Just Plain Folks

By returning to the cotton fields, tobacco barns, & humble dwellings of her ancestral home in the rural South, this author learned firsthand what is missing from the history books between the pages on slavery & present-day African-American culture. It is the experience of ordinary people who, on second glance, have led truly extraordinary lives. She developed an appreciation for their words, wit, & wisdom & has made it her life's work to pass along their experiences. In this collection of original short stories, she pays homage to these ordinary folks through lyrical tributes, many of which have aired or will air on National Public Radio. Beginning late this year, her own program, Just Plain Folks: Wisdom from the Front Porch, will air weekly on NPR. Like her radio segments, the stories in Just Plain Folks are meant both to entertain & to educate. Each story concludes with an author's note that places it in its proper cultural context.

An autobiography by Swanee Hunt, daughter of the legendary oil magnate H. L. Hunt, Bill Clinton's Ambassador to Austria, and internationally renowned philanthropist.

A sweeping, five-decade history of the evangelical movement in southern California that explains an epochal realignment of American politics. From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of “plain-folk” religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon’s “Southern Solution,” and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, “Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.”

A content reading methods text that takes a quick start, heuristic approach to imparting the skills future teachers need to improve their pupils' reading ability in essential content areas. Coverage of current theories and practices in comprehension, assessment and heuristics is organized around pre-reading, guided silent reading, and post-reading.

Together with its sister volume on Theoretical Cognitive Approaches, this volume explores the contribution which cognitive linguistics can make to the identification and analysis of overt and hidden ideologies. This volume shows that descriptive tools which cognitive linguistics developed for the analysis of language-in-use are highly efficient for the analysis of ideologies as well. Amongst them are the concept of grounding and the speaker’s deictic centre, iconographic reference, frames, cultural cognitive models as a subgroup of Idealized Cognitive Models, conceptual metaphors, root metaphors, frames as groups of metaphors, mental spaces, and conceptual blending. The first section ‘Political metaphor and ideology’ discusses topics such as Nazi Germany, discrimination of Afro-Americans, South Africa’s “rainbow nation”, and the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. The second section, on cross-cultural “Otherness” deals with cultural clashes such as those between the Basque symbolic world and the general European value systems; between the Islam and the West, determining its treatment of Iraq in the Gulf War; and between Hong Kong “Otherness” and centuries of Western dominance. The third section deals with ‘Metaphors for institutional ideologies’ and concentrates on the globalisation of the North and South American markets, on insults in (un)parliamentary debates, and on the Internet being for sale.