One of the great novelist’s most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius.This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes…along with some of his most sentimental and...

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above c...

Pride of Smoketown: The 1935 Pittsburgh CrawfordsEdited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill NowlinAssociate editors Len Levin and Carl RiechersThe 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords team, one of the dominant teams in Negro League history, is often compared to the legendary 1927 "Murderer's Row" New York Yankees. The squad from "Smoketown"—a nickname that the Pittsburgh Courier often applied to the metropolis better-known as "Steel City"—boasted four Hall-of-Fame players in outfielde...

This book on the 1939 Negro National League II champion Baltimore Elite Giants is part of a series of SABR books about the great Negro League teams of the first half of the twentieth century.The Giants were first formed in Nashville in 1921, but moved around from location to location over the years - Columbus and Washington, DC, became way stations for team founder Tom Wilson as he moved the team in search of a sizable and stable fan base that Nashville's Black population did not o...

The Kansas City Monarchs are arguably the best-known of all Negro League teams, thanks in part to the inimitable Satchel Paige's association with the team and longtime Monarch Buck O'Neil's role as an ambassador of Black baseball history.The Monarchs won the first-ever Negro League World Series against the Hilldale club in 1924. Black World Series play went on a 15-year hiatus after 1927, but when it returned, so did the Monarchs. That time, 1942, the team faced the perennial Negro...

On December 16, 2020, Major League Baseball announced that seven Negro Leagues, from various seasons spanning the years 1920 to 1948, were being recognized as major leagues and that all statistics from those leagues and seasons would henceforth be considered part of the major-league record books. The earliest league to be included is the first iteration of the Negro National League (NNL), founded by Rube Foster, which extended from 1920 through the end of 1931.The First Negro L...

In 1934, Ed Bolden's Philadelphia Stars joined the new Negro National League II (NNL2), which had been founded one year earlier. After fending off their intrastate-rivals, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Stars claimed the NNL2's second-half championship and faced the first-half champions for the title. They defeated the Chicago American Giants to claim the NNL2 crown.Over two dozen SABR members researched the Stars' history for this book, which includes biographies of as many of the ...

The Newark Eagles won only one Negro National League pennant during the franchise's 15-year tenure in the Garden State, but the 1946 squad that ran away with the NNL and then triumphed over the Kansas City Monarchs in a seven-game World Series was a team for the ages. World War II had ended, and numerous players who had served in the military returned to resume their playing careers with the Eagles. The returning veterans composed a veritable "Who's Who in the Negro Leagues" and included L...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

The theory of recognition is now a well-established and mature research paradigm in philosophy, and it is both influential in and influenced by developments in other fields of the humanities and social sciences. From debates in moral philosophy about the fundamental roots of obligation, to debates in political philosophy about the character of multicultural societies, to debates in legal theory about the structure and justification of rights, to debates in social theory about the prospects...

First pblished in the year 1837, the present novel 'The Pickwick Papers' was the famous Victorian realist novelist Charles Dickens's first novel. It was published in the serialized form following the success of his 'Sketches by Boz', under his pseudonym Boz.

A satirical critique of British bureaucracy and the impossibility of social mobility, Little Dorrit tells the story of kind-hearted Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, both of whom are unaware that their family histories have been fabricated to cover a complex web of secrets and lies. After living with his father in China for twenty years, Arthur returns home to London to inform his mother of his father's death. Before he died, however, his father gave him a mysterious watch. This gift...