Behind The Big House

Download or read book Behind the Big House written by Jodi Skipper and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When residents and tourists visit plantation sites, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people and making it impossible for their descendants to process the meanings of these sites. Behind the Big House gives readers a candid, behind the scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper's eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites around the country to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture. Part memoir and part ethnography, the book interweaves Skipper's experiences as a Black woman and a southerner to imagine more sustainable and healthy spaces for interracial collaborations around historic preservation and slavery tourism in the U.S. South. Skipper considers the growing need among professional and lay communities to address slavery and its impacts through interpretations of local historic sites. In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation. By directly speaking to a failed integration of teaching, research, and service as a crisis in academia, she strives not to give others answers, but to model another way of being"--

Download or read book Appalachian State Silences the Big House written by David J. Marmins and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They are known as "cupcake games"--lower division teams get paid to travel to college football Meccas where the hosts make a nice profit from an extra game. On September 1, 2007, the University of Michigan Wolverines, with more wins than any team in history, hosted the Appalachian State Mountaineers from Boone, North Carolina, in the first such game at Michigan Stadium, the largest stadium in the country. App State was no cupcake. Coach Jerry Moore, in the spirit of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team and other memorable underdogs, assembled his team with two things in mind--speed and character--and conditioned them to the breaking point. "We're fixin' to shock 'em," he shouted at practice, in the locker room, at the dinner table. This book tells the inside story of Moore's legendary team and the Mountaineers' historic win.

Download or read book Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites written by Kristin L. Gallas and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-23 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites aims to move the field forward in its collective conversation about the interpretation of slavery—acknowledging the criticism of the past and acting in the present to develop an inclusive interpretation of slavery. Presenting the history of slavery in a comprehensive and conscientious manner is difficult and requires diligence and compassion—for the history itself, for those telling the story, and for those hearing the stories—but it’s a necessary part of our collective narrative about our past, present, and future. This book features best practices for: Interpreting slavery across the country and for many people. The history of slavery, while traditionally interpreted primarily on southern plantations, is increasingly recognized as relevant at historic sites across the nation. It is also more than just an African-American/European-American story—it is relevant to the history of citizens of Latino, Caribbean, African and indigenous descent, as well. It is also pertinent to those descended from immigrants who arrived after slavery, whose stories are deeply intertwined with the legacy of slavery and its aftermath. Developing support within an institution for the interpretation of slavery. Many institutions are reticent to approach such a potentially volatile subject, so this book examines how proponents at several sites, including Monticello and Mount Vernon, were able to make a strong case to their constituents. Training interpreters in not only a depth of knowledge of the subject but also the confidence to speak on this controversial issue in public and the compassion to handle such a sensitive historical issue. The book will be accessible and of interest for professionals at all levels in the public history field, as well as students at the undergraduate and graduate levels in museum studies and public history programs.

Download or read book Challenging History written by Leah Worthington and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays that examine how the history of slavery and race in the United States has been interpreted and inserted at public historic sites For decades racism and social inequity have stayed at the center of the national conversation in the United States, sustaining the debate around public historic places and monuments and what they represent. These conversations are a reminder of the crucial role that public history professionals play in engaging public audiences on subjects of race and slavery. This "difficult history" has often remained un- or underexplored in our public discourse, hidden from view by the tourism industry, or even by public history professionals themselves, as they created historic sites, museums, and public squares based on white-centric interpretations of history and heritage. Challenging History, through a collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, examines how difficult histories, specifically those of slavery and race in the United States, are being interpreted and inserted at public history sites and in public history work. Several essays explore the successes and challenges of recent projects, while others discuss gaps that public historians can fill at sites where Black history took place but is absent in the interpretation. Through case studies, the contributors reveal the entrenched false narratives that public history workers are countering in established public history spaces and the work they are conducting to reorient our collective understanding of the past. History practitioners help the public better understand the world. Their choices help to shape ideas about heritage and historical remembrances and can reform, even transform, worldviews through more inclusive and ethically narrated histories. Challenging History invites public historians to consider the ethical implications of the narratives they choose to share and makes the case that an inclusive, honest, and complete portrayal of the past has the potential to reshape collective memory and ideas about the meaning of American history and citizenship.

Download or read book In the Shadows of the Big House written by Stephen Small and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-06-23 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism. In this volume, author Stephen Small describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation, Magnolia Plantation Complex, and Melrose Plantation. Small traces the historical trajectory of plantations and slave cabins since the Civil War and explores what representations of slavery and slave cabins in these sites convey about the reconfiguration of the past and the rearticulation of history in the present. Considering such themes as the role of white ethnic identity in representations of elite whites and the extent and significance of Black voices and Black visions of representations of these plantations, Small asks what these sites reveal about social forgetting and social remembering throughout Louisiana and the South. He further explores the ways that gender structures the social organization of current sites and the role and influence of the state in the social organization and representations that prevail today.

Download or read book House of Leaves written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2000-03-07 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Download or read book Great House: A Novel written by Nicole Krauss and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the National Book Award • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • A Best Book of the Year as chosen by the New York Times (Notable), Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Oregonian, and Book Page. "Masterful…Evocative and moving." —NPR For twenty-five years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944. Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, the desk takes on more and more meaning, and comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared. Great House is a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children and how do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change? Nicole Krauss has written a soaring, powerful novel about memory struggling to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss. "This is a novel about the long journey of a magnificent desk as it travels through the twentieth century from one owner to the next. It is also a novel about love, exile, the defilements of war, and the restorative power of language." —National Book Award citation