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  Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus

  Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and Hyoejin Yoon

  Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus documents how Asian/Asian American teacher-scholars have emerged within and contributed to a number of areas in rhetoric and composition, as well as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in diverse and substantial ways from the 1960s to contemporary times. Contributors reflect on the spaces where the writing of history and the potential for community coalesce, ultimately demonstrating how a history that acknowledges the alliances, unexpected connections and coalitions, gaps, setbacks, and silences is necessary for sustaining a scholarly community that is persistently open to re/vision.

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  Wall Tappings: An International Anthology of Women's Prison Writings, 200 AD to the Present

  Judith A. Scheffler

  Breaking histories of silence and invisibility, Wall Tappings presents an international collection of women's writings, from prisons around the world and across centuries. “These are the marginal texts in a tradition of marginal texts,” writes Judith A. Scheffler in introducing her groundbreaking anthology of writing by women prisoners. Unique in its geographic and historical ranges, this rich collection gives a voice to women whose stories have been long neglected. Speaking from settings as diverse as a Roman prison cell in 203 AD, the labor camps of Siberia in the 1930s, and a Philippines prison in the 1980s, these writers explore the ways in which actual incarceration rests in the shadow of imprisonment within larger society.

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  Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America

  Lydia Cushman Schurman and Deidre Johnson

  Many works now considered classics were scorned by critics when they were first published. While some of these works received little attention when initially released, others were enormously popular. So too, there is a large body of popular American fiction that is only now beginning to receive critical attention. This book examines the growing respect given to American fiction that was scorned by cultural gatekeepers such as librarians and educators, though these works were widely read by the American public. The volume looks at such scorned literature as dime novels, comic books, juvenile fiction, romance novels, and pulp magazines. Expert contributors discuss what these works say about the mores and morals of the people who so avidly read them and the values of those who sought to censor them. The book covers the period from the 1830s to the 1950s and shows how popular literature reflected such concerns as feminism and anti-feminism, notions of the heroic and unheroic, and violence and racism. In doing so, the volume helps fill a gap in scholarship about literature that was clearly important to a large number of readers.

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  This Will Make a Man of Me: The Life and Letters of a Teenage Officer in the Civil War

  James Scythes

  This book presents a firsthand account of the experiences of seventeen-year-old Second Lieutenant Thomas James Howell during Major General George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. Howell's story offers the reader a unique perspective of a young man coming of age in the Union army during the Civil War.

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  The History of the Book in the West: 1700–1800, Volume III

  Eleanor Shevlin

  Influenced by Enlightenment principles and commercial transformations, the history of the book in the eighteenth century witnessed not only the final decades of the hand-press era but also developments and practices that pointed to its future: ‘the foundations of modern copyright; a rapid growth in the publication, circulation, and reading of periodicals; the promotion of niche marketing; alterations to distribution networks; and the emergence of the publisher as a central figure in the book trade, to name a few.’ The pace and extent of these changes varied greatly within the different sociopolitical contexts across the western world. The volume’s twenty–four articles, many of which proffer broader theoretical implications beyond their specific focus, highlight the era’s range of developments. Complementing these articles, the introductory essay provides an overview of the eighteenth–century book and milestones in its history during this period while simultaneously identifying potential directions for new scholarship.

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  Ensuring quality and integrity in online learning programs

  Esther Smidt and Rui Li

  Within the past decade, many higher education institutions have begun to offer degree programs online, but there are a lack of resources for institutions to rely on when choosing to introduce an online program. With the prevalence of technology in education, the importance of providing quality distance education programs cannot be ignored. Ensuring Quality and Integrity in Online Learning Programs is an essential reference source that delves into the requirements and essential technologies needed to create and encourage effective and inclusive online educational programs. The book examines and offers best practices for all factors that contribute to building quality online programs including faculty buy-in and training; student motivation, interest, and retention; program planning, pedagogy, and design; program administration; and the use of appropriate and up-to-date technology. Administrators, educators, online program directors, instructional designers, curriculum developers, faculty, researchers, and students will benefit from the emerging research contained within this publication.

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  Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon

  Janneken Smucker

  Quilts have become a cherished symbol of Amish craftsmanship and the beauty of the simple life. Country stores in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and other tourist regions display row after row of handcrafted quilts. In luxury homes, office buildings, and museums, the quilts have been preserved and displayed as priceless artifacts. They are even pictured on collectible stamps. Amish Quilts explores how these objects evolved from practical bed linens into contemporary art. In this in-depth study, illustrated with more than 100 stunning color photographs, Janneken Smucker discusses what makes an Amish quilt Amish. She examines the value of quilts to those who have made, bought, sold, exhibited, and preserved them and how that value changes as a quilt travels from Amish hands to marketplace to consumers. A fifth-generation Mennonite quiltmaker herself, Smucker traces the history of Amish quilts from their use in the late nineteenth century to their sale in the lucrative business practices of today. Through her own observations as well as oral histories, newspaper accounts, ephemera, and other archival sources, she seeks to understand how the term "Amish" became a style and what it means to both quiltmakers and consumers. She also looks at how quilts influence fashion and raises issues of authenticity of quilts in the marketplace. Whether considered as art, craft, or commodity, Amish quilts reflect the intersections of consumerism and connoisseurship, religion and commerce, nostalgia and aesthetics. By thoroughly examining all of these aspects, Amish Quilts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of these beautiful works.

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  Model Voices: Finding a Writing Voice

  Jeffrey Sommers

  Jeffrey Sommers is an Associate Professor of English at West Chester University. His interests include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy.

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  From Community to College: Reading and Writing Across Diverse Contexts

  Jeffrey Sommers and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson

  Jeffrey Sommers is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University with a Ph.D. from New York University. His research interests & activities include composition and rhetoric, writing assessment, professional journal editing, and pedagogy. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson is Professor Emerita from Miami University. Difference theory cuts across the three areas of her research interests: Composition and Rhetoric (basic writing, open admissions and disabled students, histories of writing programs); Disability Studies (disability memoir and rhetoric, disability pedagogy); and Women’s Studies (feminist pedagogies and epistemologies).

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  Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879

  Carolyn Sorisio

  Fleshing Out America explores the representation of the body in the work of seven authors, all of whom were involved with their era's reform movements: Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin R. Delany. For such American writers, who connected the individual body symbolically with the body politic, the new science was fraught with possibility and peril. Covering topics from representation, spectatorship, and essentialism to difference, power, and authority, Carolyn Sorisio places these writers' works in historical context and in relation to contemporary theories of corporeality. She shows how these authors struggled, in diverse and divergent ways, to flesh out America—to define, even defend, the nation's body in a tumultuous period.

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  Group Responsibility: A Narrative Account

  Cassie Striblen

  Since World War II philosophers and others have sporadically and not altogether successfully wrestled with the moral problem presented by group responsibility for such atrocities as the Holocaust, 'ethnic cleansing,' racial violence and other great harms. Skillfully and selectively discussing the merits and serious drawbacks of some of the key contributions to this debate, Cassie Striblen defends a plausible yet demanding account of shared responsibility among members of the 'white' identity group based on insights from social psychology and narrative theory. Her new and subtle proposal should do much to bring serious discussion of group responsibility back into focus and sets a new standard for future debate on the topic. Lawrence Jost, University of Cincinnati, USA.

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  On Air: Effective Announcing

  Phillip Thompsen

  By providing students with essential information regarding broadcast performance, On Air: Effective Announcing helps them develop the skills required to enter the field of professional announcing. The text also helps students understand how the study of broadcast performance fits within the larger framework of communication studies.
  The book begins with an overview of the professional practice of announcing and an exploration of essential principles of effective communication. Later chapters help the reader prepare for on-air performance. The book provides valuable advice regarding what to expect on set, how to prepare for live broadcast performance, how to make on-air communication meaningful and memorable, and more. Additional chapters are dedicated to the development of a distinctive voice and effective speech practices, mastery of spoken English, and developing an understanding of sound and audio. The final chapter provides real-world strategies for breaking into the business and building a lasting career.
  Featuring voice exercises, opportunities for reflection, and a surplus of practical advice, On Air is well suited for introductory courses in broadcast performance, media performance, and announcing.

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  Public Relations Theory

  Eryn S. Travis and Edward J. Lordan

  Reflecting the ever-increasing changes in the public relations industry, this new text offers a fresh, up-to-date look at public relations theories as well as theories from related areas that impact public relations. Chapters move from the oldest areas of communication theory through newer models devoted to interpersonal, organizational, and mediated, up to the most current theories devoted to emerging media, including digital and social. Readers will learn how public relations and persuasion theories are at the heart of a practitioner’s day-to-day work, and see how a strong understanding of theories can make them more effective and strategic professionals.

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  Benjamin's Spectacles

  Spring Ulmer

  Allusions to the early 20th century intellectual Walter Benjamin appear throughout this book of poetry that explores such diverse topics as history, shadows, and the season of spring. Shifting through perspectives that blur gender lines and chronological boundaries, there is a darker undercurrent running through the poems that adds emotional depth to the lines and makes it all the more striking when the verse returns to spring.

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  The Age of Virtual Reproduction

  Spring Ulmer

  Spring Ulmer's THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION disrupts and redefines established patterns of seeing as she looks both at and beyond suffering and slaughter for an ethical way to live. Relentlessly in relation and in isolation, Ulmer meditates on moral and emotional anaesthesia--our age of numbing. On the road in Rwanda, investigating executions, meditating on photographs of the past, Ulmer interrogates her own and others' often romantic obsession with what is disappearing and asks how to be in touch with the real and reality--either through the self or through its loss. Looking at work by August Sander, Walter Benjamin, Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, John Berger, Jean Genet, Kenzaburo Oe, and others, she finds, with Benjamin, that there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism. THE AGE OF VIRTUAL REPRODUCTION offers a catalogue (of people, stories, nature, and art) that maintains that more than just surviving, life can be overwhelmingly and beautifully patterned, and thus, critically, recognizable.

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  Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs Slaves, and the Sons of Slave Mothers

  Elizabeth Urban

  This book traces the journey of new Muslims as they joined the early Islamic community and articulated their identities within it. It focuses on Muslims of slave origins, who belonged to the society in which they lived but whose background of slavery rendered them somehow alien. How did these Muslims at the crossroads of insider and outsider find their place in early Islamic society? How did Islamic society itself change to accommodate these new members?

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  Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

  Cheryl L. Wanko

  Celebrity biographies, with their stories of scandal, never fail to titillate. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find record of the best-seller list they didn't punctuate. But delving into professional struggles, private torments, and sexual escapades of performing artists has a long and unexplored history. Eighteenth-century Britain had its own tradition of celebrity biographies and autobiographies. In fact, the genre began in English in 1695, with the story of Matthew Coppinger, a little-known actor who wrote verses, engaged in pretty crime, and ended his life on the gallows. Roles of Authority provides the first comprehensive study of the earliest hundred years of celebrity biography in English, from actor-thief Coppinger to the superstars David Garrick and Sarah Siddons.