Mystic Chords of Memory "Illustrated with hundreds of well-chosen anecdotes and minute observations . . . Kammen is a demon researcher who seems to have mined his nuggets from the entire corpus of American cultural history . . . insightful and sardonic." —Washington Post Book World In this ground-breaking, panoramic work of American cultural history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Machine That Would Go of Itself examines a central paradox of our national identity How did "the land of the future" acquire a past? And to what extent has our collective memory of that past—as embodied in our traditions—have been distorted, or even manufactured? Ranging from John Adams to Ronald Reagan, from the origins of Independence Day celebrations to the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War Memorial, from the Daughters of the American Revolution to immigrant associations, and filled with incisive analyses of such phenonema as Americana and its collectors, "historic" villages and Disneyland, Mystic Chords of Memory is a brilliant, immensely readable, and enormously important book. "Fascinating . . . a subtle and teeming narrative . . . masterly." —Time "This is a big, ambitious book, and Kammen pulls it off admirably. . . . [He] brings a prodigious mind and much scholarly rigor to his task . . . an importnat book—and a revealing look at how Americans look at themselves." —Milwaukee Journal

Citing baby-boomer favorites including Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, the Beatles and other rock greats, the author shows that they have drawn on the same primal source from which mythology, dreams, and poetic insight arise. (Music)

“When I set foot on ground where Lincoln, Lee, Grant, or others walked, where the great battles raged, an almost magical feeling infuses me. Capturing these places on film, hopefully, in some small way, allows us to preserve that magical feeling of the special places and people of the war in our everyday lives.” These are the impassioned words of longtime Civil War aficionado David J. Eicher. Through his stunning photographs in Mystic Chords of Memory, Eicher presents many of the historical sites that evoke that “magical feeling” for him and thousands of other Civil War scholars and buffs. In this captivating -pictorial work, Eicher not only visits the most famous Civil War battlefields—Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Antietam among them—but also introduces readers to an array of lesser-known battle sites as well as monuments, forts, houses and farms, cemeteries, and museums. The breathtaking color photographs, chosen from Eicher’s vast personal collection, are supplemented by powerful, historical black-and-white photographs that propel readers back to the Civil War era. The resulting richly illustrated work captures the most important, unusual, and interesting places associated with the war as they stand today. Eicher’s probing analysis of the arduous four-year struggle provides background on its origins, interpretations of its major battles, and a summary of the war’s aftermath. Peppered with more than 150 quotations from the journals, letters, and diaries of Civil War participants, the narrative allows readers to absorb the human aspects of the greatest of America’s national tragedies. Eicher details the firing on Fort Sumter, the shock of First Bull Run, the carnage of Shiloh, the transformation of the war at Antietam, the turning points at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the decisive, grueling campaigns of 1864, and the surrender at Appomattox. Contributing to the book’s charm are dozens of images of forgotten places touched by the war, such as an abandoned graveyard in a Mississippi wood, the sandy strip of beach where some of the war’s first black soldiers won fame, trenches along a Virginia county highway, and a brick church in Virginia pocked by artillery fire. Whether viewed as fields of death or fields of glory—and they were both—Civil War sites retain a commanding hold on the American imagination. In words as well as photographs, Eicher captures the poignant memory of our nation in conflict.

In Creating Colonial Williamsburg, Anders Greenspan examines the restoration and re-creation of the structures and gardens of Virginia's colonial capital beginning in 1926. The restoration was undertaken by the Rockefeller family, whose aim was to

Twentieth-Century Music Theory and Practice introduces a number of tools for analyzing a wide range of twentieth-century musical styles and genres. It includes discussions of harmony, scales, rhythm, contour, post-tonal music, set theory, the twelve-tone method, and modernism. Recent developments involving atonal voice leading, K-nets, nonlinearity, and neo-Reimannian transformations are also engaged. While many of the theoretical tools for analyzing twentieth century music have been devised to analyze atonal music, they may also provide insight into a much broader array of styles. This text capitalizes on this idea by using the theoretical devices associated with atonality to explore music inclusive of a large number of schools and contains examples by such stylistically diverse composers as Paul Hindemith, George Crumb, Ellen Taffe Zwilich, Steve Reich, Michael Torke, Philip Glass, Alexander Scriabin, Ernest Bloch, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, György Ligeti, and Leonard Bernstein. This textbook also provides a number of analytical, compositional, and written exercises. The aural skills supplement and online aural skills trainer on the companion website allow students to use theoretical concepts as the foundation for analytical listening. Access additional resources and online material here: http: //www.twentiethcenturymusictheoryandpractice.net and https: //www.motivichearing.com/.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section is dedicated to antebellum America. Often, the antecedent causes of the Civil War, including the emergence of technology and the acquisition of land, are overshadowed by the vicissitudes of the war and the emancipation of slaves. The second section of this book is devoted to the war and the surrounding personal events that are so often hidden in the fog of war. The third part of the book is devoted to the aftermath of this bloody fratricidal conflict; and the subsequent effects on America, in general, and African Americans in particular.

My Fellow Americans compiles the inaugural addresses of all US presidents and offers incisive and accessible interpretations of each by the nation's leading presidential historians.

Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

"Give me liberty," demanded Patrick Henry, "or give me death!" Henry's words continue to echo in American history and that quote, and the speech it comes from, remains one of the two or three known to almost every American. The other speeches that have become part of our American collective consciousness all have one theme in common: liberty. These feats of oration seem to trace the evolution of America's definition of liberty, and to whom it applies. But what exactly is liberty?Give Me Liberty looks at these great speeches and provides the historical context, focusing attention on particular individuals who summed up the issues of their own day in words that have never been forgotten. Webber gleans lessons from the past centuries that will allow us to continue to strive for the ideals of liberty in the twenty-first century.

Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses traces this new sensory experience of synaesthesia—the physiological or figurative blending of senses—as a modernist phenomenon from its scientific description in the late nineteenth century to its prevalence in the early twentieth. Structured around twenty theses on synaesthesia, this book explores the integral relationship between modernist art, science, and technology, tracing not only how modernist artists perceptually internalized and absorbed technology and its effects but also how they appropriated it to achieve their own aesthetic, metaphysical, and social goals. Through case studies of prominent multimodal artists—Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Strauss, Aleksandr Scriabin, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Andrei Bely, and Rainer Maria Rilke—At the Crossroads of the Senses reveals the color-forms and color-sounds that, for these artists, laid the foundations of the world and served as the catalyst for the flourishing exchanges among the arts at the fin de siècle. Rooted in archival research in France, Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic, At the Crossroads of the Senses taps overlooked scientific sources to offer a fresh perspective on European modernism. Sensory studies scholars, literary critics, and art and music historians alike will welcome its many contributions, not least among them a refreshing advocacy for a kind of sensuous reading practice.