Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American." Catastrophe must be elsewhere because it affirms the rightness of "here" where conquest, according to the syndrome's logic, did not happen and is not occurring. The psychic investment in elsewhere catastrophe coalesced slowly, across centuries; varieties of it can be found in various European traditions of the modern. Yet in its most striking modes and resonances, elsewhere catastrophe proves fundamental to the invention of US-America--which is why earthquake, as the exemplary elsewhere catastrophe, is the disaster that must always happen far away or be forgotten. The book's eight chapters and epilogue range from Plato to the Puritans, from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Voltaire to Herman Melville and N.K. Jemisin, examining along the way the seismic imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Jose Martí, among other writers. At the core of the book's inquiries are the earthquakes, historical and imagined, that act as both a recurrent eruptive force and a provocation for disparate modes of critical engagement with the long and catastrophic history of the Americas.

A how-to-to-it manual for librarians with planning templates on CD-ROM.

Beginning with the homes of the first European settlers to the North American colonies, and concluding with the latest trends in construction and design of houses and apartments in the United States, Homes through American History is a four-volume set intended for a general audience. From tenements to McMansions, from wattle-and-daub construction in early New England to sustainable materials for green housing, these books provide a rich historical tour through housing in the United States. Divided into 10 historical periods, the series explores a variety of home types and issues within a social, historical, and political context. For use in history, social studies, and literature classes, Homes through American History identifies ; A brief historical overview of the era, in order provide context to the discussion of homes and dwellings. ; Styles of domestic architecture around the country. ; Building material and manufacturing. ; Home layout and design. ; Furniture and decoration. ; Landscaping and outbuildings.