John Marsh

"Impressive—Marsh successfully rewrites the founding moment of American Modernist poetry." ---Mark Van Wienen, Northern Illinois University"Cogently argued, instructive, and sensitive, Marsh’s revisionist reading opens new insights that will elicit lively comment and critical response." ---Douglas Wixson, University of Missouri–RollaBetween 1909 and 1922, the genre of poetry was remade. Literary scholars have long debated why modern American poetry emerged when and how it did. While earlier poetry had rhymed, scanned, and dealt with conventional subjects such as love and nature, modern poetry looked and sounded very different and considered new areas of experience. Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry argues that this change was partially the result of modern poets writing into their verse what other poetry had suppressed: the gritty realities of modern life, including the problems of the poor and working class. A closer look at the early works of the 20th century's best known poets (William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg) reveals the long-neglected role the labor problem—including sweatshops, strikes, unemployment, woman and child labor, and immigration---played in the formation of canonical modern American poetry. A revisionary history of literary modernism and exploration into how poets uniquely made the labor problem their own, this book will appeal to modernists in the fields of American and British literature as well as scholars in American studies and the growing field of working-class literature.

In Class Dismissed, John Marsh debunks a myth cherished by journalists, politicians, and economists: that growing poverty and inequality in the United States can be solved through education. Using sophisticated analysis combined with personal experience in the classroom, Marsh not only shows that education has little impact on poverty and inequality, but that our mistaken beliefs actively shape the way we structure our schools and what we teach in them. Rather than focus attention on the hierarchy of jobs and power--where most jobs require relatively little education, and the poor enjoy very little political power--money is funneled into educational endeavors that ultimately do nothing to challenge established social structures, and in fact reinforce them. And when educational programs prove ineffective at reducing inequality, the ones whom these programs were intended to help end up blaming themselves. Marsh's struggle to grasp the connection between education, poverty, and inequality is both powerful and poignant.

In 1974, the county of Westmorland disappeared from the map of the British Isles. This volume features more than 260 photographs of an area centred on the county town of Appleby. It intends to recall the vanished faces and places of the Eden Valley and bring to life the character of the county before it was planned out of existence.

A history of Keswick and the Central Lakes.

The town of Kendal has a long and varied history. Its market has been established for well over 800 years, the charter having been granted in 1189. This book features a host of old photographs, many hitherto unpublished, and compares them with modern views taken on the same scene today.

Illustrated with over 250 photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Images of Westmoreland recalls a constantly changing rural way of life in a county of paternalism and peaceful ways.

A history of Barrow-in-Furness