The University Of North Carolina Press: 2381 books

Much has been written about Thrale, friend and hostess of Samuel Johnson, but this is the first study to focus on Piozzi as the writer. In his narrative of her life, McCarthy draws on a large body of published and unpublished sources to map Piozzi's literary development, define her literary identity,...

This is a report on political conditions in ten widely differing states judged, for one reason or another, to be crucial, typical, or otherwise important. Part one is composed of case histories of state politics; part two reviews some general characteristics of the political structure; the epilogue...

Bergsonian "vitalism" challenged the dominance of Spencerian determinism in the early twentieth century and seemed to offer a new foundation for belief in human freedom and individual possibility. Quirk traces the impact of Bergsonism upon the American sensibility and shows how individual...

Investigating a wide range of problems in the development of English law, this collection of original essays honors the contributions of Samuel D. Thorne to the study of English legal history from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. The essays combine close study of legal texts and doctrines...

In Germany, more than anywhere else, Darwinism was a sensational success. Setting his analysis against the background of popular science, Kelly follows popular Darwinism as it permeated education, religion, politics, and social thought in Germany. He explains how the popularizers changed Darwin's...

Discovered as a typewritten manuscript only after her death in 2006, Family of Earth allows us to see into the young mind of author and Appalachian native Wilma Dykeman (1920–2006), who would become one of the American South's most prolific and storied writers. Focusing on her childhood in Buncombe...

Kinney shows how the Mass, the Divine Offices, and the liturgy underlie the themes and image clusters of Skelton's poems and argues that liturgical music, especially the plainsong, informs all of Skelton's meters. What emerges is the portrait of a consistent, determined, and imaginative poet in whose...

How do people in the African diaspora practice Islam? While the term "Black Muslim" may conjure images of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, millions of African-descended Muslims around the globe have no connection to the American-based Nation of Islam. The Call of Bilal is a penetrating account...

Distinguished by the critical value it assigns to law in Puritan society, this study describes precisely how the Massachusetts legal system differed from England's and how equity and an adapted common law became so useful to ordinary individuals. The author discovers that law gradually replaced religion...

Carpenter discusses apocalytptic narrative schemes in Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Legend of Jubal. In the context of nineteenth-century British interpretation of the prophesies, this study reveals an unsuspected visionary poetics in Eliot's writings and demonstrates that...

A wage is more than a simple fee in exchange for labor, argues Geoff Mann. Beyond being a quantitative reflection of productivity or bargaining power, a wage is a political arena in which working people's identity, culture, and politics are negotiated and developed. In Our Daily Bread, Mann examines...

It was no coincidence that the Civil War occurred during an age of violent political upheaval in Europe and the Americas. Grounding the causes and philosophies of the Civil War in an international context, Andre M. Fleche examines how questions of national self-determination, race, class, and labor...

Tracing the sectionalization of American politics in the 1840s and 1850s, Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together...

The centrality of religion in the life of the Old South, the strongly religious nature of the sectional controversy over slavery, and the close affinity between religion and antebellum American nationalism all point toward the need to explore the role of religion in the development of southern sectionalism....