Michael A Lofaro - Böcker

The embodiment of the American hero, the man of action, the pathfinder, Daniel Boone represents the great adventure of his age -- the westward movement of the American people. Daniel Boone: An American Life brings together over thirty years of research in an extraordinary biography of the quintessential pioneer. Based on primary sources, the book depicts Boone through the eyes of those who knew him and within the historical contexts of his eighty-six years. The story of Daniel Boone offers new insights into the turbulent birth and growth of the nation and demonstrates why the frontier forms such a significant part of the American experience.

The embodiment of the American hero, the man of action, the pathfinder, Daniel Boone represents the great adventure of his age -- the westward movement of the American people. Daniel Boone: An American Life brings together over thirty years of research in an extraordinary biography of the quintessential pioneer. Based on primary sources, the book depicts Boone through the eyes of those who knew him and within the historical contexts of his eighty-six years. The story of Daniel Boone offers new insights into the turbulent birth and growth of the nation and demonstrates why the frontier forms such a significant part of the American experience.

Barely noticed upon publication in 1941, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’s unique chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would enjoy a remarkable revival during the 1960s. Remembering it as a “bible of sorts” for civil rights activists like himself, psychiatrist Robert Coles called it “an eloquent testimony that others had cared, had gone forth to look and hear, and had come back to stand up and address their friends and neighbors and those beyond personal knowing.” The book has remained in print ever since, profoundly affecting subsequent generations of readers. In this collection, seventeen gifted essayists offer provocative new perspectives on the Agee-Evans classic, ranging from personal appreciations to computational analysis, with forays into literary, film, historical, social, and cultural criticism, among other approaches. David Moltke-Hansen examines the political context in which the book was produced, comparing it in particular to the works of Erskine Caldwell and others with more explicit agendas than Agee, while Sarah E. Gardner explores Agee’s position as a southerner in the literary culture of 1930s Manhattan. Contrasting Agee’s text to the uncaptioned Evans photographs that open the book, Jeffrey Couchman discusses how the writer applied a “cinematic eye” to his descriptions of the sharecroppers’ homes and their possessions. In their essays, Hugh Davis, Brent Walker Cline, and David Madden link Agee with earlier writers such as Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Melville, while Michael Jacobs considers Agee as a forefather of the “New Journalism” championed by Tom Wolfe. Other contributors explore such disparate topics as Agee’s conception of irony, the conflict of art and nature in the book, and the author’s portrayal of space. Taken together, these artful elucidations of a notoriously difficult but brilliant work provide the most comprehensive and wide-ranging view of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to date.

Although name such as Daniel Boone, Black Hawk, and “Davy” Crockett are familiar to most Americans, the historical, political, and literary contexts that produced the mythical images of these figures are unfamiliar to most outside academia. In Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett in 1833,Michael A. Lofaro compiles, annotates, and analyzes three (auto)biographical writings published in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1833-The Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone; Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk; and The Life and Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee-to reveal how the portrayals of Boone, Black Hawk, and Crockett revised the idea of the “frontier hero.” By placing them together in dialogue through the scholarly reediting of their texts, Lofaro demonstrates that these works exemplify, typify, and epitomize masculinity, burgeoning capitalism, and Jacksonian democracy, probe beliefs in race and class, and provide nothing short of a deep dissection of the frontier mentality of the antebellum period. Additionally, the reception of these works influenced the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans understood and perceived manifest destiny, the removal of Native Americans from their homelands, to the west of the Mississippi River, and the waning concept of “American frontier.” With its great scope and insight, this publication creates connections among many academic disciplines, including colonial America, Jacksonian America, Native American studies, as well as literary and folklore studies.

The legendary Davy Crockett arose simultaneously with the emergence of the historical Crockett as a public figure, and once established, the man and the myth were forevermore entangled. The present work, his Life and Adventures (1833), ushered in a series of biographical and autobiographical books that thrust Crockett fully onto the national and international scene. This work, quickly retitled Sketches and Eccentricities, was the most outlandish. Its purported author, J. S. French, mixed two nineteenth-century genres of storytelling - the Humor of the Old Southwest and the sketch - all presented within a historical framework to create an early version of the King of the Wild Frontier. The Crockett encountered here is the marksman who can shoot an elk from 140 yards with his beloved rifle, Betsy, grin the bark off a tree knot, and choose bows and arrows as weapons when challenged to a duel by a fellow congressman. Within a year, Crockett disavowed this book, preferring his autobiography - Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee - but this rollicking story, often bouncing along from tall tale, hunting anecdote, faux moral tale, to humorous pratfall, became a major source for the later biographical writings and a later cultural industry that swept up newspapers, books, political propaganda, plays, and films - and almost every way in which a frontier figure could appear in popular culture. And, while Crockett's image was a source of entertainment and humor, it also pointed toward something far more serious: after his death at the Alamo it presented Americans with a fictional Frontier hero who progressively embodied their views on topics as varied as manliness, manifest destiny, and even white supremacy. However, the Crockett of Sketches - canny, adaptable, intelligent but not educated, hilarious - was above all a perfect reflection of the aspirations, interests, and beliefs of Jacksonian-era Americans.