Building the American Republic combines centuries of perspectives and voices into a fluid narrative of the United States. Throughout their respective volumes, Harry L. Watson and Jane Dailey take care to integrate varied scholarly perspectives and work to engage a diverse readership by addressing what we all share: membership in a democratic republic, with joint claims on its self-governing tradition. It will be one of the first peer-reviewed American history textbooks to be offered completely free in digital form. Visit buildingtheamericanrepublic.org for more information. Volume 1 starts at sea and ends on the battlefield. Beginning with the earliest Americans and the arrival of strangers on the eastern shore, it then moves through colonial society to the fight for independence and the construction of a federalist republic. From there, it explains the renegotiations and refinements that took place as a new nation found its footing, and it traces the actions that eventually rippled into the Civil War. This volume goes beyond famous names and battles to incorporate politics, economics, science, arts, and culture. And it shows that issues that resonate today—immigration, race, labor, gender roles, and the power of technology—have been part of the American fabric since the very beginning.

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A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping

Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.

Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.

Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love.

Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain....

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A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping

Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.

Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.

Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love.

Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain....

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Ernst Lubitsch, the German film director who left Berlin for Hollywood in 1923, is best remembered for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka, featuring Greta Garbo. Kristin Thompson's study focuses on Lubitsch's silent films from the years between 1918 and 1927, tracing the impact this director had on consolidating classical Hollywood filmmaking. She gives a new assessment of the stylistic two-way traffic between the American and the German film industries, after World War I each other's strongest rival in Europe. By 1919, Lubitsch had emerged as the finest proponent of the German studio style: sophisticated, urbane and thoroughly professionalized. He was quick to absorb 'American' innovations and stylistic traits, becoming the unique master of both systems and contributing to the golden ages of the American as well as the German cinema. Utilizing Lubitsch's silent films as a key to two great national cinemas, Thompson's meticulously illustrated and extensively researched book goes beyond an authorial study and breaks new ground in cinema history. Click on the PDF button to download the table of contents

De succesvolle Duitse filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, die in de twintiger jaren Berlijn verruilde voor Hollywood, is vandaag de dag nog steeds bekend om meesterwerken als Ninotchka en The Shop around the Corner. De beroemde 'Lubitsch Touch', zoals men zijn unieke stijl karakteriseerde, werd bedacht door slimme studiobazen om Lubitsch als merknaam te poneren. In Herr Lubitsch goes to Hollywood bestudeert Kristin Thompson de stomme films die Ernst Lubitsch maakte tussen 1918 en 1927. Zijn vroege werk biedt een uniek uitgangspunt voor een vergelijking tussen de klassieke Hollywoord films uit die jaren en de Duitse films die gemaakt werden na de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Het resultaat is een diepgaande analyse van twee belangrijke filmstijlen in de levendige beginjaren van de filmgeschiedenis. Klik op de knop PDF om de inhoudsopgave in te zien.

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The end of slavery in the United States inspired conflicting visions of the future for all Americans in the nineteenth century, black and white, slave and free. The black child became a figure upon which people projected their hopes and fears about slavery’s abolition. As a member of the first generation of African Americans raised in freedom, the black child—freedom’s child—offered up the possibility that blacks might soon enjoy the same privileges as whites: landownership, equality, autonomy. Yet for most white southerners, this vision was unwelcome, even frightening. Many northerners, too, expressed doubts about the consequences of abolition for the nation and its identity as a white republic. From the 1850s and the Civil War to emancipation and the official end of Reconstruction in 1877, Raising Freedom’s Child examines slave emancipation and opposition to it as a far-reaching, national event with profound social, political, and cultural consequences. Mary Niall Mitchell analyzes multiple views of the black child—in letters, photographs, newspapers, novels, and court cases—to demonstrate how Americans contested and defended slavery and its abolition. With each chapter, Mitchell narrates an episode in the lives of freedom’s children, from debates over their education and labor to the future of racial classification and American citizenship.Raising Freedom’s Child illustrates how intensely the image of the black child captured the imaginations of many Americans during the upheavals of the Civil War era. Through public struggles over the black child, Mitchell argues, Americans by turns challenged and reinforced the racial inequality fostered under slavery in the United States. Only with the triumph of segregation in public schools in 1877 did the black child lose her central role in the national debate over civil rights, a role she would not play again until the 1950s.

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In a collection of essays based on direct interview research, Say it Loud! amplifies the voice of ordinary African-Americans as they respond to media presentations of Black society. Each chapter investigates ways in which African-American identity is constructed, maintained, and represented in mass media and how these portrayals are interpreted within the African-American community. Together the essays cover a vast array of media messages in television, film, music, print and cyberspace. From the Boondocks comic strip, The Cosby Show, and The Color Purple to the music of rap artist DMX and original testimony from a Menace II Society copycat killer, the material included in this volume is examined as context for the African-American struggle to achieve definition, meaning, and power. Say it Loud! offers rare insight into how this struggle is both helped and hindered by the representation of race in our media culture.

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During a trip to Europe, Christopher Newman, a wealthy American businessman, asks the charming Claire de Cintré to be his wife. To his dismay, he receives an icy reception from the heads of her family, who find Newman to be a vulgar example of the American privileged class. Brilliantly combining elements of comedy, tragedy, romance and melodrama, this tale of thwarted desire vividly contrasts nineteenth-century American and European manners. Oxford's edition ofThe American, which was first published in 1877, is the only one that uses James' revised 1907 text. About the Series:For over 100 yearsOxford World's Classicshas made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Michael Keren traces the political lives and messages of some of the twentieth century's greatest literary characters in this insightful and jargon-free book of literary criticism. Hans Castorp (Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain), Joseph K. (Franz Kafka's The Trial), John the Savage (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), Winston Smith (George Orwell's 1984), Ralph (William Golding's Lord of the Flies), Merusault (Albert Camus's The Stranger), Ida Ramundo (Elsa Morante's History), and Chauncey Gardiner (Jerzy Kosinski's Being There) participate in ideological, technological, and organizational projects of the twentieth century. Keren observes these infamous characters' behaviours and attitudes while they struggle through world wars, the rise and fall of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the development of the atomic bomb, de-colonization, the Cold War, and globalization. Here is a refreshing contribution to civil society theory that makes a pioneering effort to cross the boundaries between politics, literature, and culture. A study of the human condition via literature, The Citizen's Voice expounds the key features of a "good citizen" while offering a perfect discussion piece for courses in political theory, politics and literature, and history.

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Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--"The Colonizer Abroad" claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature of imperialism. This book applies postcolonial theory to the travel writing of some of America's best-known authors, revealing the ways in which America's travel fiction and nonfiction have both reflected and shaped society.

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Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her as a major novelist. The Saturday Review wrote that she had 'assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred page novel', but concluded that the book was 'brilliantly written', and 'should be read as a parable'. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the Midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary, and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father's money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. Wharton was re-creating an environment she knew intimately, and Undine's education for social success is chronicled in meticulous detail. The novel superbly captures the world of post-Civil War America, as ruthless in its social ambitions as in its business and politics.

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Published in 1904, The Golden Bowl is the last completed novel of Henry James. In it, the widowed American Adam Verver is in Europe with his daughter Maggie. They are rich, finely appreciative of European art and culture, and deeply attached to each other. Maggie has all the innocent charm of so many of Jamess young American heroines. She is engaged to Amerigo, an impoverished Italian prince; he must marry money, and as his name suggests, an American heiress is the perfect solution. The golden bowl, first seen in a London curio shop, is used emblematically throughout the novel. Not solid gold but gilded crystal, the perfect surface conceals a flaw; it is symbolic of the relationship between the main characters and of the world in which they move. Also in Europe is an old friend of Maggies, Charlotte Stant, a girl of great charm and independence, and Maggie is blindly ignorant of the fact that she and the prince are lovers. Maggie and Amerigo are married and have a son, but Maggie remains dependent for real intimacy on her father, and she and Amerigo grow increasingly apart. Feeling that her father has suffered a loss through her marriage, Maggie decides to find him a wife, and her choice falls on Charlotte. Charlottes affair with the prince continues and Adam Verver seems to her to be a suitable and convenient match. When Maggie herself finally comes into possession of the golden bowl, the flaw is revealed to her, and, inadvertently, the truth about Amerigo and Charlotte. Fanny Assingham (an older woman, aware of the truth from the beginning) deliberately breaks the bowl, and this marks the end of Maggies innocence. She is no pathetic heroine-victim, however. Abstaining from outcry and outrage she instead takes the reins and maneuvers people and events. She still wants to be with Amerigo, but he must continue to be worth having and they must all be saved further humiliations and indignities. To be a wife she must cease to be a daughter; Adam Verver and the unhappy Charlotte are banished forever to America, and the new Maggie will establish a real marriage with Amerigo.

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One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, "The Innocents Abroad" is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the "New Barbarians" 'encounter with the "Old World." Twains hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with sharp with the chauvinistic and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick convert to culture. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of Europe and the Holy Land dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously uses his travelogue - as Leslie A. Fiedler points out - to search out the "archetypal differences" between Americans and Europeans - the "American identity." As Mrs. Fiedler points out in his pungent Afterword, this was a quest that was to obsess Mark Twain's literary career: "over and over, he was to return to the themes of "The Innocents Abroad..." a classic work which, without ceasing to be amusing, marks a ciritcal point in the development of our literature, and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we Americans are."

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One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, "The Innocents Abroad" is Mark Twain's irreverent and incisive commentary on the "New Barbarians" 'encounter with the "Old World." Twains hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with sharp with the chauvinistic and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick convert to culture. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of Europe and the Holy Land dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously uses his travelogue - as Leslie A. Fiedler points out - to search out the "archetypal differences" between Americans and Europeans - the "American identity." As Mrs. Fiedler points out in his pungent Afterword, this was a quest that was to obsess Mark Twain's literary career: "over and over, he was to return to the themes of "The Innocents Abroad..." a classic work which, without ceasing to be amusing, marks a ciritcal point in the development of our literature, and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we Americans are."

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- If the management of the Hotel Guelph, that London landmark, could have been present at three o'clock one afternoon in early January in the sitting-room of the suite which they had assigned to Mrs Elmer Ford, late of New York, they might well have felt a little aggrieved. Philosophers among them would possibly have meditated on the limitations of human effort; for they had done their best for Mrs Ford. They had housed her well. They had fed her well. They had caused inspired servants to anticipate her every need. Yet here she was, in the midst of all these aids to a contented mind, exhibiting a restlessness and impatience of her surroundings that would have been noticeable in a caged tigress or a prisoner of the Bastille. She paced the room. She sat down, picked up a novel, dropped it, and, rising, resumed her patrol. The clock striking, she compared it with her watch, which she had consulted two minutes before. She opened the locket that hung by a gold chain from her neck, looked at its contents, and sighed. Finally, going quickly into the bedroom, she took from a suit-case a framed oil-painting, and returning with it to the sitting-room, placed it on a chair, and stepped back, gazing at it hungrily. Her large brown eyes, normally hard and imperious, were strangely softened. Her mouth quivered.

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I stepped upon the land of my forefathers - but felt than I was a stranger in the land. With these words, Washington Irving expresses the dilemma of every American artist in the nineteenth century. The Sketch Book (1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parent nation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplanted from Europe creates the first classic American short stories, 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow'. Based on Irving's final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book's sources for the modern reader. In her introduction, Susan Manning suggests that the author forged a new idiom, the 'Literary Picturesque', to accommodate and turn to advantage his dilemma of dual literary allegiances.

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Published in 1926 to explosive acclaim, The Sun Also Rises stands as perhaps the most impressive first novel ever written by an American writer. A roman à clef about a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climactic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and honor have yet to lose their currency, the novel captured for the generation that would come to be called "Lost" the spirit of its age, and marked Ernest Hemingway as the preeminent writer of his time.

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In a late eighteenth century setting, between fashionable London and backward Virginia, two twin brothers from the nobility spend their formative period trying to flee a domineering dowager mother in different ways, the older a saturnine, melancholy character, the younger an easy going type. Both, in their own way, succeed; but both reach old age feeling themselves equally swindled. The usual Thackeray touch of good humoured aristocratic melancholy aimed at bourgeois philisteism.

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