Books in the Studies in American Popular History and Culture series

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work explores the correlation between fiction writing and national identity in the late eighteenth century and the origins of America's unique and enduring love affair with crime and crime fiction.

Drawing on primary documents such as farmer's diaries, small rural newspapers of the 19th century and the publications of state agricultural societies, this provocative study presents an overview into the driving forces of that shaped American history in the Northeast.

This study surveys portraits of American Revolutionary heroes in books, magazines and school texts from 1782 to 1832. During this period of rapid change, historians and newspaper editors presented such tales in narrative and visual style, aiming to promote classical civic virtues.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Creating connections between language and literary studies and exploring the intersection of ideologies of language, gender, and nation, this book shows how American discussions of language in various forms have often disguised deeper social and political concerns about the voices of women, African Americans, and immigrants in national life.

This work examines early twentieth-century literature about women immigrants to reveal the differing ways that American racial categories and identities were textually and socially constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Recognizes the achievements by a nineteenth-century community of women religious, the Grey Nuns of Lewiston, Maine. This book tells how their hospital was significant in its time as the first hospital in that factory city; and is still significant if one desires a more accurate and inclusive history of women and healthcare in America.

This work examines the counter-narratives of social actors that may be used as resources to promote and create social change, particularly racial change.

Focuses on the profound impact that racism had on the literary imagination of black Americans in the South. The author argues that it is impossible to consider what the 'South' and what 'southernness' mean without looking at how black women have contributed to and contested any unified definition of that region.

An analysis of the freedom songs sung by Civil Rights activists and their rhetorical persuasion as part of an evolving African-American history. The songs are viewed as communication strategies that defined the activists' identities, the movement's goals, and a burgeoning world view. Sanger also de

This book inquires into the relations between society and its natural environment by examining the historical discourse around several cases of state building in the American West - the construction of three high dams from 1928 to 1963.

Examines women unionists' life histories through the lens of narrative analysis, interpreting their multiple perspectives as four coherent discourse communities: social activists, union feminists, women martyrs, and women whose identities are defined by their work in non-traditional fields.

The circulation and marketing of Edgar Allan Poe's prose are explored in this book through close readings of Poe's fictive, journalistic, and critical writings, and an examination of his involvement in the transatlantic literary marketplace and his development of a literary brand.

Noting that the variation between the playwrights can be as great as between men and women, and acknowledging that her subjects are limited to a narrow class and race population, Detsi-Diamanti the cultural and historical specificity of women playwrights of the period and the interrelationship between their dramatic efforts and the formation of an American national and literary identity. Her major themes are metaphors of freedom, industrial capitalism, and gender perspective and ideology.

Focuses on how John Brown - radical abolitionist and freedom-fighter - inspired America's most significant intellects, such as Whittier, Whitman, Melville, Howells, Emerson and Thoreau, to take a public stand against the inertia of moral compromise and social degeneracy, bringing the nation to the brink of civil war.

In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas.

Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, this book examines fictional works and historical documents featuring descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s.

Examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's radically egalitarian practice through her involvement in the abolitionist movement, emancipation, Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era, placing her work firmly in black-nationalist lineages. This book contributes to the contemporary portrayal of Harper as a theorist of African-American feminism.

Separating popular fiction into "lowbrow" and "middlebrow," Wood (U. of Wisconsin, River Falls) argues that lowbrow, like highbrow, evolves from folkloric tradition and contains messages about how to find a satisfying niche in the social order. Middlebrow, on the other hand, evolves from myth tradi

Reconciles two conflicting schools of thought within the historiography of American Puritanism. This book contends that under the threat of social and intellectual chaos on the frontiers of America, there emerged a core Puritan mission that was either embraced or spurned by New England's founders, but widely understood by all.

This book examines the evolution of Progressive-era girls' peer groups, their representation in popular girls' fiction, and the influence of these upon young women's lives during the years leading up to the Second World War.

This work examines how libraries could respond to their communities need through the use of numerous primary and secondary sources during World War II in America.

This book studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870.

Explores the development of a provincial textile industry in colonial America. This study examines the promotion of domestic textile manufacture from the level of the Massachusetts legislature down to the way in which individual communities organized individual productive efforts.

Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyses criticism of the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City.