"In The Damned Don't Cry -- They Just Disappear, literary historian and Lamba Award--winning novelist Harlan Greene has created a portrait of a nearly forgotten Southern writer, unearthing information from archives, rare books, film libraries, and small-town newspapers. Greene brings Harry Hervey (1900-1951) to life and explicates his works to reveal him as a hardworking writer and master of many genres, bravely unwilling to conform to conventional values. As Greene illustrates, Hervey's novels, short stories, nonfiction books, and film scripts contain complex mixtures of history and thinly disguised homoerotic situations and themes. They blend local color, naturalism, melodrama, and psychological and sexual truths that provide a view of the circles in which he moved. Living openly with his male lover in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, Hervey set novels in these cities that scandalized the locals and critics as well. He challenged the sexual mores of his day, sometimes subtly and at other times brazenly presenting texts that told one story to gay male readers, while still courting a mainstream audience. His novels and nonfiction may have been coded and thus escaped detection in their day, but twenty-first-century readers can decipher them easily" --

"Banning people from libraries is even worse than banning books! Decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Samuel Wilbert Tucker, a Black lawyer in Virginia, organized a peaceful read-in at the local public library, which was segregated. He wanted to affirm the right of everyone to use the library. Thanks to efforts like his, we can all sit at a table, any table, pick up a book, any book, and read."--Back cover.

Leonard Lavin epitomizes the American Dream. In this book Lavin reveals how his instinct-driven vision led him to build the Alberto Culver Corporation from a tiny beauty supply company into a revered Fortune 500 buisness.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called "Prison Blossoms." This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism

The nine American Jews of whom Milton Konvitz writes are philosophers, jurists, or rabbis, widely known and readily accepted as American Jewish thinkers. Their work reflects all essential Jewish values. Each person in his own way has dedicated his work to the betterment of life and the advancement of human ideals. In this sense, their Jewishness is not defined by religion alone. Americanism permeated all they thought and all they did. Konvitz argues that in the complex modern world, secularists often serve God more handsomely than do members of synagogues or churches. For example, when the Supreme Court in 1954 (with Felix Frankfurter playing a key role behind the scenes) agreed to outlaw segregation of the races in public schools, was the Court's action secular or religious? When Congress passed the statute known as the Americans with Disabilities Act, requiring equal treatment of handicapped persons, was the action secular or religious? Is a minimum wage act secular or religious? Is Medicaid a secular or a religious act? Konvitz believes the distinction is not useful, or even possible. The book is divided into three parts, reflecting Konvitz's range of intellectual interests. The nine essays offer concise intellectual biographies of three American Jewish philosophers, three Supreme Court Justices, and three rabbis. The philosophers-Horace M. Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, and Sidney Hook-are world-renowned. The jurists-Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Felix Frankfurter-hold prominent places in American legal history. And the three rabbis-Leo Jung, Robert Gordis, and Jacob Agus-are known wherever Jewish thought is studied. By treating with equal seriousness the lives and writings of both religious and secularist thinkers, the author intentionally minimizes the conventional antagonism and frequent conflict between religion and secularism. An unusual feature of the book is the fact that the author was a close friend of six of the persons whose lives and work are examined, allowing him a perceptive insight into their character and thought. Although the book is about serious subjects, its graceful style makes the contents easily accessible to lay persons as well as scholars and students of Judaica.

"A compelling record of one year in the life of a writer, including observations about movies, art, music, friendship, travel, and family. The essay is the most pluckily pedestrian and blithely transgressive of literary genres, the one that is most at large and in need, picking through the accumulated disjecta of daily life and personal and social history to take what it needs and remake it as it sees fit. It is, at its lively best, quite indifferent to the claims of style, fashion, theory, and respectability, provoking and inspiring through the pleasure of surprise. In 2016, Philip Lopate, who has been writing essays and thinking about the essay for decades now, turned his attention to one of the essay's offshoots, the blog, a form by that time already thick, as he knew, with virtual dust. Lopate committed to writing a weekly blog about, really, whatever over the course of a year, a quicker pace of delivery than he'd ever undertaken and one that carried the risk of all too regularly falling short. What emerged was A Year and a Day, a collection of forty-seven essays best characterized as a single essay a year in the making, a virtuosic (if never showy) demonstration of the essay's range and reach, meandering, looping back, pressing reset, forging on. Lopate's topics along the way include family, James Baldwin, a trip to China, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarastomi, the resistable rise of Donald Trump, death, desire, and the tribulations, small and large, of daily life. What results is at once a self-portrait, a picture of the times, and a splendid new elaboration of what the essay can be"--

Product Description Despite a historical record that shows sustained involvement of American Jewish women with early Zionism and Palestine, this topic has received scant scholarly attention. A major contribution to Zionist history, women’s history, and American history, American Jewish Women and Zionism offers a much needed clarification to the historical record. Divided thematically, American Jewish Women deals with representative figures, events, and themes of the pre-state era. The essays in the book have three different foci: Several are concerned with significant personalities, such as Golda Meir, Marie Syrkin, Emma Lazarus, and Henrietta Szold, while others are concerned with the pivotal role played by American Zionist women’s organizations including Hadassah, the Pioneer Women’s Organization (later Naamat), the Mizrachi Women’s Organization (later Amit Women), and others. The remaining essays address broad themes and reveal the multidimensionality of the relationship of American Jewish women and Zionism, which includes agricultural and vocational training, religion, ideology, geography, and feminism and femininity. American Jewish Women and Zionism also includes several eyewitness documents and personal testimonies. No less significant than the corpus of memoirs and literature produced by male Zionist leaders, such data throws light on hitherto neglected facets of American Jewish and Zionist history, including the variety of roles played by Zionist women and their self-awareness as participants in one of the most dramatic and consequential episodes in the history of Jewish civilization. The volume includes a glossary of terms, a map of the principal locations referred to in the text, illustrations, and a timeline of American Jewish women and their relationship to Zionism. Each section opens with a prefactory note that places the essays in historical context. It concludes with a bibliographic note and suggestions for further readings. Review "Anyone interested in the significant role of women and Zionism should definitely find this book a must read."--The National Jewish Post & Opinion "Shulamit Reinharz and Mark Raider's magnificent study... challenges us to understand how faith in Zionism and in the American dream nourished and changed both projects. This is a story not of ideologies or, for the most part, of ideologues, but rather of the creators of a new tradition. The essays in this collection bring some of the leaders of Hadassah, Pioneer Women, and of Mizrahi beautifully to life and show how a dedication to the Zionist cause deepened a commitment to American values, and enlarged the Zionist perspective, to preserve a set of liberal principles reaching across the ethnic and national divide in Palestine...In this book Reinharz and Raider assemble essays that chart the rich profusion of movements, institutions, and activities - including aliyah - that Zionism inspired in Jewish women living in the United States."--Israel Studies "The organizations that women created as an expression of their goal are deftly analyzed. There is valuable and intriguing material here which calls for the attention of scholars in the fields of American history, women's history, feminism, and Zionism."--Jewish Book World From the Publisher 6 x 9 trim. 12 illus, 1 map, 3 tables About the Author Mark A. Raider is professor of modern Jewish history in the Department of History and director of the Center for Studies in Jewish Education and Culture at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author, most recently, of The Essential Hayim Greenberg: Essays and Addresses on Jewish Culture, Socialism, and Zionism.

Set amidst the political upheaval of the McCarthy trials, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the women's movement, Intimate Politics is a courageous and uncompromising account of one woman's personal and political transformation, and a fascinating portrayal of a key chapter in our nation's history. At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions. A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

"Al Jolson, born Asa Yoelson, immigrated from his shtetl in Lithuania to the United States in 1894 after his father secured a job as a rabbi in Washington, D.C. A poor, Yiddish-speaking newcomer navigating a racially segregated and antisemitic America, young Jolson dreamed of becoming a star, and he did. Thanks to his immense talent and his knack for assimilating into new environments, by the time he reached his twenties he was the most famous and highly paid entertainer in America, making almost $5,000 a week at a time when the average American made $800 a year. Jolson's public adoration and widespread acceptance as a star marked the beginning of an enriching cultural transformation, a moment when the American mind opened up to ethnic and racial differences, widening the gap of acceptability. And yet Jolson himself, despite being ferociously ambitious and gigantically talented, was crippled by insecurity, often nervous to the point of collapse, prisoner to his many vices. Through Jolson, Bernstein simultaneously breaks open the history and legacy of the cultural sensation The Jazz Singer. Not only was The Jazz Singer the first feature length film with synchronized music and dialogue, but it was also taboo smashing in its content: The Jazz Singer is all about Jews, Orthodox and otherwise. Bernstein expounds on the making of The Jazz Singer, what the film meant then and now, introducing the many individuals involved in its production, including Samson Raphaelson, a young Jewish writer whose short story was the basis for the movie; the four Warner brothers who made a fortune off it; and George Jessel, Jolson's rival and the star of Raphaelson's stage adaptation of his short story. In the background emerges a picture of old Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties: cutthroat and greedy yet visionary and progressive. And while The Jazz Singer represented the future in many ways, it also dredged up the worst of the past, including Jolson's use of blackface, common at the time. At once a tale of the Judaizing of American culture and an acknowledgment of the challenges to come, Only in America is a glistening examination of a man at the center of a watershed moment in the arts"--

"Julia Howe (1819-1910) was a beautiful, studious New York heiress and aspiring poet when she married Bostonian Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a hero of the Greek war of independence against the Turks and an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Their marriage united two exceptional people. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale in England, to Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and John Brown. But despite his philanthropic and abolitionist ideals, Dr. Howe did not support married women's work outside the home. He isolated Julia, opposed her literary ambitions, and wasted her inheritance. She defied him by continuing to publish poems and plays while raising their six children. She also secretly wrote a bold novel about a hermaphrodite, undiscovered until long after her death. And during the Civil War, she wrote the words to the most powerful and enduring anthem in the nation's history. Authorship of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' made her famous and revered. But she fought her own civil war at home, battling with her husband over her rights to equality, intellectual freedom, and a public voice. As soon as the war ended, she became a pacifist and suffragist leader. In the second half of her life, she came into her own as a tireless campaigner for women's rights and social reform. In this biography, Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe's determined self-creation and vividly restores her to the pantheon of feminist intellectuals who changed the world"--Jacket

Streaming Video on Love In Black & White now available at Expandedbooks.com Most Americans regard the World War II period as belonging to the "greatest generation," but it was also a time when religious intolerance and racial violence flourished. Shamefully, it was commonplace to see signs that read "Whites Only" or "Jews Not Allowed." It is within this world that this compelling memoir is set. William Cohen, born in Bangor, Maine, was the eldest son of a Jewish father and a Protestant Irish mother. Janet Langhart, an African-American, was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana by her single parent mother, a Southern Baptist. The book draws fascinating parallels between the histories of two people from different regions, races, and religions, as both are witnesses to and targets of the social tensions of the day. Throughout Love in Black and White, readers accompany Bill and Janet in their struggle to overcome to the barriers of ethnic and racial bigotry and hatred. The stories are rich and profound. At times they are amusing. Other times, harrowing. Against impossible odds, Bill would be elected to serve his country as a U.S. Congressman and Senator, and Janet would become a prominent television personality, activist, and highly respected businesswoman and author. Opposites in so many ways―in color, faith and culture―seemingly a bundle of contradictions, they meet in 1974, become friends, and eventually fall in love. They decide to marry on Valentine's Day 1996 in the very place that once harbored some of the nation's most prominent racists-the U.S. Capitol. They receive the surprise of a lifetime when Bill is asked by President Bill Clinton to serve as the nation's 20th Secretary of Defense. It is a calling that proves to be life transforming for both him and Janet, as they lead, inspire and bring comfort to the men and women who defend our nation. It is at the Pentagon where they witness just how powerful our nation ca

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, born in 1903 and scion of a preeminent Lithuanian Orthodox family, was one of the most towering intellectual figures of American Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. After receiving rabbinic ordination and completing his studies toward a Ph.D., he immigrated to America where he served as the Rosh Yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. As the leader of centrist Orthodoxy in America for more than fifty years, his many accomplishments included his founding of the Maimonides School in Boston in 1937. Rabbi Soloveitchik served as the intellectual and spiritual force behind the Maimonides School from its founding and was responsible for its innovative curriculum. Synthesizing American educational methodologies and European Orthodox approaches to education, the Maimonides School became a prototype for an American Orthodox educational institution. Unique among contemporary Orthodox day schools, the coeducational nature of the classes at Maimonides, and to some extent the curriculum, was groundbreaking. Characterized by academic excellence in both Judaic studies and other subjects, the school offered boys and girls exactly the same education. Rabbi Soloveitchik’s school was particularly innovative by offering Talmud classes to girls on the same level as boys. The Maimonides School became a paradigm for the fledgling Orthodox Jewish day school movement nationwide. The character of the education there influenced later developments in the Orthodox community, such as the emphasis on higher level Torah study for women. By articulating a philosophy that advocated both traditional Orthodoxy as well as modernism and Americanism, the school gradually affected Boston’s Orthodox community, which came to be guided by its principles. As Seth Farber points out, the school, once rejected by the Jewish establishment in Boston, was eventually embraced by it. A community that saw no contradiction between democratic values and traditional Orthodox lifestyle emerged in Boston. This modern Orthodox community ultimately represented a significant voice in Boston’s Jewish and America's Orthodox cultures.

Tells the story of how wealthy businessman Julius Rosenwald came to financially support the building of 5,300 schools in rural African-American communities that desperately needed them over the course of twenty years.

My parents always told me I was Mexican. I was Mexican because they were Mexican. This was sometimes modified to ÒMexican American,Ó since I was born in California, and thus automatically a U.S. citizen. But, my parents said, this, too, was once part of Mexico. My father would say this with a sweeping gesture, taking in the smog, the beautiful mountains, the cars and houses and fast-food franchises. When he made that gesture, all was cleared away in my mindÕs eye to leave the hazy impression of a better place. We were here when the white people came, the Spaniards, then the Americans. And we will be here when they go away, he would say, and it will be part of Mexico again. Thus begins a lyrical and entirely absorbing collection of personal essays by esteemed Chicana writer and gifted storyteller Kathleen Alcal‡. Loosely linked by an exploration of the many meanings of Òfamily,Ó these essays move in a broad arc from the stories and experiences of those close to her to those whom she wonders about, like Andrea Yates, a mother who drowned her children. In the process of digging and sifting, she is frequently surprised by what she unearths. Her family, she discovers, were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who took on the trappings of Catholicism in order to survive. Although the essays are in many ways personal, they are also universal. When she examines her family history, she is encouraging us to inspect our own families, too. When she investigates a family secret, she is supporting our own search for meaning. And when she writes that being separated from our indigenous culture is Òa form of illiteracy,Ó we know exactly what she means. After reading these essays, we find that we have discovered not only why Kathleen Alcal‡ is a writer but also why we appreciate her so much. She helps us to find ourselves.

A wry and beautifully observed memoir about coming of age in the era of conceptual art. Growing up in the suburbs—confused about his sexuality, about his consumer-oriented world, about the death of his older brother—Bernard Cooper falls in love with Pop art and sets off for the California Institute of the Arts, the center of the burgeoning field of conceptual art, in this beguiling memoir. The most famous, and infamous, artists of the time drift through the place, including Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari, not to mention the student who phones the Identi-Kit division of the Los Angeles Police Department and has them make a composite drawing of the Mona Lisa . My Avant-Garde Education is at once an artist's coming-of-age story and a personal chronicle of the era of conceptual art, from a writer "of uncommon subtlety and nuance" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times ). It is a record of the wonders and follies of a certain era in art history, always aware that awakening to art is, for a young person, inseparable from awakening to the ever-shifting nature of the self.

So, just how was Tarzan created? Eager to know the inside story about the legendary John Carter and the amazing cities and peoples of Barsoom? Perhaps your taste is more suited to David Innes and the fantastic lost world at the Earth?s core? Or maybe wrong-way Napier and the bizarre civilizations of cloud-enshrouded Venus are more to your liking? These pages contain all that you will ever want to know about the wondrous worlds and unforgettable characters penned by the master storyteller Edgar Rice Burroughs. ø Richard A. Lupoff, the respected critic and writer who helped spark a Burroughs revival in the 1960s, reveals fascinating details about the stories written by the creator of Tarzan. Featured here are outlines of all of Burroughs?s major novels, with descriptions of how they were each written and their respective sources of inspiration. This Bison Books edition includes a new foreword by fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, a new introduction by the author, a final chapter by Phillip R. Burger, as well as corrected text and an updated bibliography.