The Ground We Stand On

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from us. This is a prime example of Dos Passos as an American novelist and reporter on American reality. In times of change and danger when there is fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men's preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards. It is not a question of what we want; it is a question of what is. American history, the successes and failures of the men who went before us, is only alive in so far as some seeds are still stirring and growing in us today. Divided up into three major sections: The Use of the Past, Roger Williams and the Planting of the Commonwealth in America, and On the White Porch of the Republic; The Ground We Stand On traces the backgrounds and the rise of America's early political structure, the variety of influences upon it, and the men who gave it a stable foundation. John Dos Passos (1896-1970), American novelist, was born in Chicago. During and after the Second World War, he became increasingly interested in the roots of American culture and produced a number of historical studies relating to the problems of American democracy. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction. Among his works are Manhattan Transfer, the trilogy U.S.A. and his autobiographical The Best Times.

August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.

In 1871, newly freed slaves established the community of Tamina—then called “Tammany”—north of Houston, near the rich timber lands of Montgomery County. Located in proximity to the just-completed railroad from Conroe to Houston, the community benefited from the burgeoning local lumber industry and available transportation. The residents built homes, churches, a one-room school, and a general store. Over time, urban growth has had a powerful impact on Tamina. The sprawling communities of The Woodlands, Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, and Oak Ridge have encroached, introducing both opportunity and complication, as the residents of this rural community enjoy both the benefits and the challenges of urban life. On the one hand, the children of Tamina have the opportunity to attend some of the best public schools in the nation; on the other hand, residents whose education and job skills have not kept pace with modern society are struggling for survival. Through striking and intimate photography and sensitively gleaned oral histories, Marti Corn has chronicled the lives, dreams, and spirit of the people of Tamina. The result is a multi-faceted portrait of community, kinship, values, and shared history.

In 1871, newly freed slaves established the community of Tamina—then called “Tammany”—north of Houston, Texas, near the rich timberlands of Montgomery County. Located in proximity to the just-completed railroad from Conroe to Houston, the community benefited from the burgeoning local lumber industry and available transportation. The residents built homes, churches, a one-room school, and a general store. In the decades since, urban growth and change have overtaken Tamina. The sprawling communities of The Woodlands, Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, and Oak Ridge have encroached, introducing both new prospects and troubling complications, as the residents of this rural community enjoy both the benefits and the challenges of urban life. On the one hand, the children of Tamina have the opportunity to attend some of the best public schools in the nation; on the other hand, residents whose education and job skills have not kept pace with modern society are struggling for survival. Through striking and intimate photography and sensitively gleaned oral histories, author Marti Corn has chronicled the lives, dreams, and spirit of the people of Tamina. The result is a multi-faceted portrait of community, kinship, values, and a shared history. In 2016, the book cover portrait of Tamina resident Johnny Jones was featured at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. This second edition of Corn’s classic photographic essays and interviews with Tamina residents includes a helpful classroom guide for collecting and studying oral history. The result is a rich new resource that affords readers a window into a little-understood part of our shared past.

Poetry. Art. THE GROUND I STAND ON IS NOT MY GROUND, selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of Drunken Boat's 2014 poetry book contest, is a hybrid of poetry and digital art. The poems erase historical documents related to the development and aftermath of the Pacific War, especially on the island of Okinawa. Erased into poems, these texts become spare narratives of how individual soldiers' and civilians' daily lives were transformed by the war. Using QR codes, each poem links to an interactive version at the book's companion website, where readers can explore original documents ranging from government documents and political manifestos to travel narratives, blockbuster adventure fiction, and science writing. Taken together, the poems and their original texts tell a larger story about the ways we imagine war, and the ways language can be used to record, justify, memorialize, or resist it. "This is the best book of erasure poems since Srikanth Reddy's Voyager. Nogues carves critical observations into slow motion (erasure isolating and elongating time) so that we seem to see inside the body's gestures. The book is an intense meditation on war, riddled with aporia and drawing on many resources documentary, epistolary, and even rhyming lyric- to create an empathic and deeply affecting experience of contact with the devastation war brings and "with the pain about to come." Forrest Gander "Collier Nogues is nothing short of brilliant in this necessary book, which lights up a long shadow two big governments have cast on a miraculous island and an indigenous people. Nogues comprehends how any war is a continuum of the same hell, yet each experience is specific: the chronic trauma of surviving amid the dead, the way history makes a "war" a narrative but the participants (victims/survivors/casualties) experience it only in fragments. The speakers of these poems are visionary; they are "one of us." And if we can see that, we can see what Nogues has envisioned here, see how our world can change in the direction of mercy, human dignity, survival." Brenda Shaughnessy "Collier Nogues, who grew up on a U.S. military base in Okinawa, explores how war has shaped the island of her childhood. Taken together, these poems not only express a desire to erase violence, but they also attempt to map the topography of islands and nations, caves and embrasures, weapons and flags, grace and dread. Nogues is a brave poet who disassembles the official discourses of empire to articulate a dream for an island of peace." Craig Santos Perez"

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination--the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities--emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life. Martin Price writes here about ways in which character has been conceived and presented in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with chapters that cogently argue the artistic value of character, Price then deals with the different forms character has taken in individual novels. His first discussions center on authors--Jane Austen, Stendhal, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy--who define individuals by their adherence or opposition to social norms. The next chapters deal with novelists for whom the moral world is largely internalized. The characters of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster live in society and act upon it, but the authors are particularly concerned with the confusions, terrors, and heroism that lie within consciousness. The last chapter uses novels about the artist by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann in order to apprehend the process by which experience is transformed into art. Avoiding both formalistic and moralistic extremes, this new book by a distinguished critic helps us recover a fuller sense of literary form and the forms of life from which it emerges.

Beginning outside the boarded-up windows of Columbine High School and ending almost twelve years later on the fields of Shiloh National Military Park, Hallow This Ground revolves around monuments and memorials—physical structures that mark the intersection of time and place. In the ways they invite us to interact with them, these sites teach us to recognize our ties to the past. Colin Rafferty explores places as familiar as his hometown of Kansas City and as alien as the concentration camps of Poland in an attempt to understand not only our common histories, but also his own past, present, and future. Rafferty blends the travel essay with the lyric, the memoir with the analytic, in this meditation on the ways personal histories intersect with History, and how those intersections affect the way we understand and interact with Place.

Following Rabbi Jesus is a surprising exposure of who the Jesus we find in the Gospels really is, what he teaches those who dare to follow him, and how he models what it means to live God's radical-kingdom way. The reader of the book will discover in this exploration a very different Jesus from the celebrity or hero of much popular church culture, the tame, ineffective Jesus of compromised Christianity, and the inaccessible, conceptual Christ of much academic theology. The reader who takes the chance of honestly engaging the Jesus we meet in the Gospel stories may find an engaging and liberating contrast to the life he is now living. He may even want to make a turn or two, and start over.

"When the Axis fores were finally driven from North Africa in May 1943, over 250,000 were taken prisoner, as many as had surrendered to the Russians at Stalingrad. It was a major victory and a crucial stepping-stone to the future invasion of Italy and France." "Yet, just a year before, the Allies had been facing one disaster after another. In North Africa, the Eighth Army's terrible defeat at Gazala represented Britain's nadir. Slowly but surely, however, the Allies began to turn the tide. This crucial period was a time of learning for both America and Britain and, by the end of the Tunisian campaign they had finally gained material but also certain tactical advantages over Germany, particularly in the air war. As this book shows, the development of a tactical air force - principles that are still used to this day - were founded over the skies of North Africa." "And yet this is also a book about the men - and women - who found themselves caught up in this struggle, people drawn from all parts of the globe and brought together to make up these polyglot Allied forces: British and American, Nepalese and Punjabi, South African and Australian, Maori and Zulu, and from all ranks and all services."--BOOK JACKET.