Looking Back On A Half Century

Sixty-two stories about growing up in Worcester, MA around the turn of the 20th century written by William J. Larkin a first generation Irish Catholic who, for over fifty years, made his career reporting on Worcester news. The stories were first published in a Worcester Evening Post newspaper column called, "Looking Back on a Half Century," in 1935. This version includes an introduction, forward, and biography of William J. Larkin.

In this extensively revised and updated edition of her classic work, Look Back in Gender, Michelene Wandor confirms the symbiotic relationship between drama and gender in a provocative look at key, representative British plays from the last fifty years. Repositioning the text at the heart of hteatre studies, Wandor surveys plays by Ayckbourn, Beckett, Churchill, Daniels, Friel, Hare, Kane, Osborne, Pinter, Ravenhill, Wertenbaker, Wesker and others. Her nuanced argument, central to any analysis of contemporary drama, discusses: *the imperative of gender in the playwright's imagination *the function of gender as a major determinant of the text's structural and narrative drives *the impact of socialism and feminism on post-war British drama, and the relevance of feminist dynamics in drama *differences in the representation of the fmaily, sexuality and the mother, before and after 1968 *the impact of the slogan that the 'personal is political' on contemporary form and content.

Ambeth Ocampo on the inspiration behind this collection of essays: “Chulalongkorn’s elephants are the bronze elephants the King of Siam gave to Singapore and Java as gifts during his travels in 1871. I met the Singapore elephant first as I traced Rizal’s footsteps and found a reference to it in his diary. It was upon meeting next the Jakarta elephant that prompted me to compile this collection of essays that begins and ends with an elephant. More reflective than usual and going beyond Rizal and my 19th-centuray comfort zone, these explorations still carry my trademark irreverent humor.”

In 2012 Alan Montgomery sent out an email to a group of men who he knew were born between 1946–1964, a time that has been described as the Baby Boomer age. The premise for this book was to gather an array of short stories from amateur writers about their experiences growing up and then compile them into a collection that is given some historical and social context by using a story from a pre and post boomer perspective. He posed various questions to the contributors to help them explore their past and the impact it has had on their own current situation. The stories range in scope from self-discovery, karate as a means to the fountain of youth, to a lengthy semi-biographical of one man’s journey through the boomer age. Four short letters from the past open the book, introducing the reader to the generation before the boomers arrived. Boomer Boys Looking Back is a book filled with interesting insights into a generation that will soon fade into obscurity as it struggles to remain relevant. Each story is designed to provide an intriguing perspective from the point of view from the boomers as they made their way through their lives. A dozen or so men have made such a huge contribution toward this book, those of whom have travelled distances to meet up and give their own compelling narrative of events. All that remains is to take the reader on a journey of curiosity and allow you to marvel how the boomer evolved.

It takes courage and perseverance to revisit the days and nights of our lives and write down what we find to make a record of our lives. Looking Back, Moving On provides the guide to begin the adventure and helps us through the pleasures and pitfalls, the joys and the sorrows that may be encountered. Rubin enables us to discover that, ultimately, the project is the gift of self-discovery we give to ourselves, which enables us to go on to enjoy life to the fullest. Excerpts from her students writing contribute to our feeling of being part of the creative community

A transporting work of photographic history that offers a haunting vision of how Americans viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Pull the yellowed card from the box and slide it into the viewer. Two binocular images, nearly identical, reveal a scene from the past in vivid, three-dimensional detail. Transcending space and time, the card shows the world as it existed in 1900, a moment when technology collapsed borders; when wars ignited between great powers; when natural forces brought disaster on surging, vulnerable cities—a moment very much like our own. In 1900 the stereograph was king. Its three-dimensional optics created a virtual presence for the viewer. Millions of Americans, especially schoolchildren, absorbed ideas about race, class, and gender from such 3D images, the embodiment of the notion that “seeing is believing.” Drawing on an enormous, rarely seen collection of some 300,000 stereographic views spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, Michael Lesy presents nearly 250 images displaying a riot of peoples and cultures, stark class divisions, and unsettling glimpses of daily life a century ago. Like Lesy’s landmark works of American macabre, Wisconsin Death Trip and Murder City, Looking Backward slides the reader into suspended animation. Haunting views of the early twentieth century’s most significant events at home and in the farthest reaches of the world—war, rebellion, industrial revolution, and natural catastrophe—flank pictures of the last remnants of the premodern natural world. Lesy’s evocative essays reassert the primacy of the stereograph in American visual history. He profiles the photographers who saw the world through their prejudices and the companies that sold their images everywhere. In underscoring the unnerving parallels between that period and our own, Looking Backward reveals a history that shadows us today.