Presents the personal narratives of four women in the early days of American settlement. These are tales of exploration beyond conventional boundaries, women's voyages of self-discovery in a new world. The authors include Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Knight, Elizabeth Trist and Elizabeth Ashbridge.

The Syntax of Class explores the literary expression of the crisis of social classification that occupied U.S. public discourse in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. Lacking a native language for expressing class differences, American writers struggled to find social taxonomies able to capture--and manage--increasingly apparent inequalities of wealth and power.

As new social types emerged at midcentury and, with them, new narratives of success and failure, police and reformers alarmed the public with stories of the rise and proliferation of the "dangerous...

The convergence of activists in Seattle during the World Trade Organization meetings captured the headlines in 1999. These demonstrations marked the first major expression on U.S. soil of worldwide opposition to inequality, privatization, and political and intellectual repression. This turning point in world politics coincided with an ongoing quandary in academia - particularly in the humanities where the so-called "death of theory" has left the field on tenuous footing. In "What Democracy Looks Like", the editors and twenty-seven contributors argue that these crises - in the world and the...