To The Latest Posterity

"To the Latest Posterity is filled with examples of family registers from museum and private collections, many of them never before published, including early handmade work as well as printed registers that were filled in by hand in the nineteenth century. Bringing the art into the twentieth century and beyond, the Earnests discuss the adoption of the art by the Amish, who continue the practice of illuminated family record keeping today."--Jacket.

An elegantly designed, beautifully composed volume of personal letters from famous American men and women that celebrates the American Experience and illuminates the rich history of some of America’s most storied families. Posterity is at once an epistolary chronicle of America and a fascinating glimpse into the hearts and minds of some of history’s most admired figures and storied families. Spanning more than three centuries, these letters contain enduring lessons—in life, love, character and compassion—that will surprise and enlighten. Included here are letters from Thomas Jefferson to his daughter, warning her of the evils of debt; General Patton on D-Day to his son, a cadet at West Point, about what it means to be a good soldier; W.E.B. Du Bois to his daughter about character beneath the color of skin; Oscar Hammerstein about why, after all his success, he doesn’t stop working; Woody Guthrie, writing from a New Jersey asylum, to nine-year-old Arlo about universal human frailty; Eleanor Roosevelt chastising her grown son for his Christmas plans; and Groucho Marx as a dog to his twenty-five-year-old son. Here are renowned Americans in their own words and in their own times, seen as they were seen by their children. Here are our great Americans as mothers and fathers.

"Rocco Rubini studies the motives and literary forms in the making of a "tradition," not understood narrowly, as the conservative, stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions, but rather more generously and etymologically interpreted: as the deliberate effort on the part of writers to transmit a reformulated past across generations. Leveraging Italian thinkers from Petrarch to Gramsci, with stops at the most prominent humanists in between (including Giambattista Vico, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Benedetto Croce), Rubini gives us an innovative lens through which to view an Italian intellectual tradition that is at once premodern and modern, a legacy that does not depend on a date or a single masterpiece, but instead requires the reader to parse an entire career of writings to uncover deeper, transhistorical continuities that span 600 years. Whether reading forward to the 1930s, or backward to the 14th century, Rubini elucidates the interplay of creation and reception underlying the enactment of tradition, the practice of retrieving and conserving, and the revivification of shared themes and intentions linking these thinkers across time"--

THE STORY: Norway’s most celebrated sculptor, Gustav Vigeland, is commissioned to create the last official bust of its most famous writer—the irascible, imperious, and inscrutable Henrik Ibsen. The two artists, each needing something from the other, wage war over both the creation of Ibsen’s likeness and the prospects of his legacy. With his inimitable wit and insight, Doug Wright explores the nature of artistic success and the fear of being forgotten.

Learn the hidden politics & history of presidential libraries, our taxpayer-funded American shrines - including the untold story of a president who broke the law to build his library on a tract of spectacular land: a primary training base for the United States Marines. The president took it anyway - during a time of war - and created a new bureaucracy to cover up his actions; only his other, larger crimes put an end to his scheme."The Last Campaign" examines what presidents do to keep us from knowing what presidents do: skewed history, self-commemoration, the influence of private money and political organizations, and a compromised government agency - the National Archives, which operates the libraries. Presidential library expert Anthony Clark recounts his attempts, as a private citizen and as a senior Congressional staffer, to rein in the system's worst abuses.Unrestrained commemoration, unregulated - and undisclosed - contributions, and unchecked partisan politics have radically altered the look and purpose of presidential libraries, changing them from impartial archives of history into extravagant, legacy-building showplaces where the goals of former presidents, their families, financial donors, and the national parties trump accuracy and the (often inconvenient) facts.Using records discovered over twelve years of research and repeated visits to all the presidential libraries, the National Archives, and other sources, Clark deftly narrates the ways presidents rewrite history. And how their private, political foundations use government institutions to raise millions of dollars for political purposes. He tells the story of the most political Archivist of the United States, and why his deplorable actions still resonate, still matter to us, more than twenty years later.Americans deserve fair and accurate history in the libraries for which we pay; history based on records, not politics. But while presidents run for posterity, dedicating their self-congratulatory museums an average of four years after leaving office (complete with exhibits created to glorify them and their achievements), the records that show what actually happened won't be opened for more than a hundred years...unless we decide to do something, and reform our presidential libraries.

When they met, Raymond Jay Wright and Margie Moselle Brooks had at least one thing in common: humble beginnings. He was the son of an early twentieth-century Texas sharecropper. Her father owned a farm just outside of Midland. With the advent of World War II, they embarked on what would become a military career, he the brave but understated soldier and she the strong but demure Army wife. Together, they found the kind of success that many long for but few attain, one produced by the combined forces of faith, patriotism, and love for family. For Posteritys Sake is a simple, heartwarming, and inspirational story contextually rich in American history and reminiscent of A Land Remembered. For decades, society has unknowingly asked for this true account to be told. Upon these pages lies its answer.

Gill invites readers to consider a very large proposition--that the weakening of the family in Western societies is inextricably linked to the weakening of our faith in the idea of progress. ""Posterity Lost" will be one of the most influential treatments of family change of this decade". says Norval Glenn, "American Journal of Sociology".