Lsu press apr 2020 (4 risultati)

Taschenbuch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - Bridging the Mississippi: Spans across the Father of Waters portrays in words and stunning photographs the manmade structures that cross the nation's most important and, during the mid-nineteenth century, most daunting natural waterway.Philip Gould spent three years photographing Mississippi River bridges, from the Crescent City Connection in New Orleans to the span of boulders at the river's headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. This book features seventy-five of the river's more than 130 spans, progressing from south to north, in rural, small-town, and metropolitan settings. In every season and from numerous angles, Gould captured images of historical, architectural, and engineering significance as well as dramatic natural beauty. In addition, his photos reflect the many perspectives of people whose lives intersect with the bridges, including riverboat captains, construction workers, pedestrians, drivers, cyclists, wedding parties, recreational boaters and fishers, business owners, and train engineers. Margot Hasha offers a fascinating overview of bridge construction on the Mississippi, starting with the waterway's geology and the earliest-known settlement along the banks of Misi-ziibi, what Native Americans called the ''father of waters.'' She discusses the impact of steel production on the expansion of railroad bridges, hazards encountered by river pilots today, the preservation of vintage structures, and the latest bridge designs. Hasha and Gould profile select crossings in eleven cities and towns, explaining each one's unique story and importance to its riverside community.Architectural and engineering feats; focal points for urban renewal; essential links in the nation's transportation and commerce; aesthetic frames for parks, riverwalks, and levee trails- the Mississippi River's bridges come into full focus in this visual tribute.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - The word ''prohibition'' tends to conjure up images of smoky basement speakeasies, dancing flappers, and hardened gangsters bootlegging whiskey. Such stereotypes, a prominent historian recently noted in the Washington Post, confirm that Americans' ''common understanding of the prohibition era is based more on folklore than fact.'' Popular culture has given us a very strong, and very wrong, picture of what the period was like. Prohibition's Greatest Myths: The Distilled Truth about America's Anti-ÂAlcohol Crusade aims to correct common misperceptions with ten essays by scholars who have spent their careers studying different aspects of the era. Each contributor unravels one myth, revealing the historical evidence that supports, complicates, or refutes our longÂ-held beliefs about the Eighteenth Amendment. H. Paul Thompson Jr., Joe L. Coker, Lisa M. F. Andersen, and Ann Marie E. Szymanski examine the political and religious factors in early twentiethÂ-century America that led to the push for prohibition, including the temperance movement, the influences of religious conservatism and liberalism, the legislation of individual behavior, and the lingering effects of World War I. From there, several contributors analyze how the laws of prohibition were enforced. Michael Lewis discredits the idea that alcohol consumption increased during the era, while Richard F. Hamm clarifies the connections between prohibition and organized crime, and Thomas R. Pegram demonstrates that issues other than the failure of prohibition contributed to the amendment's repeal. Finally, contributors turn to prohibition's legacy. Mark Lawrence Schrad, Garrett Peck, and Bob L. Beach discuss the reach of prohibition beyond the United States, the influence of antiÂ-alcohol legislation on Americans' longÂterm drinking habits, and efforts to link prohibition with today's debates over the legalization of marijuana. Together, these essays debunk many of the myths surrounding ''the Noble Experiment,'' not only providing a more inÂ-depth analysis of prohibition but also allowing readers to engage more meaningfully in contemporary debates about alcohol and drug policy.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In AfroÂ-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-ÂRauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, DanielsÂ-Rauterkus contests the longÂ-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-ÂRauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, DanielsÂ-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, DanielsÂ-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-ÂRealisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-ÂRauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.…

Buch. Condizione: Neu. Neuware - In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people's use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with, rather than independence from, the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master the landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with, and vulnerable to, it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system's failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming's rising seas and strengthening storms.The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans' relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment, whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable, inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.…