Writing Home

Writing Home
Author: Mary Suzanne Schriber
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780813917795

"Writing Home is an important contribution to American literary studies. Schriber does a fine job of embedding American women's travel writing in the larger tradition of the genre, and her forthright and accessible style will make this book valuable to scholars and students in the field". -- Richard S. Lowry, College of William and Mary

Notes on a Foreign Country

Notes on a Foreign Country
Author: Suzy Hansen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374712441

Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive "A deeply honest and brave portrait of of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world." —Hisham Matar, The New York Times Book Review In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul. Hansen arrived in Istanbul with romantic ideas about a mythical city perched between East and West, and with a naïve sense of the Islamic world beyond. Over the course of her many years of living in Turkey and traveling in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Iran, she learned a great deal about these countries and their cultures and histories and politics. But the greatest, most unsettling surprise would be what she learned about her own country—and herself, an American abroad in the era of American decline. It would take leaving her home to discover what she came to think of as the two Americas: the country and its people, and the experience of American power around the world. She came to understand that anti-Americanism is not a violent pathology. It is, Hansen writes, “a broken heart . . . A one-hundred-year-old relationship.” Blending memoir, journalism, and history, and deeply attuned to the voices of those she met on her travels, Notes on a Foreign Country is a moving reflection on America’s place in the world. It is a powerful journey of self-discovery and revelation—a profound reckoning with what it means to be American in a moment of grave national and global turmoil.

Little Women Abroad

Little Women Abroad
Author: Louisa May Alcott
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2011-08-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820342874

In 1870, Louisa May Alcott and her younger sister Abby May Alcott began a fourteen-month tour of Europe. Louisa had already made her mark as a writer; May was on the verge of a respected art career. Little Women Abroad gathers a generous selection of May’s drawings along with all of the known letters written by the two Alcott sisters during their trip. More than thirty drawings are included, nearly all of them previously unpublished. Of the seventy-one letters collected here, more than three-quarters appear in their entirety for the first time. Daniel Shealy’s supporting materials add detail and context to the people, places, and events referenced in the letters and illustrations. By the time of the Alcott sisters’ sojourn, Louisa’s Little Women was already an international success, and her most recent work, An Old-Fashioned Girl, was selling briskly. Louisa was now a grand literary lioness on tour. She would compose Little Men while in Europe, and her European letters would form the basis of her travel book Shawl Straps. If Louisa’s letters reveal a writer’s eye, then May’s demonstrate an eye for color, detail, and composition. Although May had prior art training in Boston, she came into her own only during her studies with European masters. When at a loss for words, she took her drawing pen in hand. These letters of two important American artists, one literary, the other visual, tell a vibrant story at the crossroads of European and American history and culture.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The Pursuit of Happiness
Author: Bianca C. Williams
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2018-02-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822372134

In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities. Through their encounters with Jamaican online communities and their participation in trips organized by Girlfriend Tours International, the women construct notions of racial, sexual, and emotional belonging by forming relationships with Jamaican men and other "girlfriends." These relationships allow the women to exercise agency and find happiness in ways that resist the damaging intersections of racism and patriarchy in the United States. However, while the women require a spiritual and virtual connection to Jamaica in order to live happily in the United States, their notion of happiness relies on travel, which requires leveraging their national privilege as American citizens. Williams's theorization of "emotional transnationalism" and the construction of affect across diasporic distance attends to the connections between race, gender, and affect while highlighting how affective relationships mark nationalized and gendered power differentials within the African diaspora.

Expat

Expat
Author: Christina Henry de Tessan
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1580055206

It's one thing to travel abroad—to stay in charming hotels and deliberate over whether to visit this museum or relax at that café even to head off the beaten track for a glimpse of "real" life—and another thing altogether to move to another country. Expat chronicles the experiences of twenty-two ordinary women living extraordinary lives in outposts as far flung as Borneo, Ukraine, India, Greece, Brazil, China and the Czech Republic. In vivid detail, these writers share how the realities of life abroad match up to the expat fantasy. One woman negotiates the rough courtesies of Serbia, finding lives limned by harshness and an insurmountable spirit. Another is tutored on English manners by an eclectic bunch from Liverpool: "The cardinal sin in America is to be insincere, whereas the cardinal sin in England is to be boring." For some, their new home prompts them to reconnect or confront lost parts of themselves: One woman rediscovers her Judaism—in Japan; another writer's Western outlook is challenged by Javanese mysticism. Many share their own naíve blunders and private confessions: a Thanksgiving dinner that doesn't translate in Paris, a sudden yearning for bad Hollywood films. And all discover that what it means to be "American" is redefined, again and again. taps into the bewilderment, the joys and surprises of life overseas, where the challenges often take unexpected forms and the obstacles overcome are all the more triumphant. Featuring an astonishing range of perspectives, destinations and circumstances, this collection offers a beautiful portrait of expatriate life.

Abroad for Her Country

Abroad for Her Country
Author: Jean M. Wilkowski
Publisher:
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Jean M. Wilkowski shares the story of her extraordinary career in the U.S. Foreign Service during the last half of the twentieth century.

Going Abroad

Going Abroad
Author: William W. Stowe
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400887348

In a nation struggling to establish its own identity, all kinds of Americans, for all kinds of reasons, were enchanted with Europe. A European trip, whether extravagant or modest, could serve social advancement, aesthetic enrichment, or personal curiosity. Travel allowed men and women, the descendants of European settlers or African slaves, to shed their familiar surroundings and comfortable personas, adopt new roles, and measure themselves against the European experience. These travelers were often also writers. Throughout the nineteenth century, celebrated authors and beginners alike published newspaper columns, magazine articles, guidebooks, travel essays, letters, and novels based on their European journeys. In Going Abroad, Stowe examines not only classic works by such writers as Irving, Fuller, Twain, James, and Adams, but also lesser-known works by African-American authors, journalists, feminist writers, and diarists. Travel and the writing of it were important, Stowe argues, in molding a peculiarly democratic, yet essentially class-based, sense of personal and group identity. Combining literary and cultural analysis, he suggests new ways of understanding nineteenth-century Americans' concept of their nation and its place in the world. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Half American

Half American
Author: Matthew F. Delmont
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2024-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1984880411

The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, by award-winning historian and civil rights expert Winner of the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 A 2022 Book of the Year from TIME, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and more More than one million Black soldiers served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units while waging a dual battle against inequality in the very country for which they were laying down their lives. The stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” And yet without their sacrifices, the United States could not have won the war. Half American is World War II history as you’ve likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black military heroes and civil rights icons such as Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the leader of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, who fought to open the Air Force to Black pilots; Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the Black press; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for Black soldiers, veterans, and their families; and James G. Thompson, the twenty-six-year-old whose letter to a newspaper laying bare the hypocrisy of fighting against fascism abroad when racism still reigned at home set in motion the Double Victory campaign. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. An essential and meticulously researched retelling of the war, Half American honors the men and women who dared to fight not just for democracy abroad but for their dreams of a freer and more equal America.