Gooch was a storyteller, poet, and perceptive social observer living in Georgian and early Victorian England. His previously unpublished, satirical account of his purported travels in America (focusing on New York City) was discovered by editor Richard Widdicombe. Widdicombe includes in this volume a short biography of Gooch, extensive textual and historical notes and an essay on Anglo-American travel literature. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.

In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called 'superfluous' or 'redundant' parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the 'unwanted' might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.

Compared to the early decades of the 20th century, when scholarly writing on African Americans was limited to a few titles on slavery, Reconstruction, and African American migration, the last thirty years have witnessed an explosion of works on the African American experience. With the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s came an increasing demand for the study and teaching of African American history followed by the publication of increasing numbers of titles on African American life and history. This volume provides a comprehensive bibliographical and analytical guide to this growing body of literature as well as an analysis of how the study of African Americans has changed.

For nonfiction books alphabetically listed on eight US cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami, annotations consist mainly of the publication data, table of contents, Library of Congress classification, and Dewey class number. The books on Baltimore span the typical range of 1880-1999. Perhaps v.1 contains an introduction explaining the authors' purpose, backgrounds, and city selection criteria. Indexed by author and title. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870. Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders.