Writing The Heavenly Frontier

Writing the Heavenly Frontier celebrates the early voices of the air as it examines the sky as a metaphorical and political landscape. While flight histories usually focus on the physical dangers of early aviation, this book introduces the figurative liabilities of ascension. Early pilot-writers not only grappled with an unwieldy machine; they also grappled with poetics that were extremely selective. Tropes that cast Charles Lindbergh as the transcendent hero of the new millennium were the same ones that kept women, black Americans, and indigenous peoples imaginatively tethered to the ground. The most popular flight autobiographies in the United States posited a hero who rose from the mundane to the miraculous; and yet the most startling autobiographies point out the social factors that limited or forbade vertical movement—both literally and figuratively. A survey of pilot writing, the book will appeal to flight enthusiasts and people interested in American autobiography and culture. But it will also appeal strongly to readers interested in the poetics and politics of place.

Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era engages feminist, temporal, and narrative theories to offer fresh examinations of interwar-era accounts by women about travel and movement and considers the use and limitations of time as a subversive force in their texts. This book makes a significant contribution to the under-examined study of women’s travel writing between the wars and synthesises and applies a variety of feminist, narrative, and postcolonial theories to excavate new understandings of the intersection between women, travel, and time in writing. The book studies the emergence of the aviatrix after the Great War and moves through to the representations of war in women’s travel on the brink of World War II. Each chapter offers a unique theoretical framework and examines how experiences of time impact perceptions of women’s bodies and identities, their engagement with history and discourse, and the problematic influence on colonialism. Women, Travel, and Writing in the Interwar Era is essential reading to any student or researcher in the field of women’s travel writing, as well as scholars of gender studies, war and interwar history, and cultural heritage.

The dominant narratives of US rurality within educational research and literature centers on the Appalachian and southern US perspectives. However, there is a need to add texture and expand the vision of rurality in US schools and education. Expanding the Vision of Rurality in the US Educational System provides readers, especially college and university faculty in pre-service education programs, with a better understanding of the rural students they teach and the rural communities where they will eventually teach. It also attempts to move the discourse beyond the deficit framework for understanding rural communities. Though the book does not ignore barriers in rural communities, it focuses on the strengths and opportunities available to rural educators without depending on the rural idyllic. Covering key topics such as diversity, belonging, and regional rurality, this premier reference source is ideal for administrators, policymakers, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

'Who says that daughters cannot be heroic?' Once upon a time, history was written by men, for men and about men. Women were deemed less important, their letters destroyed, their stories ignored. Not any more. This is the story of women who went to war, women who stopped war and women who stayed at home. The rulers. The fighters. The activists. The writers. This is the story of Wu Zetian, who as 'Chinese Emperor' helped to spread Buddhism in China. This is the story of Genghis Khan's powerful daughters, who ruled his empire for him. This is the story of Christine de Pizan, one of the earliest feminist writers. This is the story of Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president before she could even vote for one. This is the story of the world – with the women put back in.

Today, the long-assumed belief in the permanence of an enlightened world is suddenly open to challenge. Human rights, participatory government, and social justice are losing global influence, and the world of ordinary people is pushing back against Enlightenment conceits. Accumulated anger links Taliban, Tea Party, and Trump, threatening women's rights, social justice, and democracy. To understand and counteract the threat to these ideas, we must set aside embedded explanations and embrace a new frame of observation and tolerance grounded in the power of belief, legend, and tradition. In Rebuilding an Enlightened World, Bill Ivey explores how folklore offers a unique and compelling new way to understand the underlying forces disrupting the world today. If we are to salvage the best of the Enlightenment dream and build a better future, we must begin to listen, patiently and inquisitively, in order to interpret the customs, norms, and traditional practices that shape all human behavior.

Mingming Wang, one of the most prolific anthropologists in China, has produced a work both of long-term historical anthropology and of broad social theory. In it, he traces almost a millennium of history of the southern Chinese city of Quangzhou, a major international trading entrepot in the 13th century that declined to a peripheral regional center by the end of the 19th century. But the historical trajectory understates the complex set of interrelationships between local structures and imperial agendas that played out over the course of centuries and dynasties. Using urban structure, documentary analysis, and archaeological artifacts, Wang shows how the study of Quangzhou represents a Chinese template for civilizational studies, one distinctly different from Eurocentric models propounded by such theorists as Sahlins, Wolf, and Elias.

Our lives here are so often cluttered with the “cares of this world” that we fail to consider heavenly priorities and how they should be reflected in our earthly ones. At the beginning of Jesus’ most famous prayer, He teaches us to pray that God’s will “be done on earth as it is in heaven”. What heaven is up to is critical for us to understand if we’re going to live biblically. Pastor Greg Laurie explains that heaven is anything but a long, boring church service. People in heaven know about the time and place of ongoing events on earth. They are rational and recall everything from their earthly days, but most importantly for us, they have a unique perspective from which we can learn a great deal. In this rich and relevant study, Greg sheds scriptural light on the sensational books and stories about people going to heaven and coming back, answers the nagging questions we are all dying to ask, and guides us to focus—right now—on what really matters.