For twenty-five years, Lola has endured a tumultuous marriage marred by her husband Jack's infidelities and abuse. Despite his betrayals, she clung to the hope that things would change when Jack landed his dream job as university president.However, Jack's new position thrusts them into a sordid scandal involving the sexual exploitation of student athletes by the athletic director. Haunted by his own history of misconduct, Jack resorts to his usual tactics: bribery and cover-ups. Bu...

This textbook provides a framework for teaching children’s language and literacy and introduces research-based tactics for teachers to use in designing their literacy programs for children. Exploring how sense-making occurs in contemporary literacy practice, Murphy comprehensively covers major topics in literacy, including contemporary multimodal literacy practices, classroom discourse, literacy assessment, language and culture, and teacher knowledge.Organized around themes—talk, r...

The British Soldier and his Libraries, c. 1822-1901 considers the history of the libraries that the East India Company and Regular Army respectively established for soldiers during the nineteenth century. Drawing upon a wide range of material, including archival sources, official reports, and soldiers’ memoirs and letters, this book explores the motivations of those who were responsible for the setting up and/or operation of the libraries, and examines what they reveal about attit...

Queering Elementary Education is not about teaching kids to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight. It's not part of a sinister stratagem in the “gay agenda.” Instead, these provocative and thoughtful essays advocate the creation of classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical consciousness.Queer elementary classrooms are those where parents and educators care enough about their children to trust the human capacity...

Telling Pieces is an exploration of how pre-adolescent middle-school children develop a knowledge and understanding of the conventions of art (art as literacy) and how they use this knowledge to create representations of their lives in a small midwestern U.S. town.Beginning with an overview of social semiotics and emergent literacy theorizing, the authors set the stage for their study of sixth graders involved in art. A galleria of children's artworks is presented, allowin...

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and ...

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

How the contentious world of nineteenth-century banking shaped the United States.Pieces of paper that claimed to be good for two dollars upon redemption at a distant bank. Foreign coins that fluctuated in value from town to town. Stock certificates issued by turnpike or canal companies—worth something . . . or perhaps nothing. IOUs from farmers or tradesmen, passed around by people who could not know the person who first issued them. Money and banking in antebellum...

Cultivating Curious and Creative Minds presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability. Taken together, the chapters in Part I of Cultivating Curious and Creative Minds provide a sampling of what the cultivation of curious and creative minds en...

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

A study of the early years of the life insurance industry in 19th century America.Investing in Life considers the creation and expansion of the American life insurance industry from its early origins in the 1810s through the 1860s and examines how its growth paralleled and influenced the emergence of the middle class.Using the economic instability of the period as her backdrop, Sharon Ann Murphy also analyzes changing roles for women; the attempts ...

PROSE Awards Category Winner—Media and Cultural Studies, 2025Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the...