Teachers affect all our lives. I mean, that you can even read that sentence is because of a teacher. Whether the word teacher conjures up images of a fearsome nun or a Miss […]
$2.99 e-book sale to celebrate the American Studies Association conference
For the month of October 2015, to coincide with the American Studies Association annual meeting October 8-11 in Toronto, we have lowered the e-book list price of four titles in […]
Bradbury and “dangerous” books
For Ray Bradbury, censorship was serious business. In Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, book banning was not only a matter of the obliteration of the printed page, but a literal case of […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
To further observe Banned Book Week, we wanted to turn on readers of the Large Blog to one of our studies on the book banning phenomenon. In Citizen Critics: Literary Public […]
Q&A with Becoming Beautiful author Joanna Bosse
Joanna Bosse is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and dance studies at Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. She answered some questions about her book […]
Survey Says! Dishing da dirt
It is the time of the year when we enjoy the soil’s miraculous bounty. Plant a little seed in the ground, add water and sun, and marvel as this humble […]
Banned Book Week
This week is Banned Book Week, one of those observances that never loses its relevance. For proof, turn to the list of frequently challenged books, as charted by the American Library […]
The Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse
Black media pioneer Richard Durham was never an on-air star or featured player. Yet the poet, activist and script writer had a huge influence on how African Americans could be […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
The University of Illinois Press thinks country and western music hung the moon. Our list of C&W books reads like a who’s who of that musical form’s rhinestone-studded history. You want singers? […]
The Man That Got Away
Harold Arlen wrote the soundtrack to long nighttime walks on wet streets, to the staring contests we hold with memory out of the windows of our lonely room, to the melancholy […]
The King of the Cannibal Islands
Pirates. They have a bad reputation. The robbing. The kidnapping. The walking of planks. But how about the positive things pirates have done? The contributions to fashion. The government-sanctioned predatory […]
Throwbacklist Thursday
George Hamilton IV departed the world two years ago today. Unrelated to the actor and tanning phenomenon of the same name, IV, as he was sometimes called, ambled out of […]