Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries considers aesthetic imaginaries as they constitute and are constituted by and in our shared realities. With contributions from twelve scholars working in the fields of literary studies, visual studies, anthropology, cultural studies, and digital culture, this book takes a multidisciplinary approach to “aesthetic imaginaries,” which tests the conceptual potential from an array of perspectives and methodologies. It probes into the continuous creation and re-cre...

Part Three of America's Forgotten History takes us from the end of the Civil War to the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurection. We look at Reconstruction, the Indian Wars in the West, the land grant railroads of the West, the labor and farmer movements, the rise of Populism and Progressivism, Jim Crow laws and the freedmen after Reconstruction, the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism, and finally America joining Europe and Japan in the pursuit of empire. 1898, the year it be...

From its small government, non-aggressive, republican beginnings, America has become a garrison state devoted to remaking the world in its own image. While Republicans and Democrats quibble over the details of policing the world and running a nanny state, Ledbetter looks at another way, a forgotten way, the way invented during a tiny window of opportunity by the Enlightenment philosophers who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. America's Forgotten History i...

History is written by the victors. But do the victors in America's forgotten debate really have it right? Do they even think about whether it is America's destiny to be both a nanny state and garrison state? American's Forgotten History questions standard understanding from a constitutionalist point of view.This, the first of five volumes, looks at the English Civil War, fought between Puritans and Cavaliers. It then follows Puritans as they flee Cavalier power to Massachusetts and...

The chapters of America's story are marked by momentous events. In 1776, in some English colonies of America, proud inheritors of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 declared both their independence and intention to form a government based on Enlightenment principles. Despite inevitable missteps and contradictions, some major, those living the story mostly stayed true to the Classical Liberal project of minimalist government and individual rights until the end of the nineteenth century. After ...

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, An Imperial Diadem challenges the dominant historical narratives about that war, a war which saved the institutions but buried the ideals of the Enlightenment. Now, three generations worth of accelerating change have brought us to a historical disruption point of the kind that rewrites the past to capture the future. In the battle for the future, might a classical liberal understanding of the war help revive the Enlightenment's forgotten id...

Language and Globalization is a combination of my two interests, linguistics and history. Linguistics contains some intriguing hints about the entirety of the human journey, hints which have been confirmed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by genetics. How do history, linguistics, and genetics connect? I hope this short book will open the door to the answer. I hope also it will inspire some awe at both the grand cycles of human development and reconnection, and the way s...

As this book goes to publication, Kabul is falling to steely-eyed pre-Enlightenment warlords. Washington D.C., having already fallen to feckless post-Enlightenment warriors of a different sort, has shown itself clueless about how to respond when pre-Enlightenment reality smacks it upside the face. Whether the hordes at the gates are at one place pre-Enlightenment or another post-Enlightenment, a crisis of civilization has been brought to a head by the elections of 2016 and 2020. Good To Kn...

The American and French Revolutions overthrew the era of kings. The new era would pursue democracy, equality, and liberty, but two different versions. Ledbetter traces the evolution of the two versions - what he calls the American Way and the French Way - into ideologies such as free market capitalism, socialism, fascism, globalism, and the vaunted "Third Way" of Sweden.Ledbetter names the sequence of war-depression-war between 1914 and 1945 a single pivotal whole, a Thirty Year Ev...

The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker’s short story, Here I Am, Laughing with Boers;...