Between September and December 2016, Ludovic Balland set out to document how Americans were making sense of the campaigns and the constant hum of media coverage in the run up to and aftermath of the contentious general election. On his 13,000-mile road trip across the country, he called on twenty cities and attended major events, such as the inauguration and the Women's March in Washington, DC. The result of this four-month road trip is American Readers at Home, which collects interviews with more than two hundred people living in cities and small towns across the United States. With print media struggling to survive in an age of twenty-four-hour real-time news and social media feeds, American Readers at Home presents a new, personalized model of story-telling in journalism that reaches audiences by emphasizing how everyday news items relate to personal experience and form people's views. Throughout the trip, Ballard and his collaborators spoke with a wide variety of American citizens, reflecting the diversity of perspectives in the contemporary United States, including people of vastly different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds and both everyday citizens as well as politicians and celebrities. Through their statements and the expressive full-page color portraits featured in the book, we are encouraged to consider their perspectives--their hopes, fears, and expectations both before and after the election. Filled with fascinating insights, American Readers at Home is the comprehensive archive of this fascinating media project originally published across multiple platforms, including the project's website and social media channels, as well as local print and online newspapers and radio and television stations that distributed the interviews. It forms a highly original record of the United States at a time when at a time when the country was facing great uncertainty and change.

The epic first novel in a sweeping series following the romantic lives and intrigues of the fictionalized descendants of a Chinese empress—now in paperback! Behind every great family lies a great secret. There’s one rule in Gemma Huang’s family: Never, under any circumstances, set foot in Beijing. But when Gemma, an aspiring actress, lands her first break—a lead role in an update of M. Butterfly, which just so happens to be filming in the Chinese capital—Gemma heads to LAX without looking back. It’s an amazing opportunity for her burgeoning career, and she’ll get to work with her idol. Of course, there’s also the chance of discovering just exactly why she’s been forbidden from entering the city in the first place. When Gemma arrives in Beijing, she’s instantly mobbed by paparazzi at the airport. She quickly realizes she may as well be the twin of Alyssa Chua, one of the most notorious young socialites in Beijing. Thus kicks off a season of revelations and romance in which Gemma uncovers a legacy her parents have spent their lives protecting her from—one her mother would conceal at any cost.

When American Readers at Home was published in early 2018, it was met with widespread praise. The German weekly Die Zeit called it ?a fascinating contemporary document of contradictions.? The manager of a major London art bookshop tweeted on April 10, 2018 that he had ?checked ALL the books at London Book Fair today to find the best one and this is it: American Readers at Home [?] It?s incredible!? The book soon sold out, no least because it won gold in the 2019 German Design Award and was also among the winners of the 2018 Swiss and German national book design competitions.00Swiss graphic designer and photographer Ludovic Balland has now put together a new selection of the compelling material amassed on his road trip across the United States during the 2016 presidential campaign. American Readers at Home?New Cut brings together color photographs of cityscapes and black-and-white portraits of American citizens with interviews about their use of news media, alongside facsimiles of newspapers and collages with statements about the current state of the country. Four years have passed, yet none of these stories have lost their power or urgency!00French journalist Julien Gester, who writes for the French daily Libération, and Swiss curator Hilar Stadler have contributed new forewords.00Exhibition: Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, Switzerland (29.08.2020 - 20.1.2021).

In 2001, Continuum published the extensive collected papers from African Americans and the Bible, an interdisciplinary conference held at Union Theological Seminary, NYC. In the collection's introduction, Vincent L. Wimbush issued a challenge to take seriously those who "read darkness," and to consider what it is they are doing when they read the Bible as "scripture." Wimbush's focus on "darkness readers," both within and outside of the African diaspora, breaks open the discourse around the nature, meaning, and importance of the Bible. By following the lead of "darkness readers," the Bible is revealed to be more than a collection of ancient documents from an inaccessible past; it is the site upon which modern, contemporary ideological battles have and continue to be waged. In this book Margaret Aymer takes up his challenge. It is an examination of the way in which Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century abolitionist, used the epistle of James, particularly Jas 3:17, in his abolitionist speeches, to "read" the "darkness" of slavery and slaveholding Christianity. Within the epistle of James is a rhetoric of the world as "darkness". Douglass uses this to read his contemporary "darkness." As part of her research, Aymer has created an index of biblical references in all of Frederick Douglass' abolitionist speeches as collected by J. W. Blassingame (1841-1860).

Jose Marti contributed greatly to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain with words as well as revolutionary action. Although he died before the formation of an independent republic, he has since been hailed as a heroic martyr inspiring Cuban republican traditions.

Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or "parlor" traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class woman as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space--and the debate about who should occupy that space--Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman's proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years. While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women's words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American woman to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge the white middle class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman's place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife. Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women's roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the "quiet woman" must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women's space in historical discourse.