American Studies - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Popular Eugenics

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

Popular Eugenics (2006)
National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s

Edited by Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell

The motto "Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution" was part of the logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921. However, by the 1930s, the disturbing legacy of this motto had started to reveal itself in the construction of national identities in countries throughout the world. Popular Eugenics is a fascinating look at how such tendencies emerged within the rhetoric, ideology, and visual aesthetics of U.S. mass culture during the 1930s, offering detailed analysis of the way that eugenics appeared within popular culture and images of modernity, particularly during the Depression era.

The essays in this generously illustrated collection demonstrate how, after the scientific foundations of the eugenics movement had been weakened in the 1930s, eugenic beliefs spread into the popular media, including newspapers, movies, museum exhibits, plays, and novels, and even fashion shows and comic strips. Popular Eugenics shows that eugenic thought persisted in science and culture as well as in social policy and goes a long way toward explaining the durability of eugenic thinking and its effects on social policy in the United States.

Popular Eugenics will be of interest to scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines, especially American literature and history, popular culture, media studies, and the history of science.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Popular+Eugenics.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Traveling Women

Wed, 10 May 2006

Traveling Women (2006)
Narrative Visions of Early America

By Susan Clair Imbarrato

Women's travel narratives recording journeys north and south along the eastern seaboard and west onto the Ohio frontier enhance our historical understanding of early America. Drawing extensively from primary sources, Traveling Women documents women's roles in westward settlement and emphasizes travel as a culture-building event.

Susan Clair Imbarrato closely examines women's accounts of their journeys from 1700 to 1830, including Sarah Kemble Knight's well-known journal of her trip from Boston to New York in 1704 and many lesser-known accounts, such as Sarah Beavis's 1779 journal of her travel to Ohio via Kentucky and Susan Edwards Johnson's account or her 1801-2 journey from Connecticut to North Carolina.

In the women's keen observations and entertaining wit, readers will find bravado mixed with hesitation, as women set forth on business, to relocate, and for pleasure. These travelers wrote compellingly of crossing rivers and mountains, facing hunger, encountering native Americans, sleeping in taverns, and confronting slavery, expressing themselves in voices that differed in sensibility from male explorers and travelers.

These accounts, as Imbarrato shows, challenge assumptions that such travel was predominately a male enterprise. In addition, Traveling Women provides a more balanced portrait of westward settlement by affirming women's importance in the settling of early America.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Traveling+Women.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Reworlding America

Wed, 15 Mar 2006

Reworlding America (2006)
Myth, History, and Narrative

By John Muthyala

John Muthyala's Reworlding America moves beyond the U.S.-centered approach of traditional American literary criticism. In this groundbreaking book, Muthyala argues for a transgeographical perspective from which to study the literary and cultural histories of the Americas.

By emphasizing transnational migration, border crossing, and colonial modernity, Reworlding America exposes how national, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural boundaries have been continually created and transgressed---with profound consequences for the peoples of the Americas.

Drawing from cultural studies, anthropology, literature, and history, Muthyala examines the literatures of the Americas in terms of their intimate relationship to questions of cultural survival, identity formation, and social power. He goes beyond nationalist, ethnocentric, and religious frameworks used to conceptualize American literary history and examines the connection between modernity and colonialism.

Reworlding America's significance extends into the realm of education, history, ethnography, and literary and cultural studies and contributes to the larger project of refashioning the role of English and American studies in a transborder, postnational global culture.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Reworlding+America.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Knight of the Road

Sat, 01 Dec 1990

Knight of the Road (1990)
The Life of Highwayman Ham White

By Mark Dugan

The American public has long been fascinated by the Old West and the so–called heroes that it produced. Even before the days of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and the dime novel, the public’s heroes have always been somewhat tainted. Numerous stories of chivalry and gallantry have been accredited to outlaws, but all tales have been based upon folklore and legends. Mark Dugan, however, gives us a bona fide American Robin Hood with Ham White. Undoubtedly the premier stage robber in the history of the United States, Ham White was an enigmatic man who proved he could lead an honest life but his compulsion for stage robbery overcame his reasoning. He realized that the crimes he committed were wrong, and to compensate, he attempted to justify them by acts of gallantry. Unlike representations of extreme violence in the Old West, which is mainly fictional, White’s life history is devoid of bloody scenes and unbelievable shootouts, yet there is continuous action throughout the book and readers will find that Dugan’s real–life tale is a more incredible story than fictional hype.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Knight+of+the+Road.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.