Books published by publisher University of Massachusetts Press

Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman (1893--1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New Yorker as a time defined by "feverish contact with great theatre stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at parties, in mansions and great estates." While he hobnobbed with the likes of Mary McCarthy, Elia Kazan, and Greta Garbo and was one of Broadway's leading luminaries, Behrman would later admit that the friendships he built with the magazine's legendary editors Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Katharine S. White were the "one unalloyed felicity" of his life.People in a Magazine collects Behrman's correspondence with his editors along with telegrams, interoffice memos, and editorial notes drawn from the magazine's archives -- offering an unparalleled view of mid-twentieth-century literary life and the formative years of The New Yorker, from the time of Behrman's first contributions to the magazine in 1929 until his death.

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Reconstruction invites reflection on the broad meaning of American democracy, including the ideals of freedom, equality, racial justice, and self-determination. In We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice, John David Smith brings together a wealth of primary texts―editorials, letters, newspaper articles, and personal testimonies―to illuminate the experience of emancipation for the millions of African Americans enmeshed in the transition from chattel slavery to freedom from 1865 to 1877.The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics. Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election. We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice is a substantially revised and expanded edition of a book originally published under the title Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.

Has a stunning surprise or lucky encounter ever propelled you in an unanticipated direction? Are you doing what you always thought you would be doing with your life or has some unseen magnetism changed your course? And has that redirection come to seem inevitable? Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin asked leading contemporary writers to consider these questions, which they characterize through the metaphor of "the strange attractor," a scientific theory describing an inevitable occurrence that arises out of chaos. Meidav's introduction and the thirty-five pieces collected here offer imaginative, arresting, and memorable replies to this query, including guidance from a yellow fish, a typewriter repairman, a cat, a moose, a bicycle, and a stranger on a train. Absorbing and provocative, this is nonfiction to be read in batches and bursts and returned to again and again.

Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee's daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier's most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age.A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who formed Boston's bohemia. He married twice, first Agnes Rand, an award-winning poet and children's book author, and later, after their divorce, Marion Lewis Chamberlain, a librarian and MIT-trained architect. Francis and Agnes's eldest daughter, Peggy, who was so integral to the work of pioneer Pictorialists, died at age seven of juvenile diabetes. Her sister, Alice, who lost her hearing in infancy, became a wood carver and sculptor.Utilizing previously unknown family archives and institutional sources, Fanning traces the Lee family's story in the context of major artistic, political, social, and religious trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and Aestheticism, while also showing how their experiences reflected the national culture's evolving conceptions of family, gender, childhood, medicine, deaf education, and mourning. This richly drawn and gracefully written account of one family informs our understanding of this vibrant era, in Boston and well beyond.

With more than thirty-five million copies in print, the Little House series, written in the 1930s and 1940s by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, has been a spectacular commercial success. What is it about this eight-volume serial novel for children that accounts for its enduring power? And what does the popularity of these books tell us about the currents of American culture?Ann Romines interweaves personal observation with scholarly analysis to address these questions. Writing from a feminist perspective and drawing on resources of gender studies, cultural studies, and new historicist reading, she examines both the content of the novels and the process of their creation. She explores the relationship between mother and daughter working as collaborative authors and calls into question our assumptions about plot, juvenile fiction, and constructions of gender on the nineteenth-century frontier and in the Depression years when the Little House books were written. This is a book that will appeal both to scholars and to general readers who might welcome an engaging and accessible companion volume to the Little House novels.

George McGovern is chiefly remembered for his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. Yet at the time, his candidacy raised eyebrows by invoking the prophetic tradition, an element of his legacy that is little studied. In My Brother's Keeper, Mark A. Lempke explores the influence of McGovern's evangelical childhood, Social Gospel worldview, and conscientious Methodism on a campaign that brought antiwar activism into the mainstream.McGovern's candidacy signified a passing of the torch within Christian social justice. He initially allied with the ecumenical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during a time when these institutions worked easily with liberal statesmen. But the senator also galvanized a dynamic movement of evangelicals rooted in the New Left, who would dominate subsequent progressive religious activism as the mainline entered a period of decline. My Brother's Keeper argues for the influential, and often unwitting, role McGovern played in fomenting a "Religious Left" in 1970s America, a movement that continues to this day. It joins a growing body of scholarship that complicates the dominant narrative of that era's conservative Christianity.

Before he ever dreamed of becoming a landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) visited southern England and Wales during a month-long walking tour. A gifted writer, he recorded his impressions of the trip in this richly detailed volume, which has long been out of print. "In Walks and Talks," writes Charles C. McLaughlin, author of the book's new introduction, "Olmsted is reporter, social analyst, narrator, dramatist, scene-painter, and humorist, employing a wide range of modes and styles to give us the sights, sounds, and mental impressions of rural England in 1850." Olmsted's narrative-at turns poetic, funny, critical, and meticulous-is a delight to read. It is also an important historical document, revealing the extent to which England permeated almost every aspect of Olmsted's emerging worldview, soon to find expression in his various careers as scientific farmer, author and publisher, social critic, reformer, administrator, and landscape architect of major parks and park systems throughout the United States. The introduction clarifies the links between Olmsted's developing picturesque aesthetic, social conscience, and reformer's passion for change. McLaughlin offers a persuasive argument that Olmsted would come to adapt many of the features of the cultivated English countryside-first seen on this trip-in designed landscapes such as New York's Central Park. This edition provides extensive annotations to the original text, furnishing background and context to the people and places Olmsted encountered during his journey. McLaughlin's notes are based on his own trips through England, undertaken over the past two decades to retrace the author's original route.Published in association with Library of American Landscape History: http://lalh.org/

In 1928 the landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff (1870–1957) began what became one of the most important examples of the American Colonial Revival landscape―Colonial Williamsburg, a project that stretched into the 1940s and included town and highway planning as well as residential and institutional gardens. Shurcliff graduated from MIT with a degree in engineering in 1894 but was drawn to landscape architecture. Because no formal programs existed at the time, on the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted and with the aid of his mentor, Charles Eliot, he went on to piece together courses at Harvard College, the Lawrence Scientific School, and the Bussey Institute, earning a second B.S. two years later. He then spent eight years working in the Olmsted office, acquiring a broad and sophisticated knowledge of the profession.Opening his own practice in 1904, Shurcliff emphasized his expertise in town planning, through the years preparing plans for towns surrounding Boston and for several industrial communities. He also designed recreational spaces in and around Boston, including significant aspects of the Franklin Park Zoo and the Charles River Esplanade, one of Shurcliff's major projects in the region.In this richly illustrated biography, Elizabeth Hope Cushing shows how Shurcliff's early years in Boston, his training, his early design and planning work, and his experience creating an Arts and Crafts–style summer compound in Ipswich led to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest commission of his career and his most significant contribution to American landscape architecture.Published in association with Library of American Landscape History: http://lalh.org/

The Hidden Force is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer, L. Couperus. In the novel, the protagonist, Van Oudijck, a Dutch resident, faces his own demise as a result of his inability to see past his Western rationalism. The East Indian people and countryside have no effect on him, and the ambiance of Java, coupled with the adverse behavior of their Javanese subjects, prove more powerful than the might and power of the colonials.

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Reconstruction invites reflection on the broad meaning of American democracy, including the ideals of freedom, equality, racial justice, and self-determination. In We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice, John David Smith brings together a wealth of primary texts―editorials, letters, newspaper articles, and personal testimonies―to illuminate the experience of emancipation for the millions of African Americans enmeshed in the transition from chattel slavery to freedom from 1865 to 1877.The years following Appomattox offered the freed people numerous opportunities and challenges. Ex-slaves reconnected with relatives dispersed by the domestic slave trade and the vicissitudes of civil war. They sought their own farms and homesteads, education for their children, and legal protection from whites hostile to their new status. They negotiated labor contracts, established local communities, and, following the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, entered local, state, and national politics. Though aided by Freedmen's Bureau agents and sympathetic whites, former slaves nevertheless faced daunting odds. Ku Klux Klansmen and others terrorized blacks who asserted themselves, many northerners lost interest in their plight, and federal officials gradually left them to their own resources. As a result, former Confederates regained control of the southern state governments following the 1876 presidential election. We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice is a substantially revised and expanded edition of a book originally published under the title Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865–1877.

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the "North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North" offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke proves, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.While Lincoln's alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, "There Is a North" is the first book to explore how cultural action―including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature―transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North's rallying cry as his title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.