A collection of "Small Town Values" 2010-11 comics.

Winner of the Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians Co-Winner of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Book Award Thinking Small tells the story of how the United States sought to rescue the world from poverty through small-scale, community-based approaches. And it also sounds a warning: such strategies, now again in vogue, have been tried before, with often disastrous consequences. “Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them...This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking... How might those in twenty-first-century development and anti-poverty work forge a better path? They can start by reading Thinking Small.” —Merlin Chowkwanyun, Boston Review “As the historian Daniel Immerwahr demonstrates brilliantly in Thinking Small, the history of development has seen constant experimentation with community-based and participatory approaches to economic and social improvement...Immerwahr’s account of these failures should give pause to those who insist that going small is always better than going big.” —Jamie Martin, The Nation

Tidy categories may suit the media, but people are more complex up close. News outlets, historians, and sociologists can (and do) tell us all about the statistics, but they don’t (and can’t) tell us about what it’s really like in a given place—how the squish of creek water between your toes or the crunch of autumn leaves on a city sidewalk shape your sense of normal and good and right. To understand that—to understand the people in the places—we need stories. We need to listen, get to know the nuance of people, and have empathy for their way of seeing things. Brandon O’Brien is, in many ways, a man torn between places. Raised in the rural South, educated in the suburbs, and now living and doing ministry in Manhattan, he’s seen these places, and their complexity, up close. With the knack of a natural storyteller, he shares what he learned about himself, faith, and the people who make up America on his own journey through it.

This book demonstrates the political potential of mainstream theatre in the US at the end of the twentieth century, tracing ideological change over time in the reception of US mainstream plays taking HIV/AIDS as their topic from 1985 to 2000. This is the first study to combine the topics of the politics of performance, LGBT theatre, and mainstream theatre’s political potential, a juxtaposition that shows how radical ideas become mainstream, that is, how the dominant ideology changes. Using materialist semiotics and extensive archival research, Juntunen delineates the cultural history of four pivotal productions from that period—Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992), Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996), and Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (2000). Examining the connection between AIDS, mainstream theatre, and the media reveals key systems at work in ideological change over time during a deadly epidemic whose effects changed the nation forever. Employing media theory alongside nationalism studies and utilizing dozens of reviews for each case study, the volume demonstrates that reviews are valuable evidence of how a production was hailed by society’s ideological gatekeepers. Mixing this new use of reviews alongside textual analysis and material study—such as the theaters’ locations, architectures, merchandise, program notes, and advertising—creates an uncommonly rich description of these productions and their ideological effects. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, politics, media studies, queer theory, and US history, and to those with an interest in gay civil rights, one of the most successful social movements of the late twentieth century.

At Face Value spins the tale of John White, a trusty Tory backbencher in Canada’s post-Confederation Parliament who was unusually sympathetic to women and Indigenous communities. Hewing closely to the archival record, it nevertheless diverges on one crucial point, reimagining White as a woman named Eliza McCormack. In this Canadian take on Moll Flanders, Don Akenson constructs a past in which people felt free to live in the gender of their own choosing, revealing the assumptions with which gender labels are freighted and the self-empowerment available to those who reject them. Following Eliza from her birth in 1832, amid the Irish cholera panic, At Face Value recounts her blacksmithing apprenticeship, a difficult passage to Canada, an unconventional marriage, and the peaks and valleys of her political career. In Eliza, Akenson offers readers a correction to the male-dominated historical record and an unforgettable literary heroine. Shortlisted for the Trillium Prize when it was released in 1990, this classic Canadian novel has only gained relevance in the thirty years since. At Face Value offers a window into the past and a mirror for the present.

New York Times bestselling author Linda Castillo immerses readers in the world of the Amish in this chilling series that is equal parts fast-paced thriller and intriguing psychological puzzle. Sworn to Silence Sixteen years ago, a brutal serial killer left a trail of victims before vanishing into thin air. Now, he may have returned, and only one woman can stop him—but can she solve the case without revealing a terrible secret that links her to the original murders? Pray for Silence In the quiet town of Painters Mill an Amish family of seven has been found slaughtered on their farm. Police chief Kate Burkholder and her small force have few clues, no motive, and no suspect. Breaking Silence What appears to be a gruesome accident that left three people dead turns more sinister when evidence of foul play emerge. Together with agent John Tomasetti, Kate searches for answers and uncovers a dark secret at work beneath the placid surface of this idyllic Amish community.