From The Heart Of The Heartland

English Heart, Hindi Heartland examines Delhi’s postcolonial literary world—its institutions, prizes, publishers, writers, and translators, and the cultural geographies of key neighborhoods—in light of colonial histories and the globalization of English. Rashmi Sadana places internationally recognized authors such as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, and Aravind Adiga in the context of debates within India about the politics of language and alongside other writers, including K. Satchidanandan, Shashi Deshpande, and Geetanjali Shree. Sadana undertakes an ethnographic study of literary culture that probes the connections between place, language, and text in order to show what language comes to stand for in people’s lives. In so doing, she unmasks a social discourse rife with questions of authenticity and cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion. English Heart, Hindi Heartland illustrates how the notion of what is considered to be culturally and linguistically authentic not only obscures larger questions relating to caste, religious, and gender identities, but that the authenticity discourse itself is continually in flux. In order to mediate and extract cultural capital from India’s complex linguistic hierarchies, literary practitioners strategically deploy a fluid set of cultural and political distinctions that Sadana calls "literary nationality." Sadana argues that English, and the way it is positioned among the other Indian languages, does not represent a fixed pole, but rather serves to change political and literary alliances among classes and castes, often in surprising ways.

“Miner’s story of Milwaukee is filled with memorable characters . . . explores with consummate skill the dynamics of race, politics, and schools in our time.” —Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work Weaving together the racially fraught history of public education in Milwaukee and the broader story of hypersegregation in the rust belt, Lessons from the Heartland tells of a city’s fall from grace—and its chance for redemption in the twenty-first century. A symbol of middle American working-class values, Wisconsin—and in particular urban Milwaukee—has been at the forefront of a half century of public education experiments, from desegregation and “school choice” to vouchers and charter schools. This book offers a sweeping narrative portrait of an all-American city at the epicenter of public education reform, and an exploration of larger issues of race and class in our democracy. The author, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter whose daughters went through the public school system, explores the intricate ways that jobs, housing, and schools intersect, underscoring the intrinsic link between the future of public schools and the dreams and hopes of democracy in a multicultural society. “A social history with the pulse and pace of a carefully crafted novel and a Dickensian cast of unforgettable characters. With the eye of an ethnographer, the instincts of a beat reporter, and the heart of a devoted mother and citizen activist, Miner has created a compelling portrait of a city, a time, and a people on the edge. This is essential reading.” —Bill Ayers, author of Teaching Toward Freedom “Eloquently captures the narratives of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers.” —Library Journal

An in-depth look at the Norwegian American community of Minneapolis-St. Paul and its deep and complex role in the economic, political, and cultural life of the Twin Cities over more than 170 years. Since the earliest days of European settlement in the region, tens of thousands of Norwegians have found their way to Minnesota, adding a distinctive Scandinavian flavor to the state's ethnic and cultural mix. Many early arrivals settled in the cities, while others who initially chose the countryside often departed for urban settings after they had mastered the English language and become accustomed to the ways of their adopted home. The growing Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul became home to Norwegian immigrants and their migrating compatriots alike. These Norwegian Americans took up employment in a range of fields, in both the public and private sectors. They also assembled in churches and charitable organizations, carrying on homeland traditions even as they took on prominent roles in the larger urban scene. By the early twentieth century, public events like Syttende mai drew not only Norwegian Americans but Twin Cities residents more broadly, a level of recognition that explains the persistent sense of Norwegian-ness among later generations. Minnesotans of Norwegian descent in the twenty-first century may not speak their ancestral tongue, but they lovingly uphold many cultural practices of their ancestral home. In The Heart of the Heartland, author David C. Mauk brings together personal interviews, demographic research, and archival exploration to inform stories of assimilation, ascendency, and collaboration among Minnesota's Norwegian Americans and their neighbors over 170 years. The narrative traces not only Twin Cities business, industrial, neighborhood, and cultural histories but also the significant and varied roles Norwegian Americans have played in the region's development.

Presenting startling new biographical details about Timothy McVeigh and exposing stark contradictions and errors contained in previous depictions of the "All-American Terrorist," this book traces McVeigh's life from childhood to the Army, throughout the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the period after his 1995 arrest until his 2001 execution. McVeigh's life, as Dr. Wendy Painting describes it, offers a backdrop for her discussion of not only several intimate and previously unknown details about him, but a number of episodes and circumstances in American History as well. In Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. All these stories are examined, compared, and tested in Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, making this book a much closer examination into the personality and life of Timothy McVeigh than has been provided by any other biographical work about him

A painter leaves behind his life in New York to return to the South and his two best friends - both former lovers, now husband and wife. The death of someone close to them all sets the trio on a wild odyssey into small-town Georgia and into the troubled collective heart of their relationship.

"How do we imagine and engage with the agricultural heartlands of Australia? In the city and the bush, how do we see ourselves in relation to the farmland that nourishes us all? Heartland explores the cultural and historical foundations of ecological change and disorder across the southwest slopes of New South Wales, a rich and productive agricultural region. Rural places are today calling everyone, George Main suggests, into relationships of mutual care."--BOOK JACKET.

A history of a quintessentially American place--the rural and small town heartland--that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world. When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the D.C. metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe. Struck by the gap between reputation and reality, she determined to get to the bottom of history and myth. The deeper she dug into the making of the modern heartland, the wider her story became as she realized that she'd uncovered an unheralded crossroads of people, commerce, and ideas. But the really interesting thing, Hoganson found, was that over the course of American history, even as the region's connections with the rest of the planet became increasingly dense and intricate, the idea of the rural Midwest as a steadfast heartland became a stronger and more stubbornly immovable myth. In enshrining a symbolic heart, the American people have repressed the kinds of stories that Hoganson tells, of sweeping breadth and depth and soul. In The Heartland, Kristin L. Hoganson drills deep into the center of the country, only to find a global story in the resulting core sample. Deftly navigating the disconnect between history and myth, she tracks both the backstory of this region and the evolution of the idea of an unalloyed heart at the center of the land. A provocative and highly original work of historical scholarship, The Heartland speaks volumes about pressing preoccupations, among them identity and community, immigration and trade, and security and global power. And food. To read it is to be inoculated against using the word "heartland" unironically ever again.