Walking the Ground: Making American History. A Memoir of Edwin Cole Bearss, Robert Irving Desourdis

Автор: Tim Parrish
Название: Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis
ISBN: 1558497811 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781558497818
Издательство: Mare Nostrum (Eurospan)
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Цена: 34190.00 T
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Описание: Who or what is an American? Many scholars have recently argued that in a country of such vast cultural and ethnic diversity as the United States it is not useful or even possible to talk of a single national identity. Are people right to suggest that the very idea of Americanness is merely a myth designed to obscure the divisions among us? This is the central question addressed by Tim Parrish in this imaginative interdisciplinary study. Working in the tradition of the blues, an art form based on the adaptation of cultural past to present, Parrish seeks to show what happens when we think of American identity not as some transcendental entity or essence, but as an ongoing process. At the core of his analysis is an appreciation of the rich legacy of pragmatism, a distinctly American frame of mind that sees truth as an act rather than an object, as a matter of doing rather than being. While the philosophical roots of pragmatism can be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William and Henry James, and Horace Kallen, the same intellectual approach informs the work of writers such as Ralph Ellison, Mary Antin, and Philip Roth as well as creative artists such as Son House, Elvis Presley, and James Brown. What all of these figures share, according to Parrish, is a recognition of the intrinsic connection between thought and action that has allowed Americans to define who they are through what they do. Walking Blues accounts for our cultural diversity without either insisting that we are all the same or denying that we have anything in common. Far from glossing over difference, Parrish shows how our American social, racial, and ethnic conflicts often mark the starting point for the various acts of creation through which we make--and remake--ourselves as Americans.

Автор: Robert Irving Desourdis
Название: Walking the Ground: From Big Sky to Semper Fi. A Memoir of Edwin Cole Bearss
ISBN: 1536169358 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781536169355
Издательство: Nova Science
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Описание: Edwin Cole Bearss, born in 1923, is an American World War II wounded warrior of the Greatest Generation. As a U.S. Marine, he was shot four times by the Japanese in the South Pacific, but despite his wounds rose to become a giant among American historians as Chief Historian of the National Park Service and the leading published Civil War Historian as shown in the Ken Burns Civil War series. Today, at 96, he is an eminent history tour guide. In this first book of his memoir, he traces his ancestors, including a relative who was involved in the underground railroad to save Americans from slavery. We see him grow up on a Montana ranch, survive with his family through the Great Depression, and ride a horse to a one-room schoolhouse in below-zero temperatures. When he was ten years old, he would go to Chicago to see Babe Ruth hit a home run in the first All Star Game in 1933. Early in life, his beloved maternal grandmother Sara played Sacajawea with her two Bearss grandchildren as Lewis and Clark. His father, a Montana rancher and U.S. Marine, read Civil War history to him and his brother. These experiences at an early age seeded Eds love of history, particularly military history, and he would go on to map the progress of armies in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian War, the 1937 Spanish Civil War, and then track Hitlers conquests of Austria and Czechoslovakia and finally Hitlers attack on Poland. He joined the U.S. Marines as soon as possible after Pearl Harbor, following the example of his father and third cousin "Hiking Hiram" Bearss, a Medal-of-Honor awardee and noted World War I Colonel. Ed describes his efforts to join the Marines, though underage at 17. We follow his path to a string of Pacific Islands, where he and his comrades are strafed by Japanese warplanes and succumbing to malaria and yellow jaundice. We ride with him in a Higgins boat to the Yellow 1 invasion beach on New Britain Island and move with him on point through the jungle terrain. We are with him as hidden Japanese pillboxes open fire on him and his buddies, as he sees them get hit one by one. We hear his thoughts and actions as he saved himself from certain death, and the moment when a few inches of dirt saved his life, his first lesson about the importance of terrain in battle. He describes his buddys silent deaths, whose voices were forever stilled, that would motivate him to speak for them in later life. We experience his recovery in several hospitals, his return to Montana as a fishing tour guide, college, first jobs and taking his first Civil War tours. Finally, we walk the ground with him at the Shiloh Battlefield, launching his devotion to walking the ground in the National Park Service. He is an example for all Wounded Warriors to never give up.