Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations while troubling the ideology of progress that underwrote much of its self-understanding. This volume queries the various forms and formations of post-Reconstruction American literature. It contends that the literature of this period, most often referred to as 'turn-of-the-century' might be more productively oriented by the end of Reconstruction and the haunting aftermath of its emancipatory potential than by the logic of temporal and social advance that underwrote the end of the century and the beginning of the Progressive Era. Acknowledging that nearly all US literature after 1876 might be described as post-Reconstruction, the volume invites readers to reframe this period by asking: under what terms did post-Reconstruction American literature challenge or re-consolidate the 'nation' as an affective, political, and discursive phenomenon? And what kind of alternative pasts and futures did it write into existence?

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

At a time when our colleges and universities face momentous questions of new growth and direction, the republication of Higher Education in Transition is more timely than ever. Beginning with colonial times, the authors trace the development of our college and university system chronologically, in terms of men and institutions. They bring into focus such major areas of concern as curriculum, administration, academic freedom, and student life. They tell their story with a sharp eye for the human values at stake and the issues that will be with us in the future.One gets a sense not only of temporal sequence by centuries and decades but also of unity and continuity by a review of major themes and topics. Rudy's new chapters update developments in higher education during the last twenty years. Higher Education in Transition continues to have significance not only for those who work in higher education, but for everyone interested in American ideas, traditions, and social and intellectual history.

Historians recognize the cultural centrality of the newspaper press in Britain, yet very little has been published regarding competing conceptions of the press and its proper role in British society. In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. Hampton demonstrates that British theories of the press were intimately tied to definitions of the public and the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.