LSU Faculty Published Books

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  Sharia and the Making of the Modern Egyptian: Islamic Law and Custom in the Courts of Ottoman Cairo

  2014
  Reem A. Meshal

  In this book, the author examines sijills, the official documents of the Ottoman Islamic courts, to understand how sharia law, society and the early-modern economy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Cairo related to the practice of custom in determining rulings. In the sixteenth century, a new legal and cultural orthodoxy fostered the development of an early-modern Islam that broke new ground, giving rise to a new concept of the citizen and his role. Contrary to the prevailing scholarly view, this work adopts the position that local custom began to diminish and decline as a source of authority.
  These issues resonate today, several centuries later, in the continuing discussions of individual rights in relation to Islamic law.

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  Domestic Manners of the Americans

  2014
  Elsie B. Michie

  "it appeared to me that the greatest and best feelings of the human heart were paralyzed by the relative positions of slave and owner"In Domestic Manners of the Americans Frances Trollope recounts her travels through America between 1827 and 1830, describing her voyage up the Mississippi from New Orleans, a two-year stay in Cincinnati, and a subsequent tour of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. A transatlanticbest-seller on publication in 1832, its forthright criticisms of American manners encompassed spitting, religious extremism, ladies' dress, the relentless pursuit of money, and the unequal treatment of women, slaves, and Native Americans. Witty, satiric, and hugely entertaining, Trollope also had aserious purpose in warning her compatriots of the consequences of democratic freedoms at a time of great social change in England. Deploring slavery and the hypocrisy that sanctioned it, she fuelled abolitionist debate on both sides of the Atlantic and so impressed Mark Twain that fifty years later he considered her book to be the most accurate portrait of American life in the nineteenth century.

  For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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  Oil and Water: Media Lessons from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

  2014
  Andrea Miller

  Along the Gulf Coast, history is often referenced as pre-Katrina or post-Katrina. However, the natural disaster that appalled the world in 2005 has been joined by another catastrophe, this one man-made--the greatest environmental and maritime accident of all time, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. In less than five years, the Gulf Coast has experienced two colossal disasters, very different, yet very similar. And these two equally complex crises have resulted in a steep learning curve for all, but especially the journalists covering these enduring stories.

  In "Oil and Water," the authors explore the media-fed experiences, the visuals and narratives associated with both disasters. Katrina journalists have reluctantly had to transform into oil spill journalists. The authors look at this process of growth from the viewpoints not only of the journalists, but also of the public and of the scientific community. Through a detailed analysis of the journalists' content, the authors tackle significant questions. This book assesses the quality of journalism and the effects that quality may have on the public. The authors argue that regardless of the type of journalism involved or the immensity of the events covered, successful reportage still depends on the fundamentals of journalism and the importance of following these tenets consistently in a crisis atmosphere, especially when confronted with enduring crises that are just years apart.

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  New Directions in Hispanic Linguistics

  2014
  Rafael Orozco

  This volume addresses some lacunae in Hispanic linguistic research by focusing on new scholarly directions, exploring understudied topics as well as speech communities, and presenting new takes on relevant linguistic and sociocultural issues. This publication answers questions which have emerged as a result of the rapid increase in Hispanic linguistic research since the latter part of the twentieth century or that have remained open in spite of it. With the rapid growth of Hispanic Linguistics during the 21st century, the topics included in this volume are representative of the breadth, vitality, and interdisciplinarity of contemporary linguistic scholarship. They also reflect that linguistics, in general, has become more methodologically sophisticated. This book is comprised of twelve chapters divided into three parts. Part I addresses language ideology and language contact issues that are embedded in important sociolinguistic and cultural topics chronologically spanning from the 16th century to the present. Although these issues take place in Spain, the United States, Turkey and Ecuador, they pertain ideologically to all corners of the Hispanic World and beyond. Part II is devoted to pragmatics and language variation with topics that transport us to Colombia, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. The study of politeness strategies shows how Spanish speakers reduce social distance between interlocutors as they make conversation a pleasant and cooperative meeting place. Concurrently, sociolinguistic innovations reveal interesting parallels among several speech communities. Part III explores linguistic variation as it relates to theoretical, structural, and instructional issues. Although these topics are analyzed based mainly on linguistic usage in Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, and Spain - as with the rest of this volume - their relevance reaches far beyond the confines of the Hispanic World. This book is unique in multiple ways and complements a number of existing publications.

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  Peace and Pedagogy Primer

  2014
  Molly Quinn

  What makes for peace as lived? What images of peace issue from examination of daily experience? What can be gleaned from reflection upon the topic for the meanings and makings of peace in our world? Considering that to work for peace, we must begin with ourselves and with our children, Molly Quinn addresses these questions through her own life and work. She does so with those who would, and do, teach children, and with the children they teach. The text is rooted in inquiry with aspiring elementary teachers through a university social studies course in New York City, where East Harlem first-graders engage peace curriculum, and in the South Bronx, where fourth-graders attempt to understand and respond to neighborhood violence. The author seeks to elucidate educational possibilities for dreaming peace anew, and passionately living and laboring, singularly and together, for its realization among us.
  

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  The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives

  2014
  A. Ravi P. Rau

  The beauty of physics lies in its coherence in terms of a few fundamental concepts and principles. Even physicists have occasion to marvel at the overarching reach of basic principles and their ability to account for features stretching from the microscopic sub-atomic world to the cosmologicalexpanses of the Universe. While mathematics is its natural language, physics is mostly about patterns, connections, and relations between objects and phenomena, and it is this aspect that is emphasized in this book.Since science tries to connect phenomena that at first sight appear widely different, while boiling them down to a small set of essential principles and laws, metaphor and analogy pervade our subject. Consider the pendulum, its swing from one extreme to the other often invoked in social or economic contexts. In molecular vibrations, such as in the CO2 molecule, the quantum motions of electrons and nuclei are metaphorically the pendulums. In electromagnetic radiation, including the visible light we observe, there are not even any concrete material particles, only electric and magnetic fields executing simple harmonic motion. But, to a physicist, they are all "just a pendulum".The selection of topics reflects the author's own four-decade career in research physics and his resultant perspective on the subject. While aimed primarily at physicists, including junior students, this book also addresses other readers who are willing to think with symbols and simple algebra in understanding the physical world around us. Each chapter, on themes such as dimensions, transformations, symmetries, or maps, begins with simple examples accessible to all while connecting them later to more sophisticated realizations in more advanced topics of physics.
  

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  Undergraduate Instrumental Analysis

  2014
  James W. Robinson

  Crucial to research in molecular biology, medicine, geology, food science, materials science, and many other fields, analytical instrumentation is used by many scientists and engineers who are not chemists. Undergraduate Instrumental Analysis, Seventh Edition provides users of analytical instrumentation with an understanding of these instruments, covering all major fields of modern instrumentation. Following the tradition of earlier editions, this text is designed for teaching undergraduates and those with no analytical chemistry background how contemporary analytical instrumentation works, as well as its uses and limitations.
  
  Each chapter provides a discussion of the fundamental principles underlying the techniques, descriptions of the instrumentation, and numerous applications. The chapters also contain updated bibliographies and problems, and most have suggested experiments appropriate to the techniques. This completely revised and updated edition covers subjects in more detail, such as a completely revised x-ray chapter, expanded coverage of electroanalytical techniques, and expansion of chromatography and mass spectrometry topics to reflect the predominance of these instruments in laboratories. This includes state-of-the-art sample introduction and mass analyzers, and the latest developments in UPLC and hyphenated techniques. The book also contains new graphics and addresses several new topics:

  Ion mobility spectrometry Time domain NMR (relaxometry) Electron spin resonance spectroscopy (ESR, EPR) Forensic science and bioanalytical applications Microcalorimetry and optical thermal instruments Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)

  This text uniquely combines instrumental analysis with organic spectral interpretation (IR, NMR, and MS). It provides detailed coverage of sampling, sample handling, sample storage, and sample preparation. In addition, the authors have included many instrument manufacturers' websites, which contain extensive resources.

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  Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age

  2014
  Susan Elizabeth Ryan

  A historical and critical view of wearable technologies that considers them as acts of communication in a social landscape.

  Wearable technology--whether a Walkman in the 1970s, an LED-illuminated gown in the 2000s, or Google Glass today--makes the wearer visible in a technologically literate environment. Twenty years ago, wearable technology reflected cultural preoccupations with cyborgs and augmented reality; today, it reflects our newer needs for mobility and connectedness. In this book, Susan Elizabeth Ryan examines wearable technology as an evolving set of ideas and their contexts, always with an eye on actual wearables--on clothing, dress, and the histories and social relations they represent. She proposes that wearable technologies comprise a pragmatics of enhanced communication in a social landscape. "Garments of paradise" is a reference to wearable technology's promise of physical and mental enhancements.

  Ryan defines "dress acts"--hybrid acts of communication in which the behavior of wearing is bound up with the materiality of garments and devices--and focuses on the use of digital technology as part of such systems of meaning. She connects the ideas of dress and technology historically, in terms of major discourses of art and culture, and in terms of mass media and media culture, citing such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Manuel De Landa, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. She examines the early history of wearable technology as it emerged in research labs; the impact of ubiquitous and affective approaches to computing; interaction design and the idea of wearable technology as a language of embodied technology; and the influence of open source ideology. Finally, she considers the future, as wearing technologies becomes an increasingly naturalized aspect of our social behavior.

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  The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

  2014
  Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean

  Featuring hundreds of first-hand writings from the American Civil War, this final installment of the highly acclaimed four-volume series traces events from March 1864 to June 1865
  
  After 150 years the Civil War still holds a central place in American history and self-understanding. It is our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad , but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom." The Civil War- The Final Year brings together letters, diary entries, speeches, articles, messages, and poems to provide an incomparable literary portrait of a nation at war with itself, while illuminating the military and political events that brought the Union to final victory and slavery and secession to their ultimate destruction.
  
  The final volume of this highly acclaimed four-volume series begins with the controversial Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid on Richmond in March 1864 and ends with the proclamation of emancipation in Texas in June 1865. It collects 160 pieces by more than one hundred participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Herman Melville, as well as Union officers Charles Harvey Brewster, James A. Connolly, and Stephen Minot Weld; Confederate diarists Catherine Edmondston, Kate Stone, and Judith W. McGuire; freed slaves Spottswood Rice, Garrison Frazier, and Frances Johnson; and Confederate soldiers J.F.J. Caldwell, Samuel T. Foster, and William Pegram. The selections include vivid and haunting firsthand accounts of battles and campaigns-the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, the Crater, Franklin, and Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas-as well as of the Fort Pillow massacre; the struggle to survive inside Andersonville prison; the burning of Columbia and Richmond; the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; the surrender at Appomattox; and Lincoln's assassination.
  
  The Civil War- The Final Year includes an introduction, headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color endpaper maps, and an index.

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  African American Identity: Racial and Cultural Dimensions of the Black Experience

  2014
  Jas M. Sullivan

  Jas M. Sullivan and Ashraf M. Esmail's African American Identity: Racial and Cultural Dimensions of the Black Experience is a collection which makes use of multiple perspectives across the social sciences to address complex issues of race and identity. The contributors tackle questions about what African American racial identity means, how we may go about quantifying it, what the factors are in shaping identity development, and what effects racial identity has on psychological, political, educational, and health-related behavior.
  
  African American Identity aims to continue the conversation, rather than provide a beginning or an end. It is an in-depth study which uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods to explore the relationship between racial identity and psychological well-being, effects on parents and children, physical health, and related educational behavior. From these vantage points, Sullivan and Esmail provide a unique opportunity to further our understanding, extend our knowledge, and continue the debate.

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  Dispensations: Stories

  2014
  Randolph Thomas

  Fiction. Indiefab Book of the Year 2014 finalist, DISPENSATIONS pitches teens and adults with drug and alcohol problems against aging and ill- prepared parents. Thomas's characters test the boundaries of family responsibility. Blind to each other's needs and feelings, they are haunted by visions of what their lives might have been and might still be.
  
  "Without the slightest hint of sentimentality [Thomas evokes] a great, unspoken compassion for all who are broken, lost, or forgotten."--James Wilcox
  

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  Handbook of Damage Mechanics: Nano to Macro Scale for Materials and Structures

  2014
  George Z. Voyiadjis

  This authoritative reference provides comprehensive coverage of the topics of damage and healing mechanics. Computational modeling of constitutive equations is provided as well as solved examples in engineering applications. A wide range of materials that engineers may encounter are covered, including metals, composites, ceramics, polymers, biomaterials, and nanomaterials. The internationally recognized team of contributors employ a consistent and systematic approach, offering readers a user-friendly reference that is ideal for frequent consultation.

  Handbook of Damage Mechanics: Nano to Macro Scale for Materials and Structures is ideal for graduate students and faculty, researchers, and professionals in the fields of Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Materials Science, and Engineering Mechanics.

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  Sediment Dynamics from the Summit to the Sea: Proceedings of ICCE2014, New Orleans, USA, December 2014

  2014
  Yi-Jun Xu

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  Workplace Culture in Academic Libraries: The Early 21st Century

  2013
  Kelly Blessinger and Paul Hrycaj

  Workplace culture refers to conditions that collectively influence the work atmosphere. These can include policies, norms, and unwritten standards for behavior. This book focuses on various aspects of workplace culture in academic libraries from the practitioners' viewpoint, as opposed to that of the theoretician. The book asks the following questions: What conditions contribute to an excellent academic library work environment? What helps to make a particular academic library a great place to work? Articles focus on actual programs while placing the discussion in a scholarly context. The book is structured into 14 chapters, covering various aspects of workplace culture in academic libraries, including: overview of workplace culture, assessment, recruitment, acclimation for new librarians, workforce diversity, physical environment, staff morale, interaction between departments, tenure track/academic culture, mentoring/coaching, generational differences, motivation/incentives, complaints/conflict management, and organizational transparency.
  

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  African American Foreign Correspondents: A History

  2013
  Jinx Coleman Broussard

  Though African Americans have served as foreign reporters for almost two centuries, their work remains virtually unstudied. In this seminal volume, Jinx Coleman Broussard traces the history of black participation in international newsgathering. Beginning in the mid-1800s with Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd Cary?the first black woman to edit a North American newspaper?African American Foreign Correspondents highlights the remarkable individuals and publications that brought an often-overlooked black perspective to world reporting. Broussard focuses on correspondents from 1840 to modern day, including reporters such as William Worthy Jr., who helped transform the role of modern foreign correspondence by gaining the right for journalists to report from anywhere in the world unimpeded; Leon Dash, a professor of journalism and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who reported from Africa for the Washington Post in the 1970s and 1980s; and Howard French, a professor in Columbia University's journalism school and a globetrotting foreign correspondent.
  
  African American Foreign Correspondents provides insight into how and why African Americans reported the experiences of blacks worldwide. In many ways, black correspondents upheld a tradition of filing objective stories on world events, yet some African American journalists in the mainstream media, like their predecessors in the black press, had a different mission and perspective. They adhered primarily to a civil rights agenda, grounded in advocacy, protest, and pride. Accordingly, some of these correspondents?not all of them professional journalists?worked to spur social reform in the United States and force policy changes that would eliminate oppression globally. Giving visibility and voice to the marginalized, correspondents championed an image of people of color that combatted the negative and racially construed stereotypes common in the American media.
  
  By examining how and why blacks reported information and perspectives from abroad, African American Foreign Correspondents contributes to a broader conversation about navigating racial, societal, and global problems, some of which we continue to contend with today.

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  Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud

  2013
  Andrew Burstein

  Before Sigmund Freud made dreams the cornerstone of understanding an individual's inner life, Americans shared their dreams unabashedly with one another through letters, diaries, and casual conversation. In this innovative new book, highly regarded historian Andrew Burstein goes back for the first time to discover what we can learn about the lives and emotions of Americans, from colonial times to the beginning of the modern age. Through a thorough study of dreams recorded by iconic figures such as John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, as well as everyday men and women, we glimpse the emotions of earlier generations and understand how those feelings shaped their lives and careers, and thus gain a fuller multi-dimensional sense of our own past. No one has ever looked at the building blocks of the American identity in this way, and Burstein reveals important clues and landmarks that show the origins of the ideas and values that remain central to who we are today.
  

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  Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Counselor's Guide to Prevention and Treatment

  2013
  Laura H. Choate

  Recent years in North America have seen a rapid development in the area of crime analysis and mapping using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.
  In 1996, the US National Institute of Justice (NIJ) established the crime mapping research center (CMRC), to promote research, evaluation, development, and dissemination of GIS technology. The long-term goal is to develop a fully functional Crime Analysis System (CAS) with standardized data collection and reporting mechanisms, tools for spatial and temporal analysis, visualization of data and much more. Among the drawbacks of current crime analysis systems is their lack of tools for spatial analysis.
  For this reason, spatial analysts should research which current analysis techniques (or variations of such techniques) that have been already successfully applied to other areas (e.g., epidemiology, location-allocation analysis, etc.) can also be employed to the spatial analysis of crime data. This book presents a few of those cases.
  

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  The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

  2013
  Gibril Raschid Cole

  Sierra Leone's unique history, especially in the development and consolidation of British colonialism in West Africa, has made it an important site of historical investigation since the 1950s. Much of the scholarship produced in subsequent decades has focused on the "Krio," descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, North America, England, and other areas of West Africa, who settled Freetown, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Two foundational and enduring assumptions have characterized this historiography: the concepts of "Creole" and "Krio" are virtually interchangeable; and the community to which these terms apply was and is largely self-contained, Christian, and English in worldview.
  In a bold challenge to the long-standing historiography on Sierra Leone, Gibril Cole carefully disentangles "Krio" from "Creole," revealing the diversity and permeability of a community that included many who, in fact, were not Christian. In Cole's persuasive and engaging analysis, Muslim settlers take center stage as critical actors in the dynamic growth of Freetown's Krio society.
  The Krio of West Africa represents the results of some of the first sustained historical research to be undertaken since the end of Sierra Leone's brutal civil war. It speaks clearly and powerfully not only to those with an interest in the specific history of Sierra Leone, but to histories of Islam in West Africa, the British empire, the Black Atlantic, the Yoruban diaspora, and the slave trade and its aftermath.

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  The Sensational Centuries: Essays on the Enhancement of Sense Experience in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries

  2013
  Kevin Lee Cope

  The long period of “enlightenment” that extended from the rise of organised science to the emergence of Gilbert and Sullivan operas lauded reason and commended reflection but depended on sensation. A remarkably broad range of intellectual and cultural activity, whether the critical philosophy of John Locke or the rapturous poetry of John Keats, genuflected to the tame abstraction “experience” but gave full credit to raw sense for the sustaining of art, writing, and thought.
  
  Universally invoked as everything from evidence to inspiration, “sensation” became the watchword of modernisation.The Sensational Centuriesoffers a portfolio of essays on the twists, turns, and metamorphoses of the idea and theme of “sensation” during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, paying special attention to the evolution of sensationalism as an artistic and philosophical movement and examining the many curious and revealing cultural productions resulting from this intense interest in the varieties of sense.
  
  Three generous sections include essays examining the literary and artistic genres arising from the cult of sense; the exploration of venues in which extreme, unusual, or offbeat sensations could occur; and the actions that result from the pursuit of sensational experience and the cultivation of a sensationalist art. The volume thus shows how the conversation about sensationalism continued loudly and volubly across diverse traditions and without regard for confining literary, cultural, religious, and artistic traditions—thereby defining an era.

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  Integrating Play Techniques in Comprehensive School Counseling Programs

  2013
  Jennifer R. Curry

  Play therapy interventions are critical elements of providing responsive services within the context of comprehensive school counseling programs. However, many school counselors are not trained in the use of play therapy techniques during their graduate training programs as Play Therapy is not a required course based on standards set by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Education Programs (CACREP) (2009). Indeed, while there are over 400 school counseling programs in the U. S., there are only 11 certified play therapy training centers. Even more critically, school counselors may not know which play therapy approaches and interventions are evidence-based for specific childhood concerns (e. g., selective mutism, social skills deficits, parent deployment). Play therapy is a structured, theoretically-based approach to counseling that builds on the normal communicative and learning processes of children as they may not have developed the complexities of language to accurately express their concerns (Carmichael, 2006; Gil, 1991; Landreth, 2002; OConnor & Schaefer, 1983). Further, children who are most in crisis may be the ones who need play concepts integrated in counseling; yet, many school counselors are unprepared to provide these vital resources. The focus of this book is on various play techniques and the application of various play therapy theories (i. e., Child Centered Play Therapy, Solution Focused Play Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Play Therapy) within comprehensive school counseling programs, addressing various childhood concerns, prevention and intervention. Each chapter offers vignettes, a literature review of a specific childhood concern (e.g., homelessness, separation anxiety), pragmatic interventions for the school environment, and a case study to demonstrate application of techniques.
  

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  Embedded Librarianship: What Every Academic Librarian Should Know

  2013
  Alice L. Daugherty and Michael F. Russo

  In the ongoing evolution of the academic library, embedded librarianship has become an important topic of debate across levels and departments. This book delves into the concept, examining everything from theory to best practices. Is the embedded librarian an equal partner in the course, or is the librarian perceived as a "value-added" extra? What is the place of technology in this effort? Is there a line librarians should not cross? Taking into account both theory and practice to discuss multiple facets of the subject, Embedded Librarianship: What Every Academic Librarian Should Know thoroughly examines these questions and more from the perspectives of experienced embedded librarian contributors who have worked in higher education settings. The chapters illuminate the benefits and challenges of embedding, explain the planning required to set up an embedded course, identify the different forms of embedding, and consider information literacy instruction in various contexts. Readers who will benefit from this work include not only academic librarians but any professor who wants their students to be able to do better research in their fields.

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  Gulf of Mexico: Origin, Waters, and Biota, Volume 4: Ecosystem-Based Management

  2013
  John W. Day

  The fourth volume in the Harte Research Institute's landmark scientific series on the Gulf of Mexico provides a comprehensive study of ecosystem-based management, analyzing key coastal ecosystems in eleven Gulf Coast states from Florida to Quintana Roo and presenting case studies in which this integrated approach was tested in both the US and in Mexico. Two overview chapters cover related information on Cuba and on coastal zone management in Mexico. The comprehensive data on management policies and practices in this volume give researchers, policy makers, and other concerned parties the most up-to-date information available, supporting and informing initiatives to sustain healthy ecosystems so that they can, in turn, sustain human social and economic systems in this important transnational region. Combined with the second volume in this series, which examines the coastal and ocean-based economy of the Gulf region, "Ecosystem-Based Management" provides pivotal empirical information on how human activity can be managed in an environmentally sustainable way. This important research points the way to better stewardship of the Gulf's valuable natural resources, ensuring their availability for future generations.

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  Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts

  2013
  Frank A. de Caro

  Folklore Recycled starts from the proposition that folklore--usually thought of in its historical social context as ""oral tradition""--is easily appropriated and recycled into other contexts. That is, writers may use folklore in their fiction or poetry, taking plots, as an example, from a folktale. Visual artists may concentrate on depicting folk figures or events, like a ritual or a ceremony. Tourism officials may promote a place through advertising its traditional ways. Folklore may play a role in intellectual conceptualizations, as when nationalists use folklore to promote symbolic unity.
  
  Folklore Recycled discusses the larger issue of folklore being recycled into non-folk contexts, and proceeds to look at a number of instances of repurposing. Colson Whitehead's novel John Henry Days is a literary text that recycles folklore but does so in a manner which examines a number of other uses of the American folk figure John Henry. The nineteenth-century members of the Louisiana branch of the American Folklore Society and the author Lyle Saxon in the twentieth century used African American folklore to establish personal connections to the world of the southern plantation and buttress their own social status. The writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote about folklore to strengthen his insider credentials wherever he lived. Photographers in Louisiana leaned on folklife to solidify local identity and to promote government programs and industry. Promoters of ""unorthodox"" theories about history have used folklore as historical document. Americans in Mexico took an interest in folklore for acculturation, for tourism promotion, for interior decoration, and for political ends. All of the examples throughout the book demonstrate the durability and continued relevance of folklore in every context it appears.

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  Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative

  2013
  Frank A. de Caro

  In Stories of Our Lives Frank de Caro demonstrates the value of personal narratives in enlightening our lives and our world. We all live with legends, family sagas, and anecdotes that shape our selves and give meaning to our recollections. Featuring an array of colorful stories from de Caro's personal life and years of field research as a folklorist, the book is part memoir and part exploration of how the stories we tell, listen to, and learn play an integral role in shaping our sense of self. De Caro's narrative includes stories within the story: among them a near-mythic capture of his golden-haired grandmother by Plains Indians, a quintessential Italian rags-to-riches grandfather, and his own experiences growing up in culturally rich 1950s New York City, living in India amid the fading glories of a former princely state, conducting field research on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico, and coming home to a battered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Stories of Our Lives shows that our lives are interesting, and that the stories we tell--however particular to our own circumstances or trivial they may seem to others--reveal something about ourselves, our societies, our cultures, and our larger human existence.

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  Methods in Biogeochemistry of Wetlands

  2013
  R. D. DeLaune

  Wetlands occur at the interface of upland and aquatic ecosystems, making them unique environments that are vital to ecosystem health. But wetlands are also challenging to assess and understand. Wetland researchers have developed specialized analytical methods and sampling techniques that are now assembled for the first time in one volume. More than 100 experts provide key methods for sampling, quantifying, and characterizing wetlands, including wetland soils, plant communities and processes, nutrients, greenhouse gas fluxes,redox-active elements, toxins, transport processes, wetland water budgets,and more.