Conversing By Signs

The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor. These forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a 'poetics of implication.' Words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period.

How we address people, where we sit, what we disclose about ourselves, how we make eye contact, and where and when we touch are signs of attitudes and emotions. Because we may not be conscious of the social or psychological significance of these signs, they are the stealth aspect of conversation. One goal of this book is to demonstrate that address, self-disclosure, seating, eye-contact, and touch are the five vital signs of conversation. Another is to increase the reader's awareness of the fact that whatever the topic of a conversation, interlocutors are also expressing their attitudes and emotions by means of these five vital signs. A final goal is to show the reader that the use of these signs varies with ethnicity, gender, and relationship. To accomplish these goals, this book provides relevant scientific information in a popular style that makes it accessible to a broad spectrum of readers concerned with interpersonal communication.

"Laura Lynne Jackson is a psychic medium and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Light Between Us. She possesses an incredible gift--the ability to communicate with loved ones who have passed, convey messages of love and healing, and impart a greater understanding of our interconnectedness. Though her abilities are exceptional, they are not unique, and that is the message at the core of this book. Understanding "the secret language of the universe" is a gift available to all. As we learn to ask for and recognize signs from the other side, we will start to find meaning where before there was only confusion, we will see light in the darkness. We may decide to change paths, push toward love, pursue joy, and engage with life in a whole new way. In Signs, Jackson is able to bring the mystical into the everyday. She relates stories of people who have experienced these uncanny revelations and instances of unexplained synchronicity, as well as those drawn from her own experience. There's the producer whose lost child appears to her as a deer that approaches her unhesitatingly at a highway rest stop; the name tag of an ER nurse that lets a terrified wife know that her husband will be okay; the Elvis Presley song that arrives at the exact time of her own father's passing; and many others. This is a book that is both inspiring and practical, deeply comforting and wonderfully motivational in asking us to see beyond ourselves to a more magnificent universal design"--

Basic ASL for everyday conversation.

Political yard signs are one of the most ubiquitous and conspicuous features of American political campaigns, yet they have received relatively little attention as a form of political communication or participation. In Politics on Display, Todd Makse, Scott L. Minkoff, and Anand E. Sokhey tackle this phenomenon to craft a larger argument about the politics of identity and space in contemporary America. Documenting political life in two suburban communities and a major metropolitan area, they use an unprecedented research design that leverages street-level observation of the placement of yard signs and neighborhood-specific survey research that delves into the attitudes, behavior, and social networks of residents. The authors then integrate these data into a geo-database that also includes demographic and election data. Supplemented by nationally-representative data sources, the book brings together insights from political communication, political psychology, and political geography. Against a backdrop of conflict and division, this book advances a new understanding of how citizens experience campaigns, why many still insist on airing their views in public, and what happens when social spaces become political spaces.