A year in Paris...Since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision - and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of... Light. "Dreaming in French" tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women. All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn't have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program - in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence. Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration-to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem "too French." Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence-to be grappled with, explored, and transcended-the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with the burgeoning Algerian independence movement. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied. Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons, spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year-and a magical city-can change a whole life.

An eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.   After... miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.

Since September 2011, the Occupy movement has captured the world's imagination. The media has been flooded with accounts of demonstrations, descriptions... of the encampments, interviews with Occupiers, and discussions of Occupy's merits, political and otherwise. But what do its participants have to say?Dreaming in Public gathers together dispatches, essays, blog posts, and images from within the movement aimed at influencing its development and addressing those not yet involved. Produced by participant journalists, political analysts, writers, polemicists, photographers, organizers, and activists, these documents capture the vibrant, contentious, illuminating, and inventive exchange of Occupy.Work from contributors such as Naomi Klein and Harsha Walia complement public declarations from the movement, images, and graphics. Some pieces explore the rites and rituals of the movement, others its aims and overall structure. Yet others take up the role differences of race and gender play in a movement that claims to represent the 99%, and the complicated business of maintaining urban encampments. Many consider the challenge participatory democracy poses to conventional ideas of what politics is or should be.The materials in this collection attest not only to the extraordinary political energy that has already come out of Occupy, but to the implications of the movement for the future.Amy Schrager Lang is professor of English and humanities at Syracuse University and author of a number of books.Daniel Lang/Levitsky is an artist, theater producer, writer, and founding member of the Direct Action Network and Jews Against the Occupation.

Jan Willis is not Baptist or Buddhist. She is simply both. Dreaming Me is the story of her life, from growing up a Baptist in the segregated South,... dealing with racism in an Ivy League college, and becoming involved with the Black Panther Party to traveling to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. It was upon meeting the great teacher Lama Yeshe that she found a way to understand both herself and the complicated world around her, a way to find peace. Willis went on to become a professor of religion at Wesleyan and is also an internationally recognized educator and innovator. Dreaming Me is the inspiring story of her spiritual journey of transformation.

Charlotte Smith had already had more than her fair share of fabulous dresses and adventures. She lived life to the fullest in London, Paris and New York... before falling in love with Australia and making it her home. Then she discovered that she had inherited a priceless vintage clothing collection from her American Quaker godmother, Doris Darnell. When the boxes started arriving, they were filled with more than three thousand pieces dating from 1790 to 1995, from Dior and Chanel originals to a dainty pioneer dress. But when she unearthed her godmother’s book of stories, the true value of what she had been given hit home. This wasn’t merely a collection of beautiful things; it was a collection of lives. Women’s lives. Tiny snapshots of our joys and disappointments, our entrances and exits, triumphant and tragic. This is a book for any woman who knows a dress can hold a lifetime of memories. Charlotte Smith is Curator of The Fashion and Textile Gallery in Sydney which is also home to The Darnell Collection, the 5000 piece vintage collection Charlotte inherited from her godmother, Doris Darnell.  Born in Hong Kong and raised in the United States, Charlotte has a degree from Hollins College in Art History and has lived and worked in America, England, and France for Impressionist art dealers.  She moved to Australia in 1998 and opened a shop selling French country antiques.  Charlotte has one daughter.Grant Cowan has worked as an illustrator on magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and Red magazine.  He studied fashion design and lived in London before moving to Australia to teach fashion illustration .  Grant is a freelance fashion illustrator and works  with fashion schools  in Sydney.

From the late nineteenth century through World War II, popular culture portrayed the American South as a region ensconced in its antebellum past, draped... in moonlight and magnolias, and represented by such southern icons as the mammy, the belle, the chivalrous planter, white-columned mansions, and even bolls of cotton. In Dreaming of Dixie, Karen Cox shows that the chief purveyors of this constructed nostalgia for the Old South were outsiders of the region, especially advertising agencies, musicians, publishers, radio personalities, writers, and filmmakers playing to consumers' anxiety about modernity by marketing the South as a region still dedicated to America's pastoral traditions. Cox examines how southerners themselves embraced the imaginary romance of the region's past, particularly in the tourist trade as southern states and cities sought to capitalize on popular perceptions by showcasing their Old South heritage. Only when television emerged as the most influential medium of popular culture did views of the South begin to change, as news coverage of the civil rights movement brought images of violence, protest, and conflict in the South into people's living rooms. Until then, Cox argues, most Americans remained content with their romantic vision of Dixie.

This book is a highly original study of transnationalism among immigrants from Taishan, a populous coastal county in south China from which, until 1965,... the majority of Chinese in the United States originated. Drawing creatively on Chinese-language sources such as gazetteers, newspapers, and magazines, supplemented by fieldwork and interviews as well as recent scholarship in Chinese social history, the author presents a much richer depiction than we have had heretofore of the continuing ties between Taishanese remaining in China and their kinsmen seeking their fortune in “Gold Mountain.”Long after the gold in California ran out and prejudice confined them to dismal Chinatowns, generations of Chinese—mostly men from rural areas of southern China—continued to migrate to the United States in hopes of bettering the family’s lot by remitting much of the meager sums they earned as laundrymen, cooks, domestic workers, and Chinatown merchants.Economic hardships and U.S. Exclusion laws extended the immigrants’ separation from their families for decades, “sojourns” that in many cases ended only in death. Men lived as bachelors and their wives as widows, parents passed away, and children grew up without ever seeing their fathers’ faces. Families and village communities had to adapt to survive the stress of long-term, long-distance separation from their primary wage-earners.At the same time, men raised in the rural communities of a faltering imperial China had to negotiate encounters with an industrializing, Western-dominated, often hostile world. This history explores the resiliency and flexibility of rural Chinese, qualities that enabled them to preserve their families by living apart from them and to survive the intertwining of their rural world with global systems of race, labor, and capital. The author demonstrates that through migration to dank and narrow enclaves, they came to live, and even to flourish, in a transnational community that persisted despite decades of separation and an ocean’s width of distance.

"Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country" offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Dine) pastoralism. A dramatic reduction of livestock on... the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s - mainly sheep, goats, and horses - was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos - especially women, the primary owners and tenders of flocks - without significant improvement of the grazing lands. Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals, hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers, tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grazing lands were already showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened, weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses, until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change all contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history. "Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country" is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today. Marsha L. Weisiger is associate professor of history at New Mexico State University.

This fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo pastoralism chronicles the government's 1930s failed policy to preserve grazing lands by eradicating... livestock on the Navajo reservation, with particular focus on women, the primary owners and tenders of the animals."With great sensitivity and insight, Weisiger evocatively demonstrates why stock reduction continues to be indelibly seared into Navajos' collective memory." -American Indian Quarterly"The history of Navajo livestock reduction in the 1930s is well known, yet Marsha L. Weisiger offers a sophisticated reevaluation that is satisfying in both its telling and its complexity." -The Journal of American History"Those of us who love to examine history will recognize that this heartbreak could surely have been avoided through understanding, communication, and respect for nature and for the culture that thrives within it." -Shuttle, Spindle & DyepotMarsha L. Weisiger is associate professor of history at the University of Oregon.

Featuring narrative, chants, songs, and rituals, Dreaming the Dark has helped many thousands of women use magic, spirituality, and community to bring... about political and social change. This anniversary edition of the best-selling classic includes a new preface reflecting on the fifteen years since the book's original publication.

This gripping suite of twelve dreams, infused with the conflict along the border of Mexico and the United States, traces humanity’s addiction to... violence and killing—from boys stepping on ants to men shooting animals, men shooting women, men shooting enemies. The Dreams begin in a desert landscape where poverty and wealth grate against each other, and the ever present war becomes “as invisible as the desert sands we trample on.” The dreams, however, move toward a greater peace with Sáenz providing an unforgettable reading experience.From “The Fourth Dream: Families and Flags and Revenge”:I don’t believe a flag is important enough to kiss— or even burn.Some men would hate me enough to kill me if they read these words.“Rage,” Sáenz said in an interview, “must be a component of any writer’s life. But this rage must also be contained—otherwise our very bodies will become chaos—our minds will become chaos. We need order.” Sáenz finds that order in poems, transforming his rage into something “more beautiful and gracious and forgiving.”Poet and novelist Benjamin Sáenz has written 10 books of poetry and prose, most recently In Perfect Light (HarperCollins). He was a Catholic priest, doing missionary and charity work in London, Tanzania, and the barrio parishes of El Paso, Texas. Upon leaving the priesthood, he was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He teaches in the MFA program at University of Texas, El Paso.

I am smart. Extremely smart, so say my parents, friends and teachers. But it doesn't register. I don't see it, at least not like they see it . . . I'm a... bit lazy, a daydreamer. My father, a big fan of mine, persecutes me about my laziness, how I will daydream away my life. (from DREAMIST) For Charles Malik Jacobs, the summer of junior year will change everything. He dreams about being a writer someday, but for now, he's just dreaming. Exceptionally bright, he wins a gifted artist scholarship to Cal State. While there, however, he can't help but think about what he is leaving behind in Chicago, family, friends and more importantly, his former self. He relies on photographs to help him see what he believes he has lost. What Malik doesn't know is that he will gain much more this summer, including the love of someone named Bleu.

Jessica Hagedorn has received wide critical acclaim for her edgy, high-energy novels chronicling the clash and embrace of American and Filipino... cultures. With Dream Jungle, she achieves a new level of narrative daring. Set in a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, Dream Jungle feverishly traces the consequences of two seemingly unrelated events: the discovery of an alleged ?lost tribe? and the arrival of a celebrity-studded American film crew filming an epic Vietnam War movie. Caught in the turmoil unleashed by these two incidents are four unforgettable characters?a wealthy, iconoclastic playboy, a woman ensnared in the sex industry, a Filipino-American writer, and a jaded actor?who find themselves drawn irrevocably together in this lavish, sensual portrait of a nation in crisis.

Ever since she started going out with Rogerson Biscoe, Caitlin seems to have fallen into a semiconcious dreamland where nothing is quite real. Rogerson... is different from anyone Caitlin has ever known. He's magnetic. He's compelling. He's dangerous. Being with him makes Caitlin forget about everything else-her missing sister, her withdrawn mother, her lackluster life. But what happens when being with Rogerson becomes a larger problem than being without him?

By the end of World War I, in November 1918, Europe’s old authoritarian empires had fallen, and new and seemingly democratic governments were rising... from the debris. As successor states found their place on the map, many hoped that a more liberal Europe would emerge. But this post-war idealism all too quickly collapsed under the political and economic pressures of the 1920s and '30s. Howard M. Sachar chronicles this visionary and tempestuous era by examining the fortunes of Europe’s Jewish minority, a group whose precarious status made them particularly sensitive to changes in the social order. Writing with characteristic lucidity and verve, Sachar spotlights an array of charismatic leaders–from Hungarian Communist Bela Kun to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, France’s Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum and Austria’s Sigmund Freud–whose collective experience foretold significant democratic failures long before the Nazi rise to power. In the richness of its human tapestry and the acuity of its social insights, Dreamland masterfully expands our understanding of a watershed era in modern history.