How the Civilian Conservation Corps transformed our understanding of nature

In the spring of 1933, the United States was in the midst of the worst economic calamity it had ever experienced. Newly inaugurated president Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to approve funding allowing legions of out-of-work young men to find employment reclaiming and developing the nation’s natural spaces. The Civilian Conservation Corps became a reality in April 1933 and forever changed the way the American people viewed their parks, rivers, lakes, and other natural areas.

This book tells the story of the CCC’s construction of the Virginia Kendall Reserve, which today is part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in Northeast Ohio. Four hundred and thirty acres of farmland came under the control of the Akron Metropolitan Park District and its director-secretary, Harold Wagner, who immediately applied to the federal government to establish a CCC camp there with the aim of creating a natural recreation landscape open to the public.

Author Kenneth Bindas and seven of his students from Kent State University drew upon a wide variety of government documents, oral histories, and other primary sources to place the construction of the Reserve within the larger context of modernism and the emerging 1930s movements whose goals were to protect and open up natural areas. As a case study, the construction of the Virginia Kendall Reserve provides an example of the design, manipulation, and construction used to create so many Civilian Conservation Corps environments.

The book is filled with historic photographs showing the process of construction, and contemporary photos by Marina Vladova visually detail the lush nature that families, hikers, runners, bikers, and naturalists enjoy today.

Published in cooperation with the National Park Service and Eastern National

Edited and translated by Susanna Fein with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski

London, British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary books to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are additional treasures for the student of Middle English: contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion. And digging beyond these English gems, one readily discovers more prizes—less-well-known ones—in French and Latin: four fabliaux (the largest set from medieval England), three lives of Anglo-Saxon saints, and a wealth of satires, comedies, debates, interludes, collected sayings, conduct literature, Bible stories, dream interpretations, and pilgrim guides. Rich in texts in three languages, the book’s overall range is quite astounding. The Ludlow scribe, compiler and copyist, shows himself to have been a man of unusual curiosity, acquisitiveness, and discerning connoisseurship.

Edited and translated by Susanna Fein with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski

London, British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary books to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are additional treasures for the student of Middle English: contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion. And digging beyond these English gems, one readily discovers more prizes—less-well-known ones—in French and Latin: four fabliaux (the largest set from medieval England), three lives of Anglo-Saxon saints, and a wealth of satires, comedies, debates, interludes, collected sayings, conduct literature, Bible stories, dream interpretations, and pilgrim guides. Rich in texts in three languages, the book’s overall range is quite astounding. The Ludlow scribe, compiler and copyist, shows himself to have been a man of unusual curiosity, acquisitiveness, and discerning connoisseurship.

As America emerges from the Depression, the Hatherfords build a comfortable life just outside of New York City, in rural Bergen County, New Jersey. They are a glamorous couple: Vern is the charismatic owner of a successful Ford dealership, and his flamboyant wife Maeve is beautiful even in middle age. When their three-year-old son Scott falls prey to polio, and later, another son must go to war, their marriage slowly implodes. In the midst of it all, twelve-year-old Patsy steals swallows of whiskey and tries to make sense of the world around her, which includes an unusual intimacy between her brother Scott, and Julian, a young African American boy who lives among them.

Neither historical nor medical fiction, The Cure offers the pleasures of both in its richly complex portrayal of the lives and times of its characters. A beautifully written family saga about race, war, childhood illness, and romantic desire, The Cure has at its heart wounding and the struggle for hope.

The Brexit vote; the election of Trump; the upsurge of European nationalism; the devolution of the Arab Spring; global violence; Chinese expansionism; disruptive climate change; the riotous instabilities of the world capitalist system…While diverse in nature, these events share a common denominator: they are less a failure of policy, and more a complex social psychological reaction to globalization, the result of which presently threatens our survival on Earth.

Based on a critical reading of Freud’s Civilization and its discontents, The defiance of global commitment constructs a complex social psychology of how people all over the world are addressingglobalization. Drawing on the latest advances in the cognitive, social, and complexity sciences, this timely volume presents a global model of defiance and the triangular tensions between nostalgic retreat, global aggression, and civil society, as manifested in forms ranging from nostalgic resentment and LGBTQI issues to racism and ecological aggression.

Revealing how globalization and its discontents manifest the darker reaches of the human psyche and its conflicted relations with others, this insightful monograph will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as globalization studies, complexity sciences and social psychology.

Reading fluency has been identified in the Common Core State Standards as a foundational competency for reading proficiency. This resource provides teachers with approaches to fluency instruction that are effective, engaging, and easy to implement. The authors begin with a comprehensive definition of reading fluency, a discussion of why fluency has fallen out of favor in recent years, and evidence of its importance to literacy instruction. They follow up with authentic approaches to reading fluency that teachers and literacy interventionists can immediately use to improve students’ overall proficiency in reading. A unique feature of the book is the participation sections “What Do You Think?” and “What We Think,” which challenge the reader to engage in issues related to fluency—from concept, to assessment, to instruction—and then compare their views to those of the authors. This important new book updates and adds to Timothy Rasinski’s classic text, The Fluent Reader.

Book Features:

• Vignettes of teachers implementing research-based fluency instruction.
• Teaching strategies and classroom activities to help struggling readers.
• Full descriptions of the authors’ original, highly successful approaches to improving fluency.
• Resources for assessment and instruction of reading fluency.
• A new concept of reading instruction as an art as well as a science.