Bøker utgitt av University of Massachusetts Press

Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867-68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for "the republic of [his] imagination." From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth. This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth. In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.

Those who actively eschew alcohol, tobacco, and coffee cannot avoid the full range of psychoactive substances pervading the culture. This work shows how the identity of any psychoactive substance owes as much to its users, their patterns of use, and the cultural context in which the drug is taken.

This title details Elizabeth Murray's struggle to achieve economic self-sufficiency in 18th-century Boston. It makes use of Murray's own papers, which include correspondence and business records, in order to get past the veneer of gentility and see the complex woman underneath.

A detailed biography of one of the nation's most distinctive and effective politicians. Based on interviews with over 150 people, it covers Barney Frank's life and career, from his working-class childhood in Bayonne, New Jersey, to his years at Harvard and in Boston politics, through his rise to national prominence.

Undercover space aliens share an RV outside Tucson. A high school girl tries to make sense of the shooting of Gabby Giffords. Basketball fans stalk their team's head coach. A young couple falls in and out of love over the course of several lifetimes. And teenage cross-country athletes run on and on through these ten stories set amid the strange desert landscapes of the American Southwest.

Offers the best available presentation of A. Philip Randolph's ideas and arguments in his own words through files of libraries, manuscript collections and newspapers, selecting more than seventy published and unpublished pieces that shed light on Randolph's most significant activities.

Based largely on famous architect Isaiah Rogers's own diary, this book tells his story and adds much to our understanding of architectural practice in the United States before the Civil War and during the last half of the 19th century.

Explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, this work probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's pre-occupation with crime and punishment.

In this wide-ranging anthology, Shaun O'Connell includes a generous sampling of those who have recorded, revised, and redefined the vision of Boston, from John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" sermon, to Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead".

Designed as a corrective to colonial literary histories that have excluded Native voices, this anthology brings together a variety of primary texts produced by Algonquian peoples of New England during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. It includes letters, signatures, journals, baskets, pictographs, and petitions.

During the mid-1790s, citizens of the newly formed US became embroiled in a divisive debate over a proposed commercial treaty with Great Britain. This book argues that the debate over the ratification of the Jay Treaty represented more than a clash over foreign policy between pro-treaty Federalists and anti-treaty Jeffersonian Republicans.

Examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspaper, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media.

No single figure embodies Cold War science more than the renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Journalists and politicians, writers and artists have told Oppenheimer's story in many different ways since he first gained notoriety in 1945. In Storytelling and Science, David K. Hecht examines why they did so, and what they hoped to achieve through their stories.

Demonstrates that the almanac was a leading source of health information in America prior to the Civil War. This book contends that the almanac was an integral component of a complicated, fragmented, semi-vernacular health literature of the period, and that the genre played a leading role in disseminating astrological health advice.

Brings together a broad range of key writings from the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, among the most significant cultural movements in American history and covers topics ranging from the legacy of Malcolm X and the impact of John Coltrane's jazz to the tenets of the Black Panther Party and the music of Motown.