The Great Depression devastated the economies of both Germany and Great Britain. Yet the middle classes in the two countries responded in vastly different ways. German Protestants, perceiving a choice among a Bolshevik-style revolution, the chaos and decadence of Weimar liberalism, and Nazi authoritarianism, voted Hitler into power and then acquiesced in the resulting dictatorship. In Britain, Labour and Tory politicians moved gingerly together to form a National Government that muddled through the Depression with piecemeal reform.In this troubling book about troubled times, Kenneth Barnes looks into the question of how theologians and church leaders contributed to a cultural matrix that predisposed Protestants in these two countries to very different political alternatives. Holding fast to the liberal social gospel, British churchmen diagnosed the problems of the 1920s and the Depression ao solvable and called for genuine reforms, many of which foreshadowed the coming welfare state. German leaders, in contrast, were terrified by the socioeconomic and political problems of the Weimar era and offered no social message or solution. Despairingly, they referred the problems to secular politicians and after 1933 beat the drum for obedience to the Nazi state.Based on extensive research in European archives, especially the rich papers of the interwar ecumenical movement housed at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, this book examines key intellectual figures such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Archbishop William Temple, as well as many lesser known church officials and theologians. Barnes brings to life the intellectual struggles and dilemmas of the interwar period to help explain why good people could, for moral and religious reasons, choose opposing courses of political action.

The period from her first London assembly to her wedding day was the narrow span of autonomy for a middle-class Englishwoman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many women, as Katherine Sobba Green shows, the new ideal of companionate marriage involved such thoroughgoing revisions in self-perception that a new literary form was needed to represent their altered roles.That the choice among suitors ideally depended on love and should not be decided on any other grounds was a principal theme among a group of heroine-centered novels published between 1740 and 1820. During these decades, some two dozen writers, most of them women, published such courtship novels. Specifically aiming them at young women readers, these novelists took as their common purpose the disruption of established ideas about how dutiful daughters and prudent young women should comport themselves during courtship. Reading a wide range of primary texts, Green argues that the courtship novel was a feminized genre -- written about, by, and for women.She challenges contemporary readers to appreciate the subtleties of early feminism in novels by Eliza Haywood, Mary Collyer, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Richardson, Frances Brooke, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West, Mary Brunton, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen -- to recognize that these courtship novelists held in common a desire to reimagine the subject positions through which women understood themselves.

Genre -- the articulation of "kind" -- is one of the oldest and most continuous subjects of theoretical and critical commentary. Yet from Romanticism to postmodernism, the concept of genre has been punched with so many holes that today it hardly seems graspable, let alone viable. By combining theory with dialectical literary histories of three significantly different genres -- tragedy, satire, and the essay -- John Snyder reconstructs genre as the figural deployment of symbolic power. One purpose of this approach is to reconcile the recent dismantling of representational and classificatory genres with the incipient notion in post-Althusser Marxism that genre is the crucial mediation between history and aesthetics. Snyder extends certain implications of Aristotle, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Serres. He also offers the first antisystem yet comprehensive genre theory to serve as a fully distinct alternate to Frye's formalist and Genette's structuralist schemes.Finally, Snyder's theory of genre as power opens a way to a fundamentally new theory of literature itself: that aesthetic language deployed as power organizes itself as generic intervention. Three historically dynamic configurations establish the range of all possible genres -- tragedy as power politically deployed as mimesis, satire as power rationally deployed as rhetoric, and the essay as power textually deployed as constative rhetoric.Specific analyses developing this important new theory cover a broad spectrum of literature, from classical to contemporary. Other genres, different media, and a variety of subgenres and modes political and religious -- all acquire fresh significance from the elaborations of Snyder's three selected genres.

Twenty-eight powerful and individual voices are heard as Pearlman and Henderson offer a forum for a generous cross-section of the women writing fiction in America today -- writers whose vital statistics cross the borders of race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual preference, marital status, age, geography, and lifestyle. Each writer is presented in an essay/interview reflecting the dynamic that develops naturally when two vital minds meet to discuss topic of mutually interest. The writers talk about the role of memory, space, and family in their work, about politics, dreams, and race, about their mothers and children and alma maters, about book reviewing and their agents, editors, and publishers, and about each others' work. A bibliography of principal works follows each essay. A valuable contribution to writers both female and male, for above all else, this is a book about writing.

The African continent has long been plagued by economic problems. During the 1970s, with famines and two oil crises, the attention of the international donor community was riveted on Africa. In the 1980s international organizations, both governmental and private, have responded to the African crises. One increasingly visible organization is the African Development Bank, recently heralded by the Wall Street Journal as "the rarest of African species: a success." Founded in 1964 by African governments, its mandate was to solve African problems using African resources. But the devastation of the 1970s forced bank members to reexamine the implications of Africanicity, and in 1982 the bank courted nonregional members.In this first academic study of the ADB, Karen Mingst argues that the bank is a political institution, not the functional, economically neutral organization originally envisioned. Using bank archives and extensive interviews with ADB personnel, contractors, the economic development community, and national government officials, Mingst analyzes the changing political relationships in the ADB in three arenas: intraorganizational politics with effects on the secretariat and on policy issues, political relations with other development organizations, and hegemonic politics among politically and economically powerful state members.Particularly fascinating are her analyses of ADB techniques to influence borrowing states and her discussion of the cooperative and competitive relationship between the ADB and the World Bank. Mingst concludes by comparing the ADB with the other multilateral development banks: the Inter-American Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank.This book will interest all policymakers and scholars concerned with international organizations, economic development, and the entire future of Africa.

The figure of an old man poling a skiff toward shore against the evening light engaged Susan Brait to learn about Chesapeake Bay, and it is that image which opens this her book on the oystermen of the Bay and the sapping of their traditional life, and even the bounty of the Bay itself, by the demands of American society.With directness and poetic economy Brait takes the reader into the life of the Bay and into the complex relationships that affect oysters and those who make their living from them. Her account weaves easily from the daily work of oystermen to the natural forces that have shaped the Bay, from the experimental culture of oysters by marine biologists to the plans of businessmen who expect to grow and harvest the mollusks on privately owned reefs, from efforts to legislate control of the Bay and its resources to the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River where increasing pollution of the Bay originates from agricultural practices of the Amish and other farmers. These and other disparate elements are gracefully woven into a seamless web that represents the complex wholeness of the Bay itself.Chesapeake Gold is a sensitive portrayal of people and their place, but it is also more. The oystermen and their efforts to maintain their traditional life become a figure for our society's struggle to find an ethic that will serve both man and the natural world that man is apart from and a part of.

Much that is commonly accepted about slavery and religion in the Old South is challenged in this significant book. The eight essays included here show that throughout the antebellum period, southern whites and blacks worshipped together, heard the same sermons, took communion and were baptized together, were subject to the same church discipline, and were buried in the same cemeteries. What was the black perception of white-controlled religious ceremonies? How did whites reconcile their faith with their racism? Why did freedmen, as soon as possible after the Civil War, withdraw from the biracial churches and establish black denominations? This book is essential reading for historians of religion, the South, and the Afro-American experience.

Shakespeare and the Poet's Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare -- or any poet of the time -- ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe. Students of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry will find Schmidgall's approach and conclusions both challenging and illuminating.

The construction of the Erie Canal may truly be described as a major event in the growth of the young United States. At a time when the internal links among the states were scanty, the canal's planners boldly projected a system of transportation that would strike from the eastern seaboard, penetrate the frontier, and forge a bond between the East and the growing settlements of the West. In this comprehensive history, Ronald E. Shaw portrays the development of the canal as viewed by its contemporaries, who rightly saw it as an engineering marvel and an achievement of great economic and social significance not only for New York but also for the nation.

The so-called "New Woman" -- that determined and free-wheeling figure in "rational" dress, demanding education, suffrage, and a career-was a frequent target for humorists in the popular press of the late nineteenth century. She invariably stood in contrast to the "womanly woman," a traditional figure bound to domestic concerns and a stereotype away from which many women were inexorably moving.Patricia Marks's book, based on a survey of satires and caricatures drawn from British and American periodicals of the 1880s and 1890s, places the popular view of the New Woman in the context of the age and explores the ways in which humor both reflected and shaped readers' perceptions of women's changing roles. Not all commentators of the period attacked the New Woman; even conservative satirists were more concerned with poverty, prostitution, and inadequate education than with defending so-called "femininity." Yet, as the influx of women into the economic mainstream changed social patterns, the popular press responded with humor ranging from the witty to the vituperative.Many of Marks's sources have never been reprinted and exist only in unindexed periodicals. Her book thus provides a valuable resource for those studying the rise of feminism and the influence of popular culture, as well as literary historians and critics seeking to place more formal genres within a cultural framework. Historians, sociologists, and others with an interest in Victorianism will find in it much to savor.

Since the publication of Shantyboat: A River Way of Life in 1953, Harlan Hubbard achieved a wide reputation as a modern-day Thoreau. Not content simply to advocate a life of simplicity and self-sufficiency, Hubbard and his wife Anna in 1944 built with their own hands a houseboat on the banks of the Ohio near Cincinnati and in 1946 set out on a leisurely, five-year journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Shantyboat, Hubbard's recounting of their journey to New Orleans, and Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, his sequel telling of their life in a corner of rural Kentucky after their return, won him a host of readers. Shantyboat on the Bayous is the middle chapter of the Hubbard saga. It tells of Harlan and Anna's voyage of explorations into the remote reaches of Louisiana. For more than a year after reaching New Orleans, the Hubbards meandered through the lush Cajun country on the Intracoastal Waterway, along Bayou Lafourche, thought the marshes around Avery Island, and finally up the storied Bayou Teche toward the farthest point of navigation.The story of these travels, along with the author's illustrations of the bayou country, offers a portrait of one of the most unusual and least-known regions of our country and of the people who inhabit it. In this book, the Hubbards once again demonstrate their gift for living in simple and eloquent harmony with the land. As Don Wallis notes in his foreword, Shantyboat on the Bayous completes Hubbard's autobiography of "the life he shared with Anna, self-created and self-sustained, difficult and joyful, full of achievement and discovery, diligence, pleasure, and reward."Here is a jewel of a travel book, certain to be treasured by Hubbard's many admirers and discovered by scores of new ones.

The Bluegrass region of Kentucky was the only part of the slaveholding South Abraham Lincoln knew intimately. How the cultural environment of Lexington, the home of Lincoln's wife, with its pleasure-loving aristocracy, its distinguished political leaders, and its slave auctions shaped his opinions on slavery and secession is traced in these pages.In this city, early known as the "Athens of the West," Lincoln's alliance with the Todd family widened his circle of acquaintances to include such diverse personalities as the fiery Cassius M. Clay, who urged immediate emancipation; Dr. Robert J. Breckinridge, courageous Presbyterian minister, and the doctor's nephew, John C. Breckinridge, who took up arms against Lincoln after his election to the presidency.

When the University of Kentucky was begun in 1865, it was merely an adjunct of a denominational college in Lexington. From that humble beginning has come a proud institution with an enrollment of 56,000 and with students, faculty, and facilities spread across a landscape extending to the boundaries of the Commonwealth. The University's graduates now include Nobel laureates, statesmen, and thousands of productive citizens whose influence reaches to the far corners of the world. In words and pictures, this book tells the story of the University's beginnings, its struggles for adequate funding, its joys and losses, its triumphs and accomplishments. Carl Cone has assembled from University archives and private collections a visual panorama depicting the growth and diversity of a great institution's first century and a quarter.Here are the University's founding fathers alongside its presidents, faculty members, student leaders, coaches, and athletes. Here too are the dorm rooms, classrooms, laboratories, gymnasiums, and athletic fields in which thousands have worked and played on their way to the degree that marks them as University of Kentucky alumni.In the years since 1865, Kentucky's "flagship university" has moved far toward reaching the vision of greatness held out by its founder. "We want," said John Bowman, "everything which will make this institution eventually equal to any on this continent. Why should we not have them? I think we can." Today, the University continues to strive to match its founder's vision. Here is the story of that quest.

In the spring of 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court declared the state's entire system of common schools to be unconstitutional-an epochal decision that will have enormous impact on the future of the commonwealth and its citizens. In the wake of that decision, educational leaders, legislators, and concerned citizens struggle to define Kentucky's educational needs and to find the means to achieve them.The Path to a Larger Life, made up of recommendations from a volunteer citizens' organization, offers the most sweeping analysis of Kentucky's educational needs published in this century. Concentrating on the connections between a weak Kentucky economy, high levels of poverty and ill health, historic educational backwardness, and limited financial support for education, the book offers a sweeping set of recommendations and a comprehensive plan of action.Citing founder Ed Prichard's admonition that "it does not do to will the ends if you don't will the means," the book explains the need for increased school funding and increased taxation. The committee's original report figured prominently in education debates that began in 1985. As a stimulant for higher public aspirations and a long-range plan of action, this new and updated edition of The Path to a Larger Life is more pertinent than ever today.

For more than fifty years mountain-born Earl Palmer traveled the Southern Appalachians with his camera, recording his personal vision of the mountain people and their heritage. Over these year he created, in several thousand photographs, a distinctive body of work that affirms a traditional image of Appalachia -- a region of great natural beauty inhabited by a self-sufficient people whose lives are notable for simplicity and harmony.For this book, Jean Haskell Speer has selected more than 120 representative photographs from Palmer's collection and has written a biographical and critical commentary based on extensive interviews with the photographer. Palmer's photographs, Speer argues, are significant cultural statements that depict not so much a geographical region as a particular idea of Appalachia.

During the 1950s two Senate investigations, both highly publicized through the new medium of television, revealed the spread of racketeers and corruption among labor unions. Taking advantage of these sensational revelations, business interests, who for years had chafed against the federal government's pro-labor policies, mounted a campaign to curb labor's power. With the support of the business-oriented administration of Dwight Eisenhower, they pushed through Congress a new "reform" law -- the Landrum-Griffin Act. In this book, R. Alton Lee, author of an earlier study of the Taft-Hartley law, offers the first detailed legislative history of this important act and with it an examination of the Eisenhower presidency.Lee traces the development of the public's distrust of labor leaders and the rising sentiment for reform and then follows the progress of the legislation through both houses of Congress in the midst of moves and countermoves by labor and management. He shows how some of the leading actors in the struggle -- notably John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Barry Goldwater -- used the occasion to further their political ambitions. In the final vote the swing of public opinion against labor and the potent combination of conservative southern Democrats and northern Republicans secured for the law an overwhelming majority in Congress.The enactment of the Landrum-Griffin law, Lee concludes, is yet another example of Eisenhower's astuteness as a politician, one who marshaled the force of his popular appeal and adroitly deployed his administrative aides to achieve his goal. It also provides a revealing example of the interplay among public, president, and Congress in the American system.Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin makes a valuable contribution to political and labor history and to a deeper understanding of the Eisenhower presidency.