Pennsylvania Books

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition investigates one artist's lifelong engagement with the rich, distinctive traditions of rural Buck's County. It charts Sheeler's discovery of the region's architechture and artifacts beginning about 1910, when he and fellow artist Morton Livingston Schamberg rented an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Doylestown. It assesses what impact this seminal event had on Sheeler's early career, and how his cyclical return to Bucks County themes in later life reveals poignant attachments and emotional depths not usually ascribed to this twentieth-century painter and photographer - known primarily as an iconographer of the machine. By analyzing Sheeler's core attachment to the preindustrial vernacular, this exhibition and its catalovue reconstruct his attempt to reconcile part and present in a series of powerful complex pictures that resulted from his enduring fascination with the Pennsylvanian tradition.
--- excerpt from book's Preface

There are many wonderful facets to this story about a young boy who joins his family for an annual reenactment of the battle at Gettysburg. A pictoral essay provides an authentic look at the preparation and event providing an excellent forum for discussion among readers. The story, however, told from the perspective of this proud, young boy, shares a spirit of patriotism and historical empathy this is often difficult to relay to children as well as adults. Charley's experiences interpreting history as a reenactor emphasize the power of experiential learning. Every Social Studies teacher should read, learn from and share this beautiful story with students making note of the many history teachers in our students' lives -- parents, siblings, community members, museums and organizations!

This slender casebook of an academic search represents the first authoritative text of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper since it was originally published in 1892. It includes book reviews and excerpts of literary and social commentaries that reflect the story's critical reception; it publishes lists of editorial emendations and variants of the story in important editions since 1892 and it gives a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.

The enterprise, itself, deserves recognition for its prodigious and painstaking scholarship and meticulous editing. A product of an undergraduate course on scholarly editing, Julie Bates Dock gave her class a "simple collation exercise" on Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper. Students and teacher alike became more and more enthused as they searched for relationships among various editions of the story. This enthusiasm resulted in a collaborative publication by Julie Bates Dock and three of her students.

In a chapter entitled The Legend of The Yellow Wall-Paper, Dock not only recounts how the story has become one of literature's perennial bestsellers, but also warn us that "in its twenty-five-year odyssey of rediscovery by literary critics...the story has picked up along the way an assortment of blemishes and distortions, from textual anomalies to skewed accounts of its publication history to misinformation about its contemporary reception." This should be enough to make any academic want to research its history.

The evidence of casual distortions that change the import of original texts as shown in the present case emphasizes the importance of textual criticism and traditional modes of criticism. Dock says, "...the use of documents is affected by critical trends and by critics' biases and expectations...The feminist critics of the early 1970s, intent on establishing women authors in the American literary canon, had a stake in portraying the story as a victimized piece of literature. The notion that Gilman suffered condemnation from editors and readers outside the story tidily echoed the narrator's victimization within the story." Dock then goes on to cite two examples where major feminist critics came to unexamined and hasty conclusions about the publication of the story.

Dock also provides evidence to argue that omission of a few words distorts Gilman's focus. For example, the words, "in marriage," in the sentence, "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that (in marriage)." Gilman was against the institution of marriage, but not necessarily against men in general!

Legends that Gilman had to struggle to get her story published, that most readers thought of it as a "ghost story," that it received an especially distasteful reception from the male medical community are also put to rest, as evidence simply does not support these beliefs.

Dock also points out discrepancies in Gioman's own accounts as well, such as her inaccurate and varying dates and titles as well as her claim that Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, her own physician, altered his treatment of neurasthenia after reading The Yellow Wall-Paper. This is, as Dock points out, a case of "he says/she says conundrums."

The book is wonderfully embellished with photographs of Charlotte Perkins Stetson, W.D. Howells, Horace E. Scudder and Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, as well as with other visuals.

The book also cites interesting excerpts from Gilman's autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Correspondence. It explains or compiles painstaking commentaries on textual matters, selection of copy, publication history, authorial practice and preference, editorial emendations and many other publication matters as well as reviews of the story which appeared in various magazines. The Appendix provides a history of the printing of The Yellow Wall-Paper from 1892 until 1997.

This is a scholarly book, to be sure, but it is one that is also extremely interesting. In addition to learning the history of The Yellow Wall-Paper, we also learn much about Gilman's motivations, her aesthetics of writing and her own views on both marriage and men.

For students of conflict analysis, this book considers a number of theories without advocating a certain bias. There are so many books about Chechnya written by journalists that end up taking sides. Although it is a little dry compared to the journalists' accounts, it is very even-handed.

Liz Farmer Jarvis has done it again with her second book on Chestnut Hill. This gem is full of local history and "never-before-published" pictures. Anyone interested in Philadelphia and its historical development will want this book.

Dr. Ensalaco is one of my professors at the University of Dayton. We had to read this book for his Political Violence course. The book is extremely insightful and probes deeply into the repression of the political left under the Pinochet regime. The information isn't just anti-Pinochet propganda, but gives the facts from both sides of the repression, from assassination attempts by the left to disappearences of leftists and their sympathizers without trials or records that they were ever arrested. If you want to read an insightful account of the situation in Chile during the Pinochet years, I recommend that you buy this book.

The lack of copies of this book is due to that the manuscript was an NSF funded projects and a limited number of mimeograph copies were printed.

I discovered one of these copies in the Library of Congress, in 1969.

As Ackoff mentions in the book, he does not provide new tools for existing disciplines, but, rather a new toolbox with quite useful structure for those who wish to understand human behavior and those who wish to improve the well-being of our humanity. Expect every sentence to challenge more traditional forms of thought.

For my further comments, look under "On Purposeful Systems" which was the title chosen for the Aldine-Atherton reprint of this monograph. In my opinion, the added co-author, Fred E. Emery, only added confusion to the extremely well conceived set of "operational definitions" concerning words that relate to human behavior.

Published for the first time, this manuscript contains the descriptive letters of a perceptive Pennsylvanian who served throughout the war. The unit saw action in the Second Manassas Campaign, at Antietam, at Gettysburg and in other major battles fought by the Army of the Potomac. In 1863, it served in the famous First Corps and fought on Oak Ridge on July 1. The regiment, which later was assigned to the Fifth Corps, was actively engaged in the 1864-65 campaigning. Since the 107th never had a unit history published, these letters provide the first in-depth look at the 107th Pennsylvania. Richard Sauers labeled this set of letters as "some of the very best Civil War missives that I have ever read."

This is a genealogy of the Pennsylvania Clarks to the present day. It starts with Robert Clark, born in Scotland, immigrated to Ireland, and immigrated again to the United States where he died 1757. It follows ten generations of his descendants as they moved west.

Family stories and local histories are woven together to give a generational view of how people lived, and how life changed, through pioneer times. The book will be of direct interest to those who have relatives listed in it. Genealogists and historians will also find great source material for their work.

We owe great thanks to the author and her family for compiling this wonderful book on the Clarks from Pennsylvania.

This is a decent review of Ralph Stover as a climbing area. It covers all the standard climbs with decent information on the area and it's pretty easy to find the routes. However, there are areas not covered in the book (to the East and towards the river).