America S Back Porch

On America's back porch the most diverse and exotic cultures flourish in wild abandon; but it often takes the scrutiny of an outside observer, with an eye for the bizarre, to bring into relief the hilarious, often unsettling, bounty of strange experiences hiding within the mundane. In America's Back Porch, Daniel Jeffreys takes us on a startling voyage of discovery that brings us face-to-face with an America as it might have been recorded by the camera of Robert Frank. There are teenage vampires in Kentucky, Jesus-worshiping rattlesnake handlers in the Appalachians, a vigilante society in Texas, Alabama chain-gang guards who wrestle bears, cosmetic surgeons giving face-lifts to Hollywood dogs, and bounty killers in Florida. In the tradition of Bill Bryson and P. J. O'Rourke, Jeffreys takes us on a rarely seen tour of the underbelly of our culture, recorded with a sure sense for the telling detail, the colorful, and the grotesque.

From gentleman callers to big men on campus, from Coke dates to "parking," From Front Porch to Back Seat is the vivid history of dating in America. In chronicling a dramatic shift in patterns of courtship between the 1920s and the 1960s, Beth Bailey offers a provocative view of how we sought out mates-and of what accounted for our behavior. More than a quarter-century has passed since the dating system Bailey describes here lost its coherence and dominance. Yet the legacy of the system remains a strong part of our culture's attempt to define female and male roles alike.

A complete architectural guide to this well-loved building feature

The former American History editor explores the creation and restoration of an essential part of a twentieth-century home’s identity—the American porch. “In this delightful look at an American icon, journalist and documentary scriptwriter . . . Dolan traces the history of the porch, using this history to explore subjects such as architecture, history, slavery, colonialism, trade, anthropology, sociology, consumer behavior, and publishing.” —Library Journal In 1981, Michael Dolan and his wife, Eileen O’Toole, bought a 1926 suburban bungalow in the Palisades area of Washington, DC. It was a fixer-upper and DIY project that consumed their lives for twelve years. As rooms were transformed with updated electrical wiring and plumbing, the house’s porch became a storage area, rotating appliances, furniture, and construction materials as they were used and discarded. After the interior renovation was completed, Michael finally turned his attention to the porch, working with contractors to resurrect it—a reconstruction that inspired him to uncover the history of porches and their significance as a symbolic piece of Americana. “In praise of the porch: Come up and sit a spell.” —USA Today “A wry, well-researched look at the place and the people who rocked, talked and courted on [the American porch] for three centuries.” —Parade “The porch is making a comeback, gradually replacing its humbler rival the deck, which the traditionalist Dolan refers to as the platform shoe or leisure suit of American architecture.” —Time “Dolan amply demonstrates that the porch is primarily a means of escaping the heat and, almost as important, a locus for casual social interaction.” —Publishers Weekly

Remember when you were a kid and you got your first bicycle? After a few weeks of mastering the dynamics of balancing, steering, and pedaling, all at the same time hopefully, your father released his protective, steadying grip on the seat and you went wobbling off on your own. It was probably your very first taste of independence and freedom and you knew you liked that feeling very much. Few things in life have ever compared to that first solo ride. Almost 40 years after my first solo bike ride, I was able to recapture the excitement and passion of that momentous occasion when I pedaled out of Anchorage, Alaska bound for Tierra del Fuego-the very tip of South America. No matter that it was 17,500 miles distant and would take 3½ years to get there I vowed I would achieve that goal if it took the rest of my life.

With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

A look at the changing design of 19th-century American farmhouses, collected from a wide range of agricultural periodicals of the time.