A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution

• ISBN13: 9780156028721
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American Sign Language is a rich and complex language. Recently declared as an official language and recognized by 48 states as a foreign language, more and more high school teachers across the country are teaching American Sign Language as an elective.

 

Learning American Sign Language: Levels I & II â€" Beginning &Intermediate is designed to prepare teachers to successfullyinteract with American Sign Language (ASL) users. Lessons are structured around language needed for common-life situations, and examples are presented in the form of dialogues coupled with grammar and vocabulary instruction. Information is also include! d about the culture of deaf people in the United States.

 

Learners will discover that the book:

• Contains lessons designed around the conversational language needed for common life situations.
• Illustrates hundreds of sentences and vocabulary with over 2,000 high quality colorized drawings that aid in study and memory.
• Contains over 100 grammar and cultural notes, 72 exercises, and charts of the American Manual Alphabet (Finger spelling) and ASL number system.
• Teaches the rules of ASL in a natural order that is predictable and compatible with everyday language of native users of American Sign Language.
• Incorporates information about the cultural lives of Deaf people in the United States.
• Is supported by a video demonstrating all the conversations and important structures in the text.

Order the Video!

Vid! eo to Accompany American Sign Language, 2/e
Order No. 0! -205-275 54-0

American Sign Language students will find themselves captivated and entertained by this state-of-the-art Video that presents all 72 dialogues and each key structure from the text in a clear and natural way. Four internationally known Deaf actors animate the dialogues bringing life to the illustrations in the text allowing students to preview and review instructional materials at home to enhance their classroom learning.

 

About the authors:

Tom Humphries is Associate Director of the Teacher Education Program and also teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently coordinating a program to train teachers of deaf children using a bilingual approach. Prior to this he taught at Gallaudet University in the Department of English for several years and later served as an Associate Dean for the San Di! ego Community College District where he coordinated the development of an ASL program and an interpreter-training program. He holds a Ph.D. in Cross Cultural Communication and Language Learning. Dr. Humphries is co-author with Carol Padden of Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture and several other books and articles related to ASL and the culture of Deaf people.

Carol Padden is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego where she teachers courses on language, culture and media. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. Her recent research includes studies of reading development in young deaf children and she has written extensively about the cultural lives of Deaf people in the United States. She received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, in addition to numerous other awards and grants for her work! . In addition to the books she has co-authored with Tom Humphr! ies, she has published several other books and articles on American Sign Language structure. Humphries & Padden (Learning American Sign Language, 2e).

This collection of remarkable quotations is a gem of discerning wisdom, lovely thoughts, and astute wit gleaned from the words of African-American Writers, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Wells Brown, Octavia E. Butler, Stokely Carmichael, Stephen L. Carter, Charles W. Chesnutt, Eldridge Cleaver, Lucille Clifton, Anna J. Cooper, Bill Cosby, Stanley Crouch, Countee Cullen, Edwidge Danticat, Angela Davis, Sarah L. Delany, Frederick Douglass, Rita Dove, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, Mari Evans, Ernest Gaines, Marcus Garvey, Nikki Giovanni, Dick Gregory, Angelina Weld Grimke, Alex Haley, Virginia Hamilton, Henry Hampton, Lorraine Hansberry, Billie Holiday, Bell Hooks, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet ! Jacobs, Joseph Jarman, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Elizabeth Keckley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Paule Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, Claude McKay, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Thylias Moss, Gloria Naylor, Ann Plato, Ishmael Reed, Al Roker, Thomas Sowell, Anne Spencer, Jean Toomer, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Henry Van Dyke, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Booker T. Washington, Cornel West, Dorothy West, August Wilson, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby.


This collection of remarkable quotations is a gem of discerning wisdom, lovely thoughts, and astute wit gleaned from the words of African-American Writers, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Mary McLeod Bethune, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Wells Brown, Octavia E. Butler, Stokely Carmichael, Stephen L. Carter, Charles W. Chesnutt, Eldridge Cleaver, Lucille Clifton, Anna J. Cooper, Bill Cosb! y, Stanley Crouch, Countee Cullen, Edwidge Danticat, Angela Da! vis, Sar ah L. Delany, Frederick Douglass, Rita Dove, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, Mari Evans, Ernest Gaines, Marcus Garvey, Nikki Giovanni, Dick Gregory, Angelina Weld Grimke, Alex Haley, Virginia Hamilton, Henry Hampton, Lorraine Hansberry, Billie Holiday, Bell Hooks, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Joseph Jarman, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Elizabeth Keckley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Paule Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, Claude McKay, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Thylias Moss, Gloria Naylor, Ann Plato, Ishmael Reed, Al Roker, Thomas Sowell, Anne Spencer, Jean Toomer, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Henry Van Dyke, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Booker T. Washington, Cornel West, Dorothy West, August Wilson, Richard Wright, and Frank Yerby.

Now available in two-volume splits as well as the combined version.

Through! Women’s Eyes: An American History was the first textbook in U.S. women’s history to present an inclusive narrative within the context of the central developments of U.S. history and to integrate written and visual primary sources into each chapter. The result, according to authors Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, was to "reveal the relationship between secondary and original sources, to show history as a dynamic process of investigation and interpretation rather than a set body of facts and figures." The enormous success of the first edition confirms that the field of U.S. women’s history was ready for a ground-breaking textbook that focuses on women from a broad range of ethnicities, classes, religions, and regions and that helps students understand how women and women’s history are an integral part of U.S. history.

 

Click here to read about packaging with the Women and Social Movements Database!

A definitive collection of the very best short stories by con! temporar y American masters

Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, "the living master of the short story" (Buffalo News), and Christopher R. Beha, this volume provides an important overview of the contemporary short story and a selection of the very best that American short fiction has to offer.

"How ironic," Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, "that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies." Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? "Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?! "
In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many "different, unexpected" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," a story that reveals a darker side to his humor ("That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy"). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," of which Oates says, "Only Melv! ille could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowin! g and dr eamlike allegorical fiction." From Flannery O'Connor we find "A Late Encounter With the Enemy," and from John Cheever, "The Death of Justina," one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.
This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern w! riter.

A rich narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the men who shaped its political future

 

Though the American Revolution is widely recognized as our nation's founding story, the years immediately following the warâ€"when our government was a disaster and the country was in a terrible crisisâ€"were in fact the most crucial in establishing the country's independence. The group of men who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 had no idea what kind of history their meeting would make. But all their ideas, arguments, and compromisesâ€"from the creation of the Constitution itself, article by article, to the insistence that it remain a living, evolving documentâ€"laid the foundation for a government that has surpassed the founders' greatest hopes. Revisiting all the original historical documents of the period and drawing from her deep knowledge of eighteenth-century politics, Carol Berkin opens up the hearts and minds of A! merica's founders, revealing the issues they faced, the times ! they liv ed in, and their humble expectations of success."The majority of historians seem to suggest that the founders knew just what to do--and did it, creating a government that would endure for centuries," writes CUNY historian Carol Berkin in the introduction to A Brilliant Solution. Sitting atop the pedestals we've placed them on, these figures would be "amused" by such notions, she says, because in reality the Constitutional Convention was gripped by "a near-paranoid fear of conspiracies" and might easily have succumbed to "a collective anxiety" over its daunting task. The story of the birth of the U.S. Constitution has been told many times, perhaps best by Catherine Drinker Bowen in Miracle at Philadelphia. Berkin's rendition of these well-known events is clear and concise. It does a bit more telling than showing, but this seems to be in the service of brevity--the main text is only about 200 pages. (Another 100 pages of useful appendices follow, including the fu! ll texts of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, plus short biographies of all the convention delegates.) Berkin is an opinionated narrator, unafraid, for instance, to call Maryland's Luther Martin "determinedly uncouth." She also points out that American government has evolved in ways that would make the founders cringe: they believed the presidency would be a ceremonial office (rather than the locus of the nation's political power) and that political parties were bad (when, in fact, they have served democracy well). Readers who want a sure-footed introduction to America's founding would do well to start here. --John J. Miller

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