2018-2019 Personally Speaking
The 2018-19 Personally Speaking series, our ninth year of presenting our author/scholars and their books to the community year led us explorations that ranged from politics to fiction and history to mystery.
The 2018-2019 Series Included:
The Gifted Generation: When Government Was Good (Bloomsbury Publishing 2017) by David Goldfield
In The Gifted Generation, Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. By David Goldfield
Combative Politics: The Media and Public Perceptions of Lawmaking (University of Chicago Press 2017) by Mary Layton Atkinson
From the Affordable Care Act to No Child Left Behind, politicians often face a puzzling problem: Although most Americans support the aims and key provisions of these policies, they oppose the bills themselves. How can this be? Why does the American public so often reject policies that seem to offer them exactly what they want? By Mary Layton Atkinson
Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings (McFarland & Company, 2017) by Janaka Bowman Lewis
While narratives of enslavement have become more central to conversations about African American women’s writing, this book first discusses the genre of narratives of freedom and then examines women’s relationships to the community as they seek to illustrate a collective free identity. Lewis argues that these texts represent a sense of civil rights that emerges prior even to the ideas of racial uplift that reached a height for women in the late 19th Century and moved into the 20th Century. By Janaka Bowman Lewis
Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the true story of a local feud, killing, investigation and trial in Natchez, MS. The book, shows how a crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all-too-familiar story of racial injustice.
Sycamore: A Novel (Harper Collins, 2017) by Bryn Chancellor
Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age novel, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature — desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness and hope — as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.