Although it isn't the official national anthem, America may be the most important and interesting patriotic song in our national repertoire. Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America is a celebration and critical exploration of the complicated musical, cultural and political roles played by the song America over the past 250 years. Popularly known as My Country 'Tis of Thee and as God Save the King/Queen before that this tune has a history as rich as the country it extols.

In Sweet Freedom's Song, Robert Branham and...

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary study, Stephen John Hartnett explores the 'cultural fictions' that accompanied and undergirded public debates in antebellum America regarding abolition and capitalism, race and slavery, manifest destiny and empire, and representation and self-making. Drawing on a rich array of persuasive materials - including speeches and debates, novels and poems, newspaper articles and advertisements, daguerreotypes and paintings, protest pamphlets, reform manifestos, and scientific reports - Hartnett investigates how cultural fictions were presented, how they...

Stephen Hartnett merges the evocative power of poetry with scholarly research to produce both a genre-bending critique of the prison industrial complex and an innovative new method of qualitative research. Based on ten years of teaching in, writing about, and protesting at prisons across America, Harnett weaves together the hopes of prisoners, their families, and friends with the stories of activist communities struggling against the death penalty, the war on drugs, and a culture that treats prisoners as commodities. Full of materials from philosophers, poets, and historians, rich in personal...