Bette Davis's career becomes a vehicle for a deep examination of American race relations.Bette Davis was not only one of Hollywood's brightest stars, but also one of its most outspoken advocates on matters of race. In Bette Davis Black and White, Julia A. Stern explores this largely untold facet of Davis's brilliant career.Bette Davis Black and White analyzes four of Davis's best-known pictures— Jezebel (1938), The Little Foxes

The Last Mermaid lives in a white tower... The year is 2143. The world’s population has fled the devastating effects of a mutated bacterium to the safety of giant malls. These towering communities, constructed with prescient foresight by a handful of wealthy elites, are the last hope for uncorrupted humanity. Within their utopian walls, human life survives and soldiers on. These massive structures are powered by the greatest scientific discovery of the new era, Planc. It’s the first truly ...

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...

Reconsiders the centrality of a remarkable American writer of the ante- and postbellum periodsElizabeth Stoddard was a gifted writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism; successfully published within her own lifetime; esteemed by such writers as William Dean Howells and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and situated at the epicenter of New York’s literary world. Nonetheless, she has been almost excluded from literary memory and importance. This book seeks to understand ...

A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis’s inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut’s death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? T...