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Explores the history of Umass over the course of its first 150 years . The engaging text is enhanced by features on all aspects of life at this unique university. The reader encounters a cavalcade of notable people, as well as many little-known anecdotes, from the humorous to the touching. All are anchored by a gathering of archival images, some published here for the first time.

Jonathan Edwards has long epitomized the Puritan preacher as fiery scold, fixated on the inner struggle of the soul and the eternal flames of hell. In this book, Ronald Story offers a fundamentally different view of Edwards, revealing a profoundly social minister who preached a gospel of charity and community bound by love.

A native of Boston and a physician by training, Samuel G. Howe (18011876) led a remarkable life. He was a veteran of the Greek War of Independence, a fervent abolitionist, and the founder of both the Perkins School for the Blind and the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Children. Married to Julia Ward Howe, author of Battle Hymn

Addresses the deeper question of how remembrance of the US-Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends. It thus provides a new lens through which to view today's cross-border rivalries, resentments, and diplomatic pitfalls.

When he committed suicide at age forty-one, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was one of Italy's best-known writers. A poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator, he had been profoundly influenced in his early years by American literature. This book examines his life and the evolution of his views of America through a reading of his works.

Drawing on Ralph Ellison's recently published `unfinished' novel, newly released archival materials, and unpublished correspondence, Parrish provides a sustained reconsideration of the writer's crucial friendships with Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward to show how his life was dedicated to creating an American society in which all could participate equally.

The New England Puritans' fascination with the legacy of the Jewish religion has been well documented, but their interactions with actual Jews have escaped sustained historical attention. New Israel/New England tells the story of the Sephardic merchants who traded and sojourned in Boston and Newport between the mid-seventeenth century and the era of the American Revolution. It also explores the complex and often contradictory meanings that the Puritans attached to Judaism and the fraught attitudes that they bore toward the Jews as a people.More often than not, Michael Hoberman shows, Puritans thought and wrote about Jews in order to resolve their own theological and cultural dilemmas. A number of prominent New Englanders, including Roger Williams, Increase Mather, Samuel Sewall, Benjamin Colman, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles, wrote extensively about post-biblical Jews, in some cases drawing on their own personal acquaintance with Jewish contemporaries.Among the intriguing episodes that Hoberman investigates is the recruitment and conversion of Harvard's first permanent instructor of Hebrew, the Jewish-born Judah Monis. Later chapters describe the ecumenical friendship between Newport minister Ezra Stiles and Haim Carigal, an itinerant rabbi from Palestine, as well as the life and career of Moses Michael Hays, the prominent freemason who was Boston's first permanently established Jewish businessman, a founder of its insurance industry, an early sponsor of the Bank of Massachusetts, and a personal friend of Paul Revere.

Presents the voices of disability rights activists who, in the period from 1950 to 1990, transformed how society views people with disabilities, and recounts how the various streams of the movement came together to push through the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the most sweeping US civil rights legislation since passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

How a group of nonprofessional historians forced a reassessment of Abraham Lincolns life story

Here a group of distinguished historians representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives - social history, cultural history, intellectual history, labour history, urban history, women's history, African American studies, and media studies - expand on the political history of the early Cold War by rethinking the relationship between politics and culture.

As Edward R. Schmitt demonstrates, Kennedy's concern with the problem of poverty was not new. Although critics at the time accused him of opportunistically veering left in order to outflank an unpopular president, a closer look at the historical record reveals a steady evolution rather than a dramatic shift in his politics.

This reconstructs the history of a Native American tribe over eight turbulent decades of domination and dislocation.

Starting with popular books from the late nineteenth century and moving ultimately to the electronic guides of the current day, Binocular Vision contextualizes bird watching field guides historically, culturally, and in terms of a wide range of important environmental issues.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? This brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the US.

How the image of the Orient has changed in American culture over the course of three centuries

Analyses the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans this exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices.

Today it is taken as a given that the US has undergone a nationwide process of homogenization-that a country once rich in geographic and cultural diversity has subsided into a placeless sameness. Cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky challenges that nearly universal view and reaches a paradoxical conclusion: that American land and society are becoming more uniform and more diverse at the same time.

Caribbean literature and culture have all too often been viewed in fragmented terms, without attention to the broader commonalities. In these essays, Roberto Marquez offers a more encompassing vision, one that respects the individual traditions of locales, languages, and cultures but also sees the larger themes that bind heritage and history.

Explores two parallel, interlocking stories--of how economic ideas came to have vastly greater influence on American culture after World War II, and how those ideas dovetailed with a growing belief that the meaning and value of the U.S. resided in its mate

More than merely linguistic transposition, translation is a vector of power, resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Exploring these facets of the ideology of translation, the contributors to this volume focus on the agency of translators and their activism.