How did enslaved African Americans in the Old South really experience Christmas? Did Christmastime provide slaves with a lengthy and jubilant respite from labor and the whip, as is generally assumed, or is the story far more complex and troubling? In this provocative, revisionist, and sometimes chilling account, Robert E. May chides the conventional wisdom for simplifying black perspectives, uncritically accepting southern white literary tropes about the holiday, and overlooking evidence n...

This fascinating study sheds new light on antebellum America’s notorious “filibusters” — the freebooters and adventurers who organized or participated in armed invasions of nations with whom the United States was formally at peace. Offering the first full-scale analysis of the filibustering movement, Robert May relates the often-tragic stories of illegal expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries and details surprising numbers of aborted plots, as...

A powerful new book that corrects a false myth in African American history that Kirkus Reviews calls "a thoughtful antidote to white Southern propaganda.”According to an oft repeated legend, during Christmas before the Civil War, all enslaved people in the American South enjoyed lengthy vacations of a week or more depending on how long an oversized “Yule log” burned in their master's fireplace. As long as the log held out,...

Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics challenges the way historians interpret the causes of the American Civil War. Using Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas's famed rivalry as a prism, Robert E. May shows that when Lincoln and fellow Republicans opposed slavery in the West, they did so partly from evidence that slaveholders, with Douglas's assistance, planned to follow up successes in Kansas by bringing Cuba, Mexico, and Central America into the Union as slave states. A skeptic about...

From French intervention in Mexico to British interests in the Caribbean, the impact of the Civil War extended far beyond military campaigns in Virginia, diffusing widely into the Atlantic world. Revised to take into account the outpouring of scholarship on Civil War diplomacy that has appeared since the book was first published, The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim features essays by acclaimed historians Howard Jones, R. J. M. Blackett, Thomas Schoonover, and James M....

Spearheading Environmental Change: The Legacy of Indiana Congressman Floyd J. Fithian describes the life of a four-term United States congressman, focusing on his role in the emerging environmental movement in late twentieth-century America. Spearheading Environmental Change highlights Fithian’s legislative efforts regarding three water-related issues that profoundly concerned Hoosier and midwestern voters: creating a national park on the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michig...

In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin’s wife, Queen Marie, who “might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant”; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-c...

Broken Mirrors – 3 Classic Psychological Crime Novels masterfully explores the depths of human psyche and morality through an illuminating collection of seminal works. Spanning the spectrum from Russian realism to British gothic and American morality, this anthology encapsulates the genius of psychological narrative. With each novel casting an introspective gaze into the abyss of crime and retribution, this collection holds a mirror to the darker corners of the human soul. Standout pieces ...

Spanning time and space from late Victorian Britain and Ireland to postwar America and Latin America, Late Imperial Culture maps crucial regions in the terrain of imperial cultural practices including theater, film, photography, fiction, autobiography, and body art. The forms reviewed in this lively collection range from those which accept and reproduce empire's dominant self-images to scathing critiques of the oppressions that colonialism has visited upon its subjects and the pri...

The Big Book of Christmas Tales gathers an expansive constellation of seasonal writing, ranging from Victorian moral fable and Gothic-tinged wonder to domestic realism, lyric meditation, children's fantasy, comic anecdote, and psychological tale. Its Christmas is not merely sentimental: it is a literary occasion for charity, memory, estrangement, mystery, social conscience, and renewal. Familiar classics stand beside lesser-known narratives, creating a broad historical panorama of how writ...

Renewed Accountability for Access and Excellence advances discussion of a conceptualized model for cultivating democratic professional practice in education (DPPE) and considers its relationship with contemporary teaching and leading praxes. A diverse and highly qualified group of scholars and practitioners have contributed chapters relating to innovative programs, co-constructed partnerships, empirical and teaching case studies, and examples of practical applications of theory for advanci...

Based on the fifth edition, which was first published in London in 1685. "Wherein the whole ART is revealed in a more easie and perfect Method, than hath been publisht in any language. Expert and ready Ways for the Dressing of all Sorts of FLESH, FOWL, and FISH, with variety of SAUCES proper for each of them; and how to raise all manner of _Pastes_; the best Directions for all sorts of _Kickshaws_, also the _Terms_ of _CARVING_ and _SEWING_. An exact account of all _Dishes_ for all _Season...