Joan Burbick – författare

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of a national culture in America. These 'fictions' of health include annual reports of mental asylums, home-physician manuals, social reform books and novels consumed by the middle class that functioned as cautionary tales of well-being. Read together these writings engage in a counterpoint of voices at once constructing and debating the hegemonic values of the emerging American nation. In studying these narratives of health, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace, Americans designed ways to control the body in the effort to create, impose or embrace social order in a corporeal politics whose influences are felt to this day.

In this study Joan Burbick interprets nineteenth-century narratives of health written by physicians, social reformers, lay healers and literary artists in order to expose the conflicts underlying the creation of a national culture in America. These 'fictions' of health include annual reports of mental asylums, home-physician manuals, social reform books and novels consumed by the middle class that functioned as cautionary tales of well-being. Read together these writings engage in a counterpoint of voices at once constructing and debating the hegemonic values of the emerging American nation. In studying these narratives of health, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America confronts what Burbick sees as a certain fundamental uneasiness about democracy in America. Fearing the political freedom they hoped to embrace, Americans designed ways to control the body in the effort to create, impose or embrace social order in a corporeal politics whose influences are felt to this day.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Rodeo has always been considered a supremely masculine sport, a rough and tumble display of macho strength and skill. But author Joan Burbick shows us the other side of rodeo: the world of rodeo queens- part cowgirl and part pageant princess- who wave and smile and keep the dream of the ideal Western woman alive. So who are the women behind the candy-red chaps, Farrah Fawcett curls, and rhinestone tiaras? Burbick traveled the backroads of the rural West for years, trying to find out. She interviewed dozens of queens, including rodeo royalty from the 1930s and 40s, women who grew up breaking wild horses, branding calves, and witnessing the sad decline of the ranching life. Stories from white and Native American rodeo queens in the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of rodeo, reveal the conflicts over gender and race that shaped the rodeo and the Cold War politics of small Western towns. Finally, rodeo queens from the 1970s to the present describe a more fiercely commercial rodeo, driven largely by TV-ratings and sponsorships, glitter and hairspray. Illustrated throughout with wonderful photographs, this rich tapestry of women's voices echoes and challenges our clichés of the rural West. Their combined stories of fulfilled dreams and lost hopes reveal the tenacity of the myth of the American West, a place of muscled men, golden-haired women, relentless beauty and tragic limits.

On progressive websites and in newspaper columns Gun Show Nation has become part of a lively debate on guns and democracy in America. “Burbick gets it,” Buzzflash says, “she cuts through to the heart of the psychology of guns.”Cultural historian, critic, and gun owner Joan Burbick examines the lethal politics of gun ownership, answering that perennial question about America culture: Why are Americans so obsessed with guns? Looking at the nation from the floor of a gun show, Burbick uncovers a powerful conservative ideology that attempts to place gun ownership at the center of our democracy. “Careful in her conclusions, lively in her writing” (Booklist), her analysis takes us from the history of the NRA, through the gun lobby’s engagement with domestic politics that reached its high-water mark during the Reagan era, to the movement’s contemporary hostility to the United Nations.The most thorough account yet of the beliefs that millions of ordinary Americans hold about guns, Gun Show Nation delves into the political machinations that have shaped the gun debate in America and draws fascinating conclusions about gun culture and national identity.