accounts of daily life by Quaker agents and Presbyterian missionaries during the nineteenth century. In recent years, Pawnee activists have taken the lead in the repatriation struggle and have fought for respectful burials of their ancestors' remains. This is the first comprehensive bibliography of the Pawnees, examining a wide spectrum of books and journals on Pawnee history, culture, and ethnology. Chapters are devoted to topics such as: Pawnee archaeology and anthropology, Myths and legends, Social organization, Material culture, Music and dance, Religion, Education, Repatriation. Entries are thoroughly annotated and evaluated, making this up-to-date research tool essential for historians, ethnologists, and other Pawnee researchers.