In Public Archaeology for the Twenty-First Century, James F. Brooks and Jeremy M. Moss have collected essays from twenty-seven scholars and community members to illuminate archaeological sites like ancient “water courts” at Mound Key in Florida, the lost Black cemetery at Nashville Zoo, fur-trade-era Fort Michilimackinac, and Arizona’s Gila Bend Internment Camp. Each case offers readers an experience that enlivens the past whilespeaking to the present.These essays w...

Trees are not just natural resources; they are also cultural ones that present unique challenges and opportunities for public historians. Trees can serve as important objects of memory, recalling past triumphs or tragedies. They can be the last living witness to important events or community stories. Trees can also be objects of preservation, sometimes as individuals, other times as stands or even forests, all of which can take on historical significance for people, sites, and institutions...

In 2009, the New Yorker declared chickens the "it bird" and heralded "the return of the backyard chicken." This honor occurred as, a host of American cities were changing their laws to allow chickens in residents’ backyards. Philip Levy, a sometime chicken keeper himself, mixes cultural history with husbandry to chronicle the weird and wonderful story of Americans’ urban chickens. From the streets of Brooklyn to council chambers in Albany to the beat of Key West’s Chicken Nuisance...

No figure in American history has generated more public interest or sustained more scholarly research around his various homes and habitations than has George Washington. The Permanent Resident is the first book to bring the principal archaeological sites of Washington's life together under one cover, revealing what they say individually and collectively about Washington’s life and career and how Americans have continued to invest these places with meaning.Philip Levy begi...

A biography of Ferry Farm—George Washington's boyhood home—and its three centuries of American history."Levy's exploration yields clues to George's life there, such as whether there really was a cherry tree. . . . A wealth in deliberative detail to contemplate and relish." — Kirkus ReviewsIn 2002, Philip Levy arrived on the banks of Rappahannock River in Virginia to begin an archeological excavation of Ferry Farm, t...

George Washington’s childhood is famously the most elusive part of his life story. For centuries biographers have struggled with a lack of period documentation and an absence of late-in-life reflection in trying to imagine Washington’s formative years.In George Washington Written upon the Land, Philip Levy explores this most famous of American childhoods through its relationship to the Virginia farm where much of it took place. Using approaches from biography, archaeology,...

This revised textbook is designed for undergraduate courses in cognitive psychology. It approaches cognitive psychology by asking what it says about how people carry out everyday activities: how people organize and use their knowledge in order to behave appropriately in the world in which they live.; Each chapter of the book starts with an example and then uses this to introduce some aspect of the overall cognitive system. Through such examples of cognition in action, important components ...

A fascinating study of American life and an explanation of how American life is studied through the everyday details of ordinary living, colorfully depicting a world hundreds of years in the past.History is recorded in many ways. According to author James Deetz, the past can be seen most fully by studying the small things so often forgotten. Objects such as doorways, gravestones, musical instruments, and even shards of pottery fill in the cracks between large histo...

For readers of Jill Lepore, Joseph J. Ellis, and Tony Horwitz comes a lively, thought-provoking intellectual history of the golden age of American utopianism—and the bold, revolutionary, and eccentric visions for the future put forward by five of history’s most influential utopian movements.In the wake of the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism, a generation of dreamers took it upon themselves to confront the messiness and injustice of a rapidly changing w...

George Washington's Mount Vernon brings together--for the first time--the details of Washington's 45-year endeavor to build and perfect Mount Vernon. In doing so it introduces us to a Washington few of his contemporaries knew, and one little noticed by historians since. Here we meet the planter/patriot who also genuinely loved building, a man passionately human in his desire to impress on his physical surroundings the stamp of his character and personal beliefs. As chief architect...

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • Drawing on a wealth of research, this "fascinating" book (The New York Times Book Review) charts the invention of our current Yuletide traditions, from St. Nicholas to the Christmas tree and, perhaps most radically, the practice of giving gifts to children.Anyone who laments the excesses of Christmas might consider the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts: they simply outlawed the holiday. The Puritans had their reasons, since Chris...

Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical ...