longleaf services on behalf of university of oklah jul 2019 (4 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In this powerful collection of free-verse poetry, immigrant, poet, and memoirist José Antonio Rodríguez encapsulates the experiences of an artist and citizen caught between two worlds. At once deeply personal and thematically expansive, these works offer a bracing look at the darker impulses of contemporary America.Saturated with allusions to family, immigration, sexuality, and violence, This American Autopsy is also an unsettling meditation on life and death. With its provocative title, the collection calls to mind an image of our nation as a body, awaiting examination to determine the cause of death. In this scenario the poet vacillates between various roles: coroner, pathologist, and the body itself.Some of the poems in this collection look to the past: events such as the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion or the author's first trip to an American grocery store. Others muse on more recent tragedies, including racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and the illicit drug trade. A few of the poems are written in Spanish, and the volume concludes with two English translations of these poems, which author originally wrote in his native language.Even as he paints a vivid picture of American diversity, Rodríguez exposes the deterioration of our nation-broken promises, failed prosperity, the shattering of dreams. Intimate and urgent, these timely dispatches from the Texas-Mexico border reveal the tensions and contradictions of today's America.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - From airport birdwatching and getting lost in an urban forest, to rethinking society's ill-fated war on wildlife and our struggle to reshape the American landscape, Red Dirt Country invites readers to savor the joys of our natural surroundings. Written by Oklahoma native John Gifford, this timely book is a literary meditation on the Oklahoma landscape and the rich biodiversity of the southern Great Plains.Inspired by such naturalists as Gilbert White, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Henry David Thoreau, the essays in Red Dirt Country reveal the rewards of close observation and the author's deep respect for the natural world. With his keen eye for detail, Gifford chronicles life along a suburban creek, noting from month to month the habits of the area's birds, mammals, and trees. With particular attention, he captures the grace and majesty of that sleek raptor, the Mississippi Kite, during its yearly nesting cycle in the southern plains.Even as Gifford extols the surprising beauty of Oklahoma, he ponders the larger environmental concerns and challenges that we face today, such as the cataclysmic wildfires and droughts threatening the American West, and modern society's impact on vital lands and wildlife.A compelling work of creative nonfiction, Red Dirt Country harkens back to America's most beloved masterpieces of nature writing. At the same time, Gifford provides a distinctly contemporary reflection on today's suburban wilderness, inspiring us all to develop a deeper connection to our natural surroundings.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The Mormon trek westward from Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley was an enduring accomplishment of American overland trail migration; however, their wintering at the Missouri River near present-day Omaha was a feat of faith and perseverance. Richard E. Bennett presents new facts and ideas that challenge old assumptions-particularly that life on the frontier encouraged American individualism.With an excellent command of primary sources, Bennett assesses the role of women in a pioneer society and the Mormon strategies for survival in a harsh environment as they planned their emigration, coped with internal dissension and Indian agents, and dealt with tribes of the region. This was, says Bennett, 'Mormonism in the raw on the way to what it would be later.' Now available in paperback for the first time, with a new introduction by the author, Mormons at the Missouri received the Francis M. and Emily Chipman Award from the Mormon History Association and was honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors 'Ma' and 'Pa' Ferguson, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity.After the hardware store shootings, white community leaders, formerly silenced by fear of the gang's retribution, finally sought state intervention. In 1935, fresh-faced, newly elected governor James V. Allred made good on his promise to reform state law enforcement agencies by sending a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate reports of organized crime. In East Texas Troubles, historian Jody Edward Ginn tells of their year-and-a-half-long cleanup of the county, the inaugural effort in Governor Allred's transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency.Besides foreshadowing the wholesale reform of state law enforcement, the Allred Rangers' investigative work in San Augustine marked a rare close collaboration between white law enforcement officers and black residents. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the sworn testimony of black and white residents in the resulting trials, Ginn examines the consequences of such cooperation in a region historically entrenched in racial segregation.In this story of a rural Texas community's resurrection, Ginn reveals a multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.