A pictorial field guide to the world-famous Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. Mini-biographies of 500 interesting people buried in the cemetery. Detailed quadrant maps and 178 photographs of funerary sculpture and architecture. Fully illustrated dictionary of Victorian symbols. Complete index.
"Reisem tells Myron Holley's story in the context of the momentous historical events and movements that shaped his life, including the War of 1812, the building of the Erie Canal, and the struggle to abolish slavery. The author crafts a comprehensive portrait of the profound influence that this visionary man exerted, changing the course of history in New York State and indeed the nation. Among Holley's many achievements, he served as the Superintendent of Construction of the Erie Canal and founded the first Horticultural Society in Western New York, the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, and the anti-slavery Liberty Party." -- Landmark Society of Western New York homepage.
A passionate, wry, and personal book about how the greatest works of literature illuminate our lives Why do we read literature? For Arnold Weinstein, the answer is clear: literature allows us to become someone else. Literature changes us by giving us intimate access to an astonishing variety of other lives, experiences, and places across the ages. Reflecting on a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing, The Lives of Literature explores, with passion, humor, and whirring intellect, a professor’s life, the thrills and traps of teaching, and, most of all, the power of literature to lead us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. As an identical twin, Weinstein experienced early the dislocation of being mistaken for another person—and of feeling that he might be someone other than he had thought. In vivid readings elucidating the classics of authors ranging from Sophocles to James Joyce and Toni Morrison, he explores what we learn by identifying with their protagonists, including those who, undone by wreckage and loss, discover that all their beliefs are illusions. Weinstein masterfully argues that literature’s knowing differs entirely from what one ends up knowing when studying mathematics or physics or even history: by entering these characters’ lives, readers acquire a unique form of knowledge—and come to understand its cost. In The Lives of Literature, a master writer and teacher shares his love of the books that he has taught and been taught by, showing us that literature matters because we never stop discovering who we are.
From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start. Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States. Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making?and unmaking?of race.
Grief can drive you to your knees, overtake you suddenly, and challenge you over and over again to find ways to simultaneously live and mourn. Its ability to exhaust us and to shake our stability seems to be greatest on special occasions. It is these landmark days that most challenge our ability to be present and find ways to make it through the day. Mourning and Milestones: Honoring Anniversaries, Birthdays and Special Occasions After a Loved One Dies helps to ease the burden of invention for grievers who are searching for ways to both honor their loss and live in the present. Widow, and bereavement group facilitator Kathleen Fraser shares her struggle finding ways to meet the challenges of these difficult days after the death of her husband. Based upon her own experiences with diminished capacity, fear of getting lost in grief, and a general sense of unmooring, Kathleen offers functional strategies for planning ahead, seeking gratitude where it can be found and trusting others to help.
The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.
Hovering over her wrinkled body, Lilla realizes she didn't go to heaven. She's stuck here among the living as a ghost. That magic light never appeared to take her to her dead husband, Sam, but she vows to find a way to spend eternity with him. When she begins searching, she slams into stone walls and scares people. Her unintentional hauntings earn her legions of unwelcome fans vying to prove the existence of this new ghost. Eventually, she learns how to get around from many spirits inhabiting her new world, and even protects some living relatives. She barely survives an attack by a vicious spirit, which leaves her disfigured and cynical. As time passes, she becomes so desperate to learn how other souls cross over, she commits a frightful act.