January 2008 Archives

Thanks to Jerry Hauser for alerting us that the Library of Congress has uploaded over 3000 of the historic photographs in its collection to Flickr.

A large segment of the uploaded collection shows color photographs taken by the FSA and OWI in the 1930s and 1940s.

Shown here is a photograph by Marion Post Wolcott, titled Georgia Oat Field? from about 1940.

Each photo on the Flickr site includes detailed information about the image as well as links to the Library of Congress and its enormous collections of photographs.



This is David Bransby, Woman Aircraft Worker (1942).

Ann George and Jack Selzer, Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2007). From the series on Rhetoric / Communication.

From the Press catalog:

Kenneth Burke once remarked that he was "not a joiner of societies." Yet during the 1930s he affiliated himself with a range of intellectual communities—including the leftists in the League of American Writers; the activist contributors to Partisan Review, the New Masses, the Nation, and the New Republic; and the southern Agrarians and New Critics, as well as various other poets and pragmatists and thinkers. Ann George and Jack Selzer underscore the importance of these relations to Burke's development and suggest that his major writing projects of the 1930s fundamentally emerged from interactions with members of these various groups, such as writers Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom; poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams; cutural commentators Malcolm Cowley, Mike Gold, and Edmund Wilson; and philosophers Sidney Hook and John Dewey.

George and Selzer offer a comprehensive account of four Burke texts—Auscultation, Creation, and Revision (1932), Permanence and Change (1935), Attitudes toward History (1937), and The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)—and contend that the work from this decade is at least as compelling as his later, more widely known books. The authors examine extensive and largely unexplored archives of Burke's papers, study the magazines in which Burke's works appeared, and, most important, read him carefully in relation to the ideological conversations of the time. Offering a rich context for understanding Burke's writings from one of his most prolific periods, George and Selzer argue that significant Burkean concepts—such as identification and dramatism—found in later texts ought to be understood as rooted in his 1930s commitments.

$39.96 at Amazon.com

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a national day of service.

Richard Jensen's Reagan at Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg has just been published by Texas A&M University Press in its Library of Presidential Rhetoric series.

The paperback version is available at Amazon.com for under $15.