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.

The 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic remains a unique event: the only time the Organization of American States has intervened with force on a member state's territory. It is also a classic example of a U.

The people of the Kentucky mountains and the southern Appalachians preserved a language alive with colorful turns of phrase and whimsical wit and for their amusement they created a rich vein of oral lore -- songs, tales, and games. James Still presents a varied and entertaining collection of riddles, whimsies, and verbal pranks, gathered through his long association with the mountain people of eastern Kentucky.This book includes in one volume two earlier books -- Way Down Yonder on Troublesome Creek and The Wolfpen Rusties -- that have been unavailable for several years. It contains the complete text of the original editions, including Still's explanatory notes for archaic or obscure expressions. Also included are the original lively illustrations by the noted artist Janet McCaffery.

Richard Lukas's book, encompassing the wartime recollections of sixty "ordinary" Poles under Nazi occupation, constitutes a valuable contribution to a new perspective on World War II. Lukas presents gripping first-person accounts of the years 1939-1945 by Polish Christians from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Their narratives, from both oral and written sources, contribute enormously to our understanding of the totality of the Holocaust. Many of those who speak in these pages attempted, often at extreme peril, to assist Jewish friends, neighbors, and even strangers who otherwise faced certain death at the hands of the German occupiers. Some took part in the underground resistance movement. Others, isolated from the Jews' experience and ill informed of that horror, were understandably preoccupied with their own survival in the face of brutal condition intended ultimately to exterminate or enslave the entire Polish population. These recollections of men and women are moving testimony to the human courage of a people struggling for survival against the rule of depravity. The power of their painful witness against the inhumanities of those times is undeniable.

" Thicker'n fiddlers in hell. Independent as a hog on ice. If a bride makes her own clothes, it's bad luck. It'll snow in May if it thunders in February. How's a hen on a fence like a penny? What's the reddest side of an apple? Learn what folklore and folk culture are and enjoy a generous helping of sayings, rhymes, songs, tall tales, superstitions and riddles from Kentucky.

" Inspiring short biographies of some of Kentucky's unsung heroines -- Jenny Wiley, Lucy Audubon, Malinda Gatewood Bibb, Laura Clay, Enid Yandell, Cora Wilson Stewart, Mary Breckinridge, Alice Allison Dunnigan, and Loretta Lynn. These women had a vision of a better life for themselves and for others and the courage to make their ideas become real.

"The reader gets to play detective in four mysteries from Kentucky's past -- the disappearances of James Harrod and "Honest Dick" Tate, the battlefield death of Indian chief Tecumseh, and the assassination of William Goebel. James Klotter offers clues but leaves the solution to the reader. James Klotter is Kentucky State Historian and professor of History at Georgetown University and is the author of A New History of Kentucky, History Mysteries, Our Kentucky, Kentucky: Land of Tomorrow, Kentucky: Portrait in Paradox, Kentucky: Decades of Discord, William Goebbel, and Faces of Kentucky.

" "I don't agree with all the choices people make," says the author. "You probably won't either. My job is to let them tell their stories. " And so she does in these thirteen warm, funny, and sad short stories about people making hard decisions for themselves and for their families: · Like Iona, who accidentally accepts a marriage proposal · And Daryll, just about to graduate from high school, whose mother is eager for him to "make something" of himself. · And Lexie and Jeb, deep in debt and already struggling to feed their six children, who find out a seventh is on the way.

The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson, and Barbara A. White.

In her historical novels about Kentucky, Janice Holt Giles has become known for the integrity with which she handles her material and for the realism with which she writes. In The Believers, first published in 1957, she continues her series about the settling of Kentucky with a moving story of love and marriage set in a Shaker community.Rebecca Fowler is only seventeen when she marries Richard Cooper. She cannot remember a time when she has not loved and trusted him and followed where he led. At first the marriage is happy; it is only after their child is stillborn that Richard shows preliminary signs of religious fanaticism in his insistence that this is God's punishment visited upon them. The Shaker missionaries newly arrived in Kentucky find him an easy convert.When Richard joins the Shaker community, Rebecca goes with him, as a dutiful wife should, hoping that her love will ultimately win him back to her and to the larger world. She becomes part of a strange world in which men and women -- even husbands and wives -- live apart, coming together only for meals and for worship. As time passes and she sees Richard's affection recede, only her stubborn honesty gives her the strength to deny lip service to a doctrine she cannot truly accept and, at the last, courage to follow the dictates of her heart.In this novel, Mrs. Giles gives us a unique picture of everyday life in a Shaker village, one of the experiments in utopian communal living that are a part of American history. Realistically but with understanding, she shows us a society animated not only by saintliness but by bigotry and ordinary human frailties.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.