Bücher der Reihe American Century

Pillars of the Republic is a pioneering study of common-school development in the years before the Civil War. Public acceptance of state school systems, Kaestle argues, was encouraged by the people's commitment to republican government, by their trust in Protestant values, and by the development of capitalism. The author also examines the opposition to the Founding Fathers' educational ideas and shows what effects these had on our school system.

"Objective, well reasoned, highly stimulating in portraying Lincoln and the torments that destiny imposed on him." -Earl Schenck Miers "Richard N. Current's book is a brisk, expert, and judicious summary of what we do not know [of Lincoln] or cannot get agreement upon . . . He reviews the arguments with acumen, lucidity, and balance." --"Mississippi Valley Historical Review"

"Jazz is my religion, and surrealism is my point of view."Ted Joans was one of the first Beat poets in the Greenwich Village arts scene, pioneering a movement that often overlooked his profound contributions. His poetry mixes the rhythms of jazz music with "hand grenades" of truth, and his live reading performance style anticipated the spoken word movement. Black Pow-Wow is a collection of the best of Joans' early poetry, including such well-known poems as "Jazz Is My Religion," "Passed On Blues: Homage to a Poet," and "The Nice Colored Man." Many of his poems speak to his friends and contemporaries--including Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and particularly Langston Hughes--as well as his extensive travels across the African continent and around the world. His avante-garde poems also reflect his style as a painter and collage artist, call for social protest, and denounce racism, sexual repression, and injustice.This groundbreaking collection, one of only two mainstream publications Joans produced, perfectly captures the pulse of the Beat Generation and the rhythms of blues.

From the first crises in America's farming regions in the 1870s through the fracture and demise of grass-roots protest organizations at the end of the century. American Populism chronicles the Populists' battles with the dominant institutions of an industrializing nation. In this readable and balanced account, Robert McMath examines Populism's relation to the social and economic networks of rural communities and to churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and trade unions, showing how it became a natural response to dramatically changing times.

James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping novel is a landmark in black literary history and, more than eighty years after its original anonymous publication, a classic of American fiction. The first fictional memoir ever written by a black, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man influenced a generation of writers during the Harlem Renaissance and served as eloquent inspiration for Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of racial identity imposed on black Americans. Narrated by a mulatto man whose light skin allows him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a pilgrimage through America's color lines at the turn of the century--from a black college in Jacksonville to an elite New York nightclub, from the rural South to the white suburbs of the Northeast. This is a powerful, unsentimental examination of race in America, a hymn to the anguish of forging an identity in a nation obsessed with color. And, as Arna Bontemps pointed out decades ago, "the problems of the artist [as presented here] seem as contemporary as if the book had been written this year."

With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has for decades been seen as a fundamental collection of African-American verse. Bontemps (1902-73), an important figure during and after the Harlem Renaissance, author of more than 25 novels, and longtime librarian at Fisk University, last revised this classic anthology just before his death, adding such crucial new voices as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Kaufman, among others.This edition, issued in 1996, reprints the poems in Bontemps's revised volume along with updated biographical notes. Nearly seventy poets are represented, their works indexed by both author and title.