Freedom in Laughter
(July 2020)
Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, and the Civil Rights Movement Malcolm Frierson - Author
Analyzes the dynamic period in which Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby moved African American professional stand-up comedy from the chitlin' circuit to the mainstream.
In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Frierson moves comedy from the margins to the center of the American Civil Rights Movement. Freedom in Laughter reveals how stand-up comedians Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby used their increasing mainstream success to advance pol...(Read More)
What Remains
(June 2020)
The Suitcases of Charles F. at Willard State Hospital Ilan Stavans - Essay by Jon Crispin - Photographer
Combining photography and essay, presents a speculative portrait of a Jewish immigrant living out the end of his days in New York’s midcentury mental health system.
After the closure of Willard Psychiatric Center on New York’s Seneca Lake in 1995, more than four hundred abandoned suitcases were discovered in its attic, containing thousands of personal possessions belonging to former patients. Three of the suitcases w...(Read More)
The Historical Mind
(May 2020)
Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age Justin D. Garrison - Editor Ryan R. Holston - Editor
Timely and provocative assessment of various cultural, moral, and political problems in “post-constitutional” America.
America is increasingly defined not only by routine disregard for its fundamental laws, but also by the decadent character of its political leaders and citizens—widespread consumerism and self-indulgent behavior, cultural hedonism and anarchy, the coarsening of moral and political discourse, an...(Read More)
Offers a new conceptual framework rooted in mythological analysis to ground the field of Africana cultural memory studies.
Black Cultural Mythology retrieves the concept of “mythology” from its Black Arts Movement origins and broadens its scope to illuminate the relationship between legacies of heroic survival, cultural memory, and creative production in the African diaspora. Christel N. Temple comprehensively ...(Read More)
Assesses how America’s film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period.
This is the definitive account of how America’s film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. H...(Read More)
Reconciling Nature
(November 2019)
Literary Representations of the Natural, 1876-1945 Robert M. Myers - Author
Reveals how classic American novels embodied the tensions embedded in American views of the natural world from the Centennial until the end of the Second World War.
Reconciling Nature maps the complex views of the environment that are evident in celebrated American novels written between the Centennial Celebration of 1876 and the end of the Second World War. During this period, which includes the Progressive era and the N...(Read More)
