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Image one: E-book titled Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II - synopsis: During the nineteenth century, American schools for deaf education regarded sign language as the natural language of Deaf people, using it as the principal mode of instruction and communication. These schools inadvertently became the seedbeds of an emerging Deaf community and culture. But beginning in the 1880s, an oralist movement developed that sought to suppress sign language, removing Deaf teachers and requiring deaf people to learn speech and lip reading. Historians have all assumed that in the early decades of the twentieth century oralism triumphed overwhelmingly. Susan Burch shows us that everyone has it wrong; not only did Deaf students continue to use sign language in schools, hearing teachers relied on it as well. In Signs of Resistance, Susan Burch persuasively reinterprets early twentieth century Deaf history: using community sources such as Deaf newspapers, memoirs, films, and oral (sign language) interviews, Burch shows how the Deaf community mobilized to defend sign language and Deaf teachers, in the process facilitating the formation of collective Deaf consciousness, identity and political organization.
Image two: E-book titled Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS - synopsis: Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, Viral Cultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises.
Image one: E-book titled Children at Play: An American History - synopsis: From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of children's play. But what do we know about how children actually play, especially American children of the last two centuries? In this fascinating and enlightening book, Howard Chudacoff presents a history of children's play in the United States and ponders what it tells us about ourselves. Through expert investigation in primary sources, including dozens of children's diaries, hundreds of autobiographical recollections of adults, and a wealth of child-rearing manuals--along with wide-ranging reading of the work of educators, journalists, market researchers, and scholars--Chudacoff digs into the "underground" of play.
Image two: E-book titled Babysitter: An American History - synopsis: Informed by her research on the history of teenage girls’ culture, Miriam Forman-Brunell analyzes the babysitter, who has embodied adults’ fundamental apprehensions about girls’ pursuit of autonomy and empowerment. In fact, the grievances go both ways, as girls have been distressed by unsatisfactory working conditions. In her quest to gain a fuller picture of this largely unexamined cultural phenomenon, Forman-Brunell analyzes a wealth of diverse sources, such as The Baby-sitter’s Club book series, horror movies like "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," urban legends, magazines, newspapers, television shows, and more.
Image one: E-book titled Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials - synopsis: With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known, yet surprisingly persistent, aspect of American history.
Image two: E-book titled Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America - synopsis: Americans' long and restless search for identity through family trees illuminates the story of America itself, according to Francois Weil, as preoccupation with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way to an embrace of diversity in one's forebears, pursued through Ancestry.com and advances in DNA testing. While seeking out one’s ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire, genealogy later developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. Over the next century, knowledge of one’s family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite “Anglo-Saxons” in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one’s family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.
Image one: Art and Poetry Month
Image two: E-book titled Lockdown Cultures: The Arts and Humanities in the Year of the Pandemic, 2020-21 (2022) - synopsis: This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analyzed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.
Image three: E-book titled Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry (2016) - synopsis: Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state’s population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family—shopping, going out, working—to intimate encounters with Alaska’s breathtaking natural beauty.
Image one: Book titled The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2001) - synopsis: An autobiography of the Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., compiled and edited from articles, essays, speeches, sermons, letters, and other sources, examining his private and public life and describing his involvement in many important events in the Civil Rights Movement. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image two: Book titled Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (2012) - synopsis: While Martin Luther King, Jr., saw America as essentially a dream as yet unfulfilled, Malcolm X viewed America as a realized nightmare. James Cone cuts through superficial assessments of King and Malcolm as polar opposites to reveal two men whose visions are complementary and moving toward convergence. - available in the UNT Dallas Library collection
Image one: E-book titled Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021) - synopsis: Invokes contemporary discourse on racial capitalism in a powerful reassessment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking and legacy. Like today’s organizers, King was more than a dreamer. He knew that his call for a “radical revolution of values” was complicated by the production and circulation of value under capitalism. Shining new light on King’s largely implicit economic and political theories, and expanding appreciation of the Black radical tradition to which he belonged, this book reconstructs, develops, and carries forward King’s strikingly prescient critique of capitalist society.
Image two: E-book titled Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature (2014) - synopsis: African American writers have incorporated Martin Luther King Jr. into their work since he rose to prominence in the mid-1950s. Martin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature is a study by award-winning author Trudier Harris of King’s character and persona captured and reflected in works of African American literature as they continue to evolve.
Image one: E-book titled Prairie Man: The Struggle between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin (2015) - synopsis: U.S. Government policy toward Native Americans after the Battle of the Little Big Horn was to give them a makeover as Americans after finally and firmly displacing them from their lands. Sitting Bull, when forced to accept reservation life, understood who was in control, but his view of reservation life was very different from that of the Indian Bureau and its agents. His people’s birth right was their native heritage and culture. Although redrawn by the Government, he believed that the prairie land still held a special meaning of place for the Lakota. Those in power dictated a contrary view - with the closing of the frontier, the Indian was challenged to accept the white road or vanish. In the case of the Lakota, that position was given personification in the form of Agent James McLaughlin. This book explores the story within Sitting Bull’s and James McLaughlin’s conflict and offers new perspectives and insights.
Image two: E-book titled The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (2014) - synopsis: In 1791, General Arthur St. Clair led the United States army in a campaign to destroy a complex of Indian villages at the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio. Almost within reach of their objective, St. Clair’s 1,400 men were attacked by about one thousand Indians. The U.S. force was decimated, suffering nearly one thousand casualties in killed and wounded, while Indian casualties numbered only a few dozen. Native American historian Colin Calloway demonstrates here that St. Clair’s Defeat—as it came to be known—was hugely important for its time. It was both the biggest victory the Native Americans ever won, and, proportionately, the biggest military disaster the United States had suffered.
Image one: E-book titled Horror in the Heartland: Strange and Gothic Tales from the Midwest (2017) - synopsis: From tales of the booming grave-robbing industry of late 19th-century Indiana to the story of a Michigan physician who left his estate to his pet monkeys, Keven McQueen investigates a spooky and twisted side of Indiana, Ohio, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Exploring burial customs, unexplained deaths, ghost stories, premature burials, bizarre murders, peculiar wills and much more, this creepy collection reveals the region’s untold stories and offers intriguing, if sometimes macabre, insights into human nature.
Image two: E-book titled The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (2015) - synopsis: The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens series; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception.
Image one: E-book titled Food across Borders (2017) - synopsis: The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes "American" in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from "the line in the sand" that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between "our" food and "their" food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between "us" and "them." The stories told in Food across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.
Image two: E-book titled La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (2014) - synopsis: Commemorating Juan Ponce de León's landfall on the Atlantic coast of Florida, this ambitious volume explores five centuries of Hispanic presence in the New World peninsula, reflecting on the breadth and depth of encounters between the different lands and cultures. Melding history, literature, anthropology, music, culture, and sociology, La Florida is a unique presentation of the Hispanic roots that run deep in Florida's past and present and will assuredly shape its future.
Image one: E-book titled E-book titled Your Undergraduate Degree in Psychology: From College to Career (2013) - synopsis: Drawing on current research data, applied theory, and both academic and workplace experiences, this book will help stimulate self-reflection and improve decision making as students approach their careers. The text covers key topics in the college-to-career transition, including career planning and development, identifying and transferring marketable skills, building and sustaining strong networks, understanding what employers want and don’t want, coping with personal life changes, becoming a valued employee, and more.
Image two: E-book titled Expanding Your English and Creative Skills through Art and the Humanities (2018) - synopsis: Expanding your English and Creative Skills through Art and the Humanities has been designed for students or professionals who would like to use and improve their English in areas such as history, art history, literature, film and media, and language, at an upper-intermediate or advanced level. This book integrates practice of the four skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing) and has been written from a holistic and humanistic approach.
