On May 9, 1846, Second Lieutenant Theodore Lincoln Chadbourne, United States Army, fell in the battle of Resaca de la Palma during the war with Mexico. Dead at twenty-three in a remote desert, his promise outweighing his accomplishments, Chadbourne slid into obscurity. But his lapse was not immediate, nor was it complete; clues to Chadbourne lay scattered about the historical landscape. Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne is Jim W. Corder's account of his obsessive search for information about this soldier, whose name he first read on a historical marker beside a highway in Texas. A thoughtful meditation on the connectedness of history and the possibilities of recovering and understanding the past, the book reveals as much about Corder's literary and historiographical preoccupations as it does about the life of his subject. Rather than order his material into a linear, chronological narrative, Corder presents it in much the same sequence and form as it came to him. The effect is to dramatize the historical process and allow the very details that Corder collects to reveal Chadbourne to the reader. Who was Chadbourne, and can we ever really know? If Corder has any answers, they lie in his subtext of uncertainty.

Annotation Volume illuminates many of the tensions present in the field of rhetoric and composition studies, explaining the scope and role of rhetoric in contemporary scholarship. For scholars and other individuals interested in rhetoric and composition studies./P>

As a young army officer during the War with Mexico, Laidley commanded a field battery at Cerro Gordo and was instrumental in defending Pueblo against Santa Anna. His war letters to his father from 1845-48 reveal his low opinion of volunteer soldiers, cynicism about military promotions, and concerns over his physical and spiritual health. McCaffrey (history, U. of Houston) leaves Laidley's spelling and grammar intact, but introduces paragraph breaks. He briefly discusses the officer's life before and after the war. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

But of all the markers of Corder's Soul-questing, the most poignant is his last: his description of his grandmother's quilt-making, whose intricate (yet homemade) patterns express the true American folk-mandala, symbolic of psychic wholeness."--Jacket.

Featuring work previously unpublished, The Heroes Have Gone shows off Jim W. Corder's consummate skills as a memoirist, essayist, and cultural critic. Though the subjects are wide-ranging--West Texas, World War II, writing and teaching, TCU football--one looms above the rest: Corder's lifetime love affair with America's pastoral sport, baseball.

A war that started under questionable pretexts. A president who is convinced of his country’s might and right. A military and political stalemate with United States troops occupying a foreign land against a stubborn and deadly insurgency. The time is the 1840s. The enemy is Mexico. And the war is one of the least known and most important in both Mexican and United States history—a war that really began much earlier and whose consequences still echo today. Acclaimed historian David A. Clary presents this epic struggle for a continent for the first time from both sides, using original Mexican and North American sources. To Mexico, the yanqui illegals pouring into her territories of Texas and California threatened Mexican sovereignty and security. To North Americans, they manifested their destiny to rule the continent. Two nations, each raising an eagle as her standard, blustered and blundered into a war because no one on either side was brave enough to resist the march into it. In Eagles and Empire, Clary draws vivid portraits of the period’s most fascinating characters, from the cold-eyed, stubborn United States president James K. Polk to Mexico’s flamboyant and corrupt general-president-dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna; from the legendary and ruthless explorer John Charles Frémont and his guide Kit Carson to the “Angel of Monterey” and the “Boy Heroes” of Chapultepec; from future presidents such as Benito Juárez and Zachary Taylor to soldiers who became famous in both the Mexican and North American civil wars that soon followed. Here also are the Irish Soldiers of Mexico and the Yankee sailors of two squadrons, hero-bandits and fighting Indians of both nations, guerrilleros and Texas Rangers, and some amazing women soldiers. From the fall of the Alamo and harrowing marches of thousands of miles in the wilderness to the bloody, dramatic conquest of Mexico City and the insurgency that continued to resist, this is a riveting narrative history that weaves together events on the front lines—where Indian raids, guerrilla attacks, and atrocities were matched by stunning acts of heroism and sacrifice—with battles on two home fronts—political backstabbing, civil uprisings, and battle lines between Union and Confederacy and Mexican Federalists and Centralists already being drawn. The definitive account of a defining war, Eagles and Empire is page-turning history—a book not to be missed.

Merging cultural commentary and intense introspection, Yonder is a remarkable meditation on change, memory, nostalgia, and the modern condition. A contrapuntal mix of contemporary history and the events of the author's personal life, Yonder portrays and ponders a world delivered from the pieties and hierarchies of the past yet incapacitated by the dizzying excess of new connotations and perspectives, choices and possibilities. Yonder is about Corder's struggle for a footing against nostalgia's pull. In a kind of nonlinear, semi random sorting process reflected in the book's structure, Corder turns inward to refocus hazy memories and estimate and shoulder his responsibilities for the turns his life has taken. These events are juxtaposed against the momentous changes of his generation, drawing universal truths from the offhand and obscure, discerning pitch and tone in the white noise.

"James Corder way ahead of his time in pursuing expressivism and ""the personal"" in composition. This book is a collection of essays by Corder that span his teaching career (roughly 1976 to 1997); it includes three previously unpublished pieces."