When prospector "Ed" Schieffelin set out from Fort Huachuca in 1877 in search of silver, skeptics told him all he'd find would be his own tombstone. What he did discover, of course, was one of the richest veins of silver in the West—a strike he wryly called Tombstone. Briefly a boomtown, in less than a decade Tombstone was fading into what, for the next half-century, looked more like a ghost town. How is it, Kara McCormack asks, that the resurrection of a few of the town's long-dead figures, caught forever in a thirty-second shoot-out, revived the moribund Tombstone—and turned it into what the Arizona Office of Tourism today calls "equal parts Deadwood and Disney"? A meditation on the marketing of "authenticity," Imagining Tombstone considers this "most authentic western town in America" as the intersection of history and mythmaking, entertainment and education, the wish to preserve, the will to succeed, and the need to survive. McCormack revisits the facts behind the feud that culminated in the Earp brothers' and Doc Holliday's long walk to their showdown with the Clantons and McLaurys—a walk reenacted by so many actors that it became a ritual of Hollywood westerns and a staple of present-day Tombstone's tourist offerings. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts, stories told by Hollywood, performances on the town's streets, the fervor of Earp historians and western history buffs, and global notions of the West, Imagining Tombstone shows how the town's tenacity depends on far more than a "usable past." If Tombstone is "The Town Too Tough to Die," it is also, as this edifying and entertaining book makes clear, the place where authentic history and its counterpart in popular culture reveal their lasting and lucrative hold on the public imagination.

An account of the famine that killed roughly thirty-six million Chinese during the Great Leap Forward examines how the communist ideologies and collectivization campaigns perpetuated by the country's leaders caused the catastrophe.

In The Amorous Imagination, D. Andrew Yost builds upon Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love to argue that through the interpretive activities of the imagination the Beloved appears to the lover as this Other, not the Other. Weaving together insights from Romantic thought and contemporary French philosophy, Yost describes the distinctive role the imagination plays in individuating another person so that they appear radically unique, special, and unsubstitutable. This radical uniqueness—or haecceitas—emerges out of the lovers' engagement in an "endless hermeneutic," an ongoing process of creative and responsive meaning-making that grounds the lovers' lives in each other and opens them up to new possibilities. All of this, Yost argues, is made possible by the amorous imagination. Drawing from the deep well of love poetry, mythology, philosophy, and literature The Amorous Imagination comes to the provocative conclusion that without the productive power of the imagination love itself could not emerge.

The award-winning finalist stories from the Scribes Valley Publishing short story writing contest.

This story of Tombstone's Bird Cage Theatre sheds new light on the Old West and the various characters who shaped it.

Biopics—films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history—have long been one of Hollywood's most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character.

Omar Khayyam’s Secret: Hermeneutics of the Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination is a twelve-book series of which this book, subtitled New Khayyami Studies: Quantumizing the Newtonian Structures of C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination for A New Hermeneutic Method, is the first volume. Each book is independently readable, although it will be best understood as a part of the whole series. In the overall series, the transdisciplinary sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi shares the results of his decades-long research on Omar Khayyam, the enigmatic 11th/12th centuries Persian Muslim sage, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, physician, writer, and poet from Neyshabour, Iran, whose life and works still remain behind a veil of deep mystery. Tamdgidi’s purpose has been to find definitive answers to the many puzzles still surrounding Khayyam, especially regarding the existence, nature, and purpose of the Robaiyat in his life and works. To explore the questions posed, he advances a new hermeneutic method of textual analysis, informed by what he calls the quantum sociological imagination, to gather and study all the attributed philosophical, religious, scientific, and literary writings of Khayyam. In this first book of the series, following a common preface and introduction to the series, Tamdgidi develops the quantum sociological imagination method framing his hermeneutic study in the series as a whole. In the prefatory note he shares the origins of this series and how the study is itself a moment in the trajectory of a broader research project. In his introduction, he describes how centuries of Khayyami studies, especially during the last two, have reached an impasse in shedding light on his enigmatic life and works, especially his attributed Robaiyat. The four chapters of the book are then dedicated to developing the quantum sociological imagination as a new hermeneutic method framing the Khayyami studies in the series. The method builds, in an applied way, on the results of Tamdgidi’s recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imagination: Volume 1: Unriddling the Quantum Enigma (2020), where he explored extensively, in greater depth, and in the context of understanding the so-called “quantum enigma,” the Newtonian and quantum ways of imagining reality. In this first book, he shares the findings of that research in summary amid new applied insights developed in relation to Khayyami studies. In the first chapter, Tamdgidi raises a set of eight questions about the structure of C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination as a potential framework for Khayyami studies. In the second chapter, he shows how the questions are symptomatic of Newtonian structures that still continue to frame Mills’s sociological imagination. In the third chapter, the author explores how the sociological imagination can be reinvented to be more in tune with the findings of quantum science. In the last chapter, the implications of the quantum sociological imagination for devising a hermeneutic method for new Khayyam and Robaiyat studies are outlined. In conclusion, the findings of this first book of the Omar Khayyam’s Secret series are summarized. CONTENTS About OKCIR—i Published to Date in the Series—ii About this Book—iv About the Author—vi Note on Transliteration—xv Acknowledgments—xvii Preface to the Series: Origins of This Study—1 Introduction to the Series: The Enigmatic Omar Khayyam and the Impasse of Khayyami Studies—9 CHAPTER I—The Promise and the Classical Limits of C. Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination—27 CHAPTER II—The Newtonian Way of Imagining Reality, Society, Sociology, and Khayyami Studies—61 CHAPTER III—Quantum Sociological Imagination As A Framework for New Khayyami Studies—109 CHAPTER IV—Hermeneutics of the Khayyami Robaiyat in Quantum Sociological Imagination: Source Availability and Matters of Secrecy—177 Conclusion to Book 1: Summary of Findings—215 Appendix: Transliteration System and Book 1 Glossary—225 Book 1 Cumulative Glossary of Transliterations—238 Book 1 References—243 Book 1 Index—251

This book relates the stories and describes the memorials of the people buried in Shelby, North Carolina's historic Sunset Cemetery, a microcosm of the Southeastern United States. The authors, an academic and a journalist, detail the lives and memories of people who are buried here, from Civil War soldiers to those who created the Jim Crow South and promoted the narrative of the Lost Cause. Featured are authors W.J. Cash and Thomas Dixon, whose racist novel was the basis for The Birth of a Nation. Drawn from historical research and local memory, it includes the tales of musicians Don Gibson and Bobby "Pepper Head" London, as well as a paratrooper who died in the Battle of the Bulge and other ordinary folks who rest in the cemetery. A bigger responsibility is to give a voice to the silenced, enslaved people of color buried in unmarked graves. Cemeteries are sacred places where artistry and memory meet--to understand, we need both the tales and the tombstones.

With sensuous imagery and musical cadence, Berti conjures up a star-crossed love story for a brother and sister in pre-revolutionary China. Their hearts' desires collide with their parents' strictness, superstitions, the delicate balance between modernity and tradition, and with the indelible memory of their grandmother, who visits the young girl in her dreams from the "imagined country" of her death.

Melodrama is the foundation of American cinema. It is, however, a poorly understood term. While it is a pervasive and persuasive dramatic mode, it is not tied to any specific moral or ideological system. It is not a singular genre; rather, it operates as a "genre generating machine" capable of determining the aesthetics and structure of the drama within many genres. Melodrama centers the conflict around the clash between good and evil and provides a sense of poetic justice--but the specific values embedded in notions of good and evil are determined by the culture, and they shift from nation to nation, region to region, and period to period. This book explores the "populist" westerns of the 1930s, the propaganda films that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the popularity of Sax Rohmer's master villain Fu Manchu. "Melodramas of passion" and film noir also offer a challenge to melodrama with its seemingly alienated protagonists and downbeat endings. Yet, with few exceptions, Hollywood was able to assimilate these genres within its melodramatic imagination.