Author: Keith Sagar File Type: pdf The Laughter of Foxes was the first study to be published after Hughes death, and therefore the first to survey the whole of Hughes achievement, including Birthday Letters. It contains a great deal of new information, including extracts from Hughes letters, and the first publication of the background story of Crow. There are chapters on the mythic imagination, on the poetic relationship of Hughes and Plath, and on the evolution of a Hughes poem through all its manuscript drafts. But the main purpose of the book is to attempt an adequate reading of Hughes poetry, revealing the underlying quest which transformed his imagination, leading him by painful stages from a vision of a world made of blood to a vision of a world made of light. **

Author: Lisa Kasmer File Type: pdf Traumatic Tales British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores intersections of nationalism and trauma in Romantic and Victorian literature from the emergence of British nationalism through the height of the British Empire. From the national tales of the early nineteenth century to the socially incisive realist novels that emerged later in the century, nationalism is inescapable in this literature, as much current scholarship acknowledges. Nineteenth-century national trauma, however, has only recently begun to be explored. Taking as its starting point the unsettling effects of nationalism, the essays in this collection expose the violence underlying empire-building, particularly in regard to subject identity. National violenceimperialism, colonialism and warfarenecessarily grounds nation-formation in deep-lying trauma. As the essays demonstrate, such fraught nexus are made visible in national tales as well as in political policy, exposed by means of theoretical and historical analyses to reveal psychological, political, social and individual trauma. This exploration of violence in the construction of national ideology in nineteenth-century Britain rethinks our understanding of cultural memory, national identity, imperialism, and colonialism, recent thrusts of Romantic and Victorian study in nineteenth-century literature. **About the Author Lisa Kasmer is an Associate Professor of English at Clark University, Worcester, USA. She specializes in gender studies and womens writing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

Author: Eric Foner File Type: mobi An abridged version of Reconstruction Americas Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize.About the AuthorEric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, is the author of numerous works on American history, including Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War Tom Paine and Revolutionary America and The Story of American Freedom. He has served as president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York Council for the Humanities.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. The World the War MadeThe Coming of EmancipationOn January 1, 1863, after a winter storm swept up the east coast of the United States, the sun rose in a cloudless sky over Washington, D.C. At the White House, Abraham Lincoln spent most of the day welcoming guests to the traditional New Years reception. Finally, in the late afternoon, the President retired to his office to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Excluded from its purview were the 450,000 slaves in the loyal border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, 275,000 in Union-occupied Tennessee, and tens of thousands more in portions of Louisiana and Virginia under the control of federal armies. But, the Proclamation decreed, the remainder of the nations slave population, well over 3 million men, women, and children, 11 are and henceforth shall be free. Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. The slavery question divided the nations churches, sundered political ties between the sections, and finally shattered the bonds of the Union. On the principle of opposing the further expansion of slavery, a new political party rose to power in the 1850s, placing in the White House a son of the slave state Kentucky who had grown to manhood on the free Illinois prairies and believed the United States could not endure forever half slave and half free. In the crisis that followed Lincolns election, eleven slave states seceded from the Union, precipitating in 1861 the bloodiest war the Western Hemisphere has ever seen. The Emancipation Proclamation not only culminated decades of struggle, but evoked Christian visions of an era of unbounded progress for a nation purged at last of the sin of slavery. Even the staid editors of the New York Times believed it marked a watershed in American life, an era in the history . . . of this country and the world. For emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nations largest concentration of private property. Begun to preserve the Union, the Civil War now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic. In one sense, however, the Proclamation only confirmed what was already happening on farms and plantations throughout the South. War, it has been said, is the midwife of revolution, and well before 1863 the disintegration of slavery had begun. As the Union Army occupied territory on the periphery of the Confederacy, first in Virginia, then in Tennessee, Louisiana, and elsewhere, slaves by the thousands headed for the Union lines. Even in the heart of the Confederacy, the conflict undermined the Souths peculiar institution. The drain of white men into military service left plantations under the control of planters wives and elderly and infirm men, whose authority slaves increasingly felt able to challenge. Reports of demoralized and insubordinate behavior multiplied throughout the South. But generally it was the arrival of federal soldiers that spelled havoc for the slave regime, for blacks quickly grasped that the presence of occupying troops destroyed the coercive power of both the individual master and the slaveholding community. On the Magnolia plantation in Louisiana, the arrival of the Union Army in 1862 sparked a work stoppage and worse We have a terrible state of affairs here negroes refusing to work . . . The negroes have erected a gallows in the quarters and give as an excuse for it that they are told they must drive their master . . . off the plantation hang their master etc. and that then they will be free. Slavery in southern Louisiana, wrote a Northern reporter in November 1862, is forever destroyed and worthless, no matter what Mr. Lincoln or anyone else may say on the subject. Meanwhile, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, with perplexed and laggard steps, the United States government followed in the footsteps of the black slave. The slaves determination to seize the opportunity presented by the war initially proved an embarrassment to the Lincoln administration and a burden to the army. Lincoln fully appreciated, as he would observe in his second inaugural address, that slavery was somehow the cause of the war. But he also understood the vital importance of keeping the border slave states in the Union, generating support among the broadest constituency in the North, and weakening the Confederacy by holding out to irresolute Southerners the possibility that they could return to the Union with their property, including slaves, intact. In 1861, the restoration of the Union, not emancipation, was the cause that generated the widest support for the war effort. Yet as the Confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers, and the presence of Union soldiers precipitated large-scale desertion of the plantations, the early policy quickly unraveled. Increasingly, military authorities adopted the plan, inaugurated in Virginia by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, of designating fugitive slaves contraband of war who would be employed as laborers for the Union armies. Then, too, Northern abolitionists and Radical Republicans recognized that secession offered a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow at slavery. Their agitation kept at the forefront of Northern politics the question of the struggles ultimate purpose. The steps by which Congress and the President moved toward abolition have often been chronicled. In March 1862, Congress enacted an article of war expressly prohibiting the army from returning fugitives to their masters . . . An abridged version of Reconstruction Americas Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize. An abridged version of Reconstruction Americas Unfinished Revolution, the definitive study of the aftermath of the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Prize, Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francis Parkman Prize, and Lionel Trilling Prize.

Author: Kerry Eleveld File Type: pdf As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama distanced himself from same-sex marriage, saying he believed marriage was a sacred union between a man and a woman. In 2012, he did just the opposite, proclaiming it was important for him to affirm the right of same-sex couples to marry. This dramatic about-face put the most powerful man in the world at the front of the battle for gay rights, giving LGBT Americans and their advocates an invaluable ally in their struggle for freedom. Just one year later, the Supreme Court would strike down key provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act, and no Democratic presidential nominee would ever again shun marriage equality. As former Advocate journalist Kerry Eleveld shows, Obamas support transformed the issue of gay rights from a political liability into an electoral imperative, and in Dont Tell Me to Wait she offers a boots-on-the-ground account of how gay rights activists pushed the president to this political tipping point. Obamas evolution on marriage equality was not the result of a benevolent politician who entered the Oval Office with a wealth of good intentions. Rather, pressure from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists changed the conversation, issue by issue. As a result of the protests and outcry following the passage of Californias same-sex marriage ban, Obama realized that overturning the militarys Dont Ask, Dont Tell policy was the one 2008 campaign promise he couldnt ignore. While pledges to other progressive constituencies fell apart during Obamas first two years in office, the LGBT rights movement protested the administrations fecklessness early and often. By the time the sun set on the 111th Congress, the Dont Ask, Dont Tell repeal had become the sole piece of major progressive legislation to become law. The repeals overwhelming success and popularity paved the way for other LGBT advances, including the presidents eventual embrace of the freedom to marry. With unprecedented access and unparalleled insights into this hot-button issue, Dont Tell Me to Wait captures a critical moment in LGBT history and demonstrates the power of activism to change the course of a presidencyand a nation. **