Books by Mark C. Carnes

Why are so many students intellectually disengaged? Mark Carnes says it is because students are so deeply absorbed in competitive social play. He shows how month-long role-immersion games in the curriculum can channel those competitive impulses into transformative learning experiences, and how bricks-and-mortar colleges can set young minds on fire.

In this study of American 19th-century secret orders, the author argues that religious practices and gender roles became increasingly feminized in Victorian America and that secret societies, such as the Freemasons, offered men and boys an alternative, male counterculture.

The stereotype of the Victorian man as a sexually repressed patriarch belies the wide variety of male behaviors and conceptions of manhood during the mid to late nineteenth century. A complex pattern of alternative and even competing behaviors and attitudes emerges in this collection of essays that points toward a "gendered history" of men.

This work uses the geography of the United States to portray the history of the land and its people. An indispensable tool for students and educators alike, this book is destined to become a classic in the field.