Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the a...

This book explores what it means to study America in the twenty-first century and what the emergence of the field of New Area Studies means for the development of American Studies.By analysing the meaning of interdisciplinarity, aesthetics, temporality, and periodisation, this book reveals both fields of study through the lens of interdisciplinary cases studies, innovative methodologies, and a global perspective. Exploring the imagined geographies of America across space and time, ...

As the modern celebration of Christmas took shape across the nineteenth century, American writers gave it new meaning in the pages of countless books and magazines. Now, for the first time, this rich anthology brings together some of the most significant of those seasonal stories to retell a forgotten tale of Christmases past.From the authors who helped define a national literary culture, to the popular sentimentalists who negotiated Christmas’s position at the center of family lif...

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) was one of the most popular American writers at the turn of the twentieth century, and her annual Christmas stories appeared in magazines and periodicals across the globe. Since then, the extraordinary stories that once delighted her legions of fans every festive season have gone largely out of print and unread. Now, for the first time, The Last Gift presents a collection of Freeman’s best Christmas writing, introducing these funny, poignant, pr...

Released in 1952, The Anthology of American Folk Music was the singular visionof the enigmatic artist, musicologist, and collector Harry Smith (1923–1991). Acollection of eighty-fourcommercial recordings of Americanvernacular and folkmusic originally issued between 1927 and 1932, the Anthology featured an eclecticand idiosyncratic mixture of blues and hillbilly songs, ballads old and new, dancemusic, gospel, and numerous other performances less easy to classify.Wh...

In 1836 Benjamin Drake, a midwestern writer of popular sketches for newspapers of the day, introduced his readers to a new and distinctly American rascal who rode the steamboats up and down the Mississippi and other western waterways -- the riverboat gambler. These men, he recorded, "dress with taste and elegance; carry gold chronometers in their pockets; and swear with the most genteel precision.... Every where throughout the valley, these mistletoe gentry are called by the original, if n...