This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman’s life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819–1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren’s son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Later in life, Lee debated with senators, fed foreign emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed soldiers. As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces’ dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished. Lee’s personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life. She was an elite southern woman who knew the rules but who also flouted and other times flaunted the prevailing gender arrangements. Her views on status suggest that the immeasurable markers of prestige were much more important than wealth in her social stratum. She had strong ideas about who was (or was not) her “equal,” yet she married a man of quite modest means. Lee’s biography also enlarges our view of Confederate patriotism, revealing a war within a war and divisions arising as much from politics and geography as from issues of slavery and class. Mary Greenhow Lee was a woman of her time and place — one whose youthful rebellion against her society’s standards yielded to her desire to preserve that society’s way of life. Genteel Rebel illustrates the value of biography as history as it narrates the eventful life of a surprisingly powerful southern lady.

Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) played a pivotal role in creating and defining the Harlem Renaissance. Thurman's complicated life as a black writer is described here for the first time: from his birth in Salt Lake City, Utah; through his quixotic and spotty education; to his arrival and residence in New York City at the height of the New Negro Movement in Harlem. Seen as it often is through the life of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance is celebrated as a highly successful Afro-centrist achievement. Seen from Thurman's perspective, as set against the historical and cultural background of the Jazz Age, the accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance appear more qualified and more equivocal. In Thurman's view the Harlem Renaissance's failure to live up to its initial promise resulted from an ideological underpinning which was overwhelmingly concerned with race. He felt that the movement's self-consciousness and faddism compromised the aesthetic standards of many of its writers and artists, including his own.

Five decades after the production and initial release of Rebel Without a Cause, this book examines both the complicated historical moment in which the film was made as well as its continuing and pervasive influence on film today. The contributors track how the film continues to speak to diverse audiences as a touchstone for imagined anxieties over adolescence and coming-of-age, traditional values of family and community, threats from abroad, and the provocations of mass or consumer society. Although the specific sources and motivations for rebellion have shifted, what has persisted is the film's singular power to represent rebellion in what could otherwise be seen as the everyday, and to move viewers to ponder its causes.

“Cooper paints a meticulous and absorbing portrait of McKay’s restless artistic, intellectual, and political odyssey... The definitive biography on McKay.”—Choice Although recognized today as one of the genuine pioneers of black literature in this century—the author of “If We Must Die,” Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and A Long Way from Home, among other works—Claude McKay (1890–1948) died penniless and almost forgotten in a Chicago hospital. In this masterly study, Wayne Cooper presents a fascinating, detailed account of McKay’s complex, chaotic, and frequently contradictory life. In his poetry and fiction, as well as in his political and social commentaries, McKay searched for a solid foundation for a valid black identity among the working-class cultures of the West Indies and the United States. He was an undeniably important predecessor to such younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and also to influential West Indian and African writers such as C. L. R. James and Aimé Césaire. Knowledge of his life adds important dimensions to our understanding of American radicalism, the expatriates of the 1920s, and American literature. “Mr. Cooper’s most original contribution is his careful and perceptive analysis of McKay’s nonfiction writing, especially his social and political commentary, which often contained ‘prophetic statements‘ on a range of important social, political, and historical issues.”—New York Times Book Review

During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture. Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.

Explains the reasons for the large Irish emigration, and examines the problems they faced adjusting to new lives in the United States.