To Make this Land Our Own

To Make this Land Our Own
Author: Arlin C. Migliazzo
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781570036828

A case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South Carolina On the banks of the lower Savannah River, the military objectives of South Carolina officials, the ambitions of Swiss entrepreneur Jean Pierre Purry, and the dreams of Protestants from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, and England converged in a planned settlement named Purrysburg. This examination of the first South Carolina township in Governor Robert Johnson's strategic plan to populate and defend the colonial backcountry offers the clearest picture to date of the settlement of the colony's Southern frontier by ethnically diverse and contractually obligated immigrants. Arlin C. Migliazzo contends that the story of Purrysburg Township, founded in 1732 and set in the forbidding environment bounded by the Savannah River and the Coosawhatchie swamps, challenges the notion that white colonists shed their ethnic distinctions to become a monolithic culture. He views Purrysburg as a laboratory in which to observe ethnic phenomena in the colonial and antebellum South. Separated by linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers, the émigrés adapted familiar social processes from their homelands to create a workable sense of community and identity. His work is one of only a handful of examples of what has been deemed the "new social history" methodology as applied to a South Carolina subject. Initially devastated by privation and a high mortality rate, Purrysburg residents also suffered the vicissitudes of an indifferent provincial elite, the encroachment of lowcountry rice planters, Prevost's invasion in 1779, and ultimate destruction of the settlement by Sherman's army. Migliazzo details the community's changing military and economic fortunes, the gradual displacement of its residents to neighboring communities, the role of African Americans in the region, the complex religious life of township settlers, and the quirky contributions of Purry's climatological speculations to the fateful siting of this first township.

Strangers in Their Own Land

Strangers in Their Own Land
Author: Arlie Russell Hochschild
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-02-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620973987

The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump "A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book." —Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others. The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.

A Land Like Your Own

A Land Like Your Own
Author: Jason M. Silverman
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1608994546

A land like our own explores the ways the Bible has reused previous traditions and has subsequently been reused by both Jews and Christians. The editors employ the symbol of the "Land" as indicative of both loss and hope, reflective of the ways in which the past is variously figured and re-configured by the authors of both Testaments.

Employing the Enemy

Employing the Enemy
Author: Matthew Vickery
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2017-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1783609974

Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2018 Thousands of Palestinians, including children, are building and working on illegal Israeli settlements. Their bitter toil entails a daily rejection of their rights and subjects them to dangerous working conditions. Employing the Enemy is a deeply moving narrative that paints a faithful portrait of these workers and their families. Matthew Vickery explores not only the rationale, emotions and consequences of such employment but also why and how people collude with their own oppression. In doing so he draws attention to a previously neglected aspect of the Palestinian experience, exposing these practices as a new, insidious form of state-sponsored forced labour.

In the Land of the Living

In the Land of the Living
Author: Kenneth L. Sehested
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725249553

"If required to summarize my deepest conviction in a single sentence, it would be something like this: I believe that God is more taken with the agony of the earth than with the ecstasy of heaven." So begins the preface to In the Land of the Living: Prayers Personal and Public by Kenneth L. Sehested. What follows from that conviction is a collection of prayers and poems, most of which are "inspired by" one or more particular biblical texts and many of which were originally written for use in Sehested's own congregation. Sehested's lifelong work as a justice and peace organizer informs his "poetic eloquence," which, in the words of one reviewer, produces reflections on Scripture that create "a flash of insight, a bolt of courage, a stretch of imagination, a surprising peek into the heart of God" and "cries out against second-hand convictions." In the Land of the Living (Ps 27:13) represents a significant addition to that tradition of spirituality which takes seriously both the pain of the world and the claim of a God at work disarming both the heart and the nations. Indeed, "These prayers are jumper cables from the pew to the world."

American Georgics

American Georgics
Author: Edwin C. Hagenstein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300137095

From Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Michelle Obama's White House organic garden, the image of America as a nation of farmers has persisted from the beginnings of the American experiment. In this rich and evocative collection of agrarian writing from the past two centuries, writers from Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry reveal not only the great reach and durability of the American agrarian ideal, but also the ways in which society has contested and confronted its relationship to agriculture over the course of generations. Drawing inspiration from Virgil's agrarian epic poem, Georgics, this collection presents a complex historical portrait of the American character through its relationship to the land. From the first European settlers eager to cultivate new soil, to the Transcendentalist, utopian, and religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, American society has drawn upon the vision of a pure rural life for inspiration. Back-to-the-land movements have surged and retreated in the past centuries yet provided the agrarian roots for the environmental movement of the past forty years. Interpretative essays and a sprinkling of illustrations accompany excerpts from each of these periods of American agrarian thought, providing a framework for understanding the sweeping changes that have confronted the nation's landscape.