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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: 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.
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Resources: Streaming Video
Streaming video database 1: Psychotherapy.net - Allows users to watch master therapists conducting psychotherapy sessions and over 300 training videos featuring leading practitioners in the field.
Streaming video database 2: Behavioral and Mental Health Online - Features applied training materials that help today's counseling students, faculty, and practitioners put theory into practice. The award-winning resources in the database offer more than 2,000 hours of training videos, conference sessions, and footage of actual therapy sessions.
Image one: Need data or statistics? - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Data and statistics on alcohol use; deaths and mortality; healthy aging; life expectancy; and more. - www.cdc.gov/datastatistics
Image two: Need data or statistics? - F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting: Data and statistics on crime in the United States; law enforcement officers killed and assaulted; hate crime statistics; cargo theft; and human trafficking. - www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr
Image three: Need data or statistics? - United States Census Bureau: Data on population, economy, education, employment, and more. - www.census.gov
Image one - E-book titled Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (2013) - synopsis: In Entertaining Elephants Susan Nance examines elephant behavior—drawing on the scientific literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications—to offer a study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus entertainment between 1800 and 1940. Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business. The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience. They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull hooks, hay, and the weather.
Image two - E-book titled Winnebago Nation: The Peculiar Place of the RV in American Culture (2014) - synopsis: In Winnebago Nation, popular critic James B. Twitchell takes a light-hearted look at the culture and industry behind the yearning to spend the night in one's car. For the young, the road trip is a coming-of-age ceremony; for those later in life, it is the realization of a lifelong desire to be spontaneous, nomadic, and free. Informed by his own experiences on the road, Twitchell recounts the RV's origins and evolution over the twentieth century; its rise, fall, and rebirth as a cultural icon; its growing mechanical complexity as it evolved from an estate wagon to a converted bus to a mobile home; and its role in bolstering and challenging conceptions of American identity.
Image three - E-book titled The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America (2019) - synopsis: In the post–World War I American climate of isolationism, nativism, democratic expansion of civic rights, and consumerism, Italian-born star Rodolfo Valentino and Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini became surprising paragons of authoritarian male power and mass appeal. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and Italy, Giorgio Bertellini’s work shows how their popularity, both political and erotic, largely depended on the efforts of public opinion managers, including publicists, journalists, and even ambassadors. Beyond the democratic celebrations of the Jazz Age, the promotion of their charismatic masculinity through spectacle and press coverage inaugurated the now-familiar convergence of popular celebrity and political authority.
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Image one: E-book titled Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory (2017) - synopsis: The 1830’s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present.
Image two: E-book titled Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star (2019) - synopsis: Brings the exciting career, dedicated activism, and noteworthy legacy of Ho-Chunk actress Lilian Margaret St. Cyr vividly to life. Known to film audiences as “Princess Red Wing,” St. Cyr emerged as the most popular Native American actress in the pre-Hollywood and early studio-system era in the United States.
Image one: E-book titled Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore (2007) - synopsis: In Haunting Experiences, Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.
Image two: E-book titled Boo!: Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (1996) - synopsis: The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments.
Image one: E-book titled Learning To Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics (2018) - synopsis: In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, and more. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
Image two: E-book titled The Battle for Paradise: Surfing, Tuna, and One Town's Quest to Save a Wave (2015) - synopsis: Pavones, a town located on the southern tip of Costa Rica, is a haven for surfers, expatriates, and fishermen seeking a place to start over. Located on the Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf), a marine sanctuary and one of the few tropical fjords in the world, Pavones is home to a legendary surf break and a cottage fishing industry. In The Battle for Paradise, Jeremy Evans travels to Pavones to uncover the story of how this ragtag group stood up to a multinational company and how a shadowy figure from the town’s violent past became an unlikely hero.
Image one: E-book titled Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (2015) - synopsis: Explores the different ways that Americans have thought about the bicycle through popular songs, merit badge pamphlets, advertising, films, newspapers, and sitcoms. Those associations shaped the actions of government and the courts when they intervened in bike policy through lawsuits, traffic control, road building, taxation, rationing, import tariffs, safety education, and bike lanes from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Image two: E-book titled Dodgerland: Decadent Los Angeles and the 1977-78 Dodgers (2016) - synopsis: Part journalism, part social history, and part straight sports writing, Dodgerland is told through the lives of four men, each representing different aspects of this L.A. story. Tom Lasorda, the vocal manager of the Dodgers, gives an up-close view of the team's struggles and triumphs; Tom Fallon, a suburban small-business owner, witnesses the Dodgers' season and the changes to California's landscape—physical, social, political, and economic; Tom Wolfe, a chronicler of California's ever-changing culture, views the events of 1977–78 from his Manhattan writer's loft; and Tom Bradley, Los Angeles's mayor and the region's most dominant political figure of the time, gives a glimpse of the wider political, demographic, and economic forces that affected the state at the time.
