Consigned to illiteracy, American slaves left little record of their thoughts and feelings—or so we have believed. But a few learned to use pen and paper to make sense of their experiences, despite prohibitions. These authors’ perspectives rewrite the history of emancipation and force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom.

When North and South went to war, millions of American families endured their first long separation. For men in the armies—and their wives, children, parents, and siblings at home—letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Yet for many of these Union and Confederate families, taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task. I Remain Yours narrates the Civil War from the perspective of ordinary people who had to figure out how to salve the emotional strain of war and sustain...

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the f...

Addressing texts produced by writers who lived through the Civil War and wrote about it before the end of Reconstruction, this collection explores the literary cultures of that unsettled moment when memory of the war had yet to be overwritten by later impulses of reunion, reconciliation, or Lost Cause revisionism. The Civil War reshaped existing literary cultures or enabled new ones. Ensembles of discourses, conventions, and practices, these cultures offered fresh ways of engaging a host o...

Here at Jersey Devil Press, there are three things we look for in a story: strangeness, beauty, and poop jokes. And while this collection is admittedly a little shy on scatological humor, the 18 works collected here are easily the strangest and most beautiful things we've ever published.The 2015 Jersey Devil Press Anthology contains the best work from our last five years, written by some of our favorite authors. We love them in a way we're not entirely comfortable with.And ...

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature.It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"—such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It i...

FM4 bot NachwuchsautorInnen und allen, die Lust am Geschichtenschreiben haben, die Chance, sich in kurzer Form literarisch über das Thema "haarig" auszulassen. Zehn der cirka 1.000 Beiträge wurden von einer hochkarätigen Jury gekürt und schafften es in die Anthologie Wortlaut 14. Die urteilenden Barbiere und Haarkünstlerinnen: Irene Diwiak (Gewinnerin Wortlaut 13), Jens Friebe (Musiker und Musikjournalist), Gerhard Haderer (Karikaturist und Zeichner), Eva Menasse (Schriftstellerin), David ...

This book analyzes Germany's path-breaking Energiewende, the country's transition from an energy system based on fossil and nuclear fuels to a sustainable energy system based on renewables. The authors explain Germany's commitment to a renewable energy transition on multiple levels of governance, from the local to the European, focusing on the sources of institutional change that made the transition possible. They then place the German case in international context through compara...