Uncommon Friends

Uncommon Friends

Author: James Draper Newton

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780156926201

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Newton engagingly recalls a lifetime of friendship with five giants of the twentieth century. Foreword by Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Index; photographs.


And So It Goes

And So It Goes

Author: Charles J. Shields

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 142997379X

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A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011 The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature. In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no ("A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer"). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: "O.K." For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut's last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters. And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut's concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut's works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.


Portraits of Resistance

Portraits of Resistance

Author: Jennifer Van Horn

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0300257635

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A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait's importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people's relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.


Elusive Archives

Elusive Archives

Author: Martin Brückner

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-08-27

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 1644532042

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The essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor. This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.


Freedom Has a Face

Freedom Has a Face

Author: Kirt Von Daacke

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0813933099

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Argues that the inhabitants of Albemarle County (in rural Piedmont Virginia), white, black, and mixed-race treated each other more on the basis of a person's reputations than on the basis of state laws requiring restrictions on black freedom. Examples are drawn from law proceedings, (blacks did testify in courts despite its being against the law), marriages, residence, and other matters.


Edgar Payne

Edgar Payne

Author: Scott A. Shields

Publisher: Pomegranate Communications

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780764960536

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One of the most gifted of the historic California plein-air painters, Edgar Alwin Payne (1883-1947) utilized the animated brushwork, vibrant palette, and shimmering light of Impressionism, but his powerful imagery was unique among artists of his generation. While his contemporaries favored a quieter, more idyllic representation of the natural landscape, Payne was devoted to subjects of rugged beauty. Largely self-taught, he found inspiration and instruction in nature itself. His majestic, vital landscapes, informed by his reverence for the natural world, are imbued with an internal force and an active dynamism. An avid traveler, Payne was among the first painters to capture the vigor of the Sierra Nevada, and his travels through the Southwest resulted in equally magnificent depictions of the desert. In Europe he rendered the towering peaks of the Alps and the colorful harbors of France and Italy. His unending quest to convey the "unspeakably sublime" in his landscapes won him widespread acclaim-one prominent critic called him a "poet who sings in colors." Released in conjunction with the traveling exhibition organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey presents more than 125 reproductions of Payne's paintings, drawings, and decorative arts, as well as rarely seen photographs from the artist's travels and selections from his personal collection of compositional studies. Essays by Peter H. Hassrick, Lisa N. Peters, Scott A. Shields, Jean Stern, and Patricia Trenton trace Payne's development as he traveled the world, discovering magnificence in diverse settings ranging from the California coast, the Sierra Nevada, and the stark Southwest desert to the Swiss Alps and the harbors and waterways of Europe. A richly researched chronology by Shields presents the biographical influences that shaped Payne's illustrious career.