University of Illinois Press

The remarkable story of a Black-Irish dance and its rival champions During the tumultuous years before the Civil War, Irish American John Diamond and African American William Henry Lane, known as Juba, became internationally famous as competitors in the art and sport of challenge dancing. April F. Masten's dual biography reconstructs the lives and work of these extraordinary dancers, casting fresh light on their contributions to the history of American popular culture. Challenge dancing was born from Black-Irish social interaction in the dockside markets, taverns, and theaters of antebellum New York. Promoted as a masculine art with close ties to boxing, it featured prolific gambling, hefty purses, and championship belts, yet also included women competitors, cross-dressing, and blackface. The astonishing jigs of its foremost practitioners attracted huge audiences across northeastern port cities, along Mississippi Valley circus routes, and into England's provincial music halls. Diamond and Juba's rivalry and parallel careers provide a rare glimpse into Black and immigrant strivings in an expanding nation keen for talent yet divided by prejudice. A vivid portrait of a forgotten world, Diamond and Juba tells the intertwined stories of two legendary performers.

A singular guide to mushrooms on mountain tops Little-known and hard to find, the tiny mushrooms that grow above the treeline offer mycophiles rare opportunities—but also index the advance of global climate change. Cathy L. Cripps’s comprehensive nature guide draws on the twenty-five years of collecting and research that have made her North America’s foremost expert on alpine fungi. Features include: More than 200 color photographs Small size-perfect for use in the field In-depth scientific information on 150 species, including some recently discovered and most not found outside alpine or Arctic habitats Division of species into ecological groups to aid with searching and identification Coverage of the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, with extensions into British Columbia and Alaska, with many of the same mushrooms also found in the Arctic Tips on collecting for both professional researchers and amateur enthusiasts A conservation-based approach aimed at the general public, mycologists, researchers, naturalists, land managers, and others Easy to use and charged with cutting-edge science, Alpine Mushrooms of North America is an expert guide to mycology’s final frontier.

Sallie Martin combined fame as a performer with a far-sighted business acumen that brought Black gospel music to a national audience and laid the foundation for the industry that followed. Kay Norton's biography follows Martin's parallel careers from her early plans to grow the genre through her celebrity in the 1960s–1970s and eventful retirement. "Same old Sallie Martin, same old Jesus," she once told audiences, a reflection of both her musical style and unapologetic approach to life. Cofounder of the National Conference of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, Martin also co-established the pioneering Black music publisher Martin and Morris Music Studio. Her group the Sallie Martin Singers took Chicago gospel to all points of the compass and Martin mentored and employed dozens of aspiring vocalists and instrumentalists. Norton looks at Martin's important relationships and the challenges she faced, while placing her accomplishments and legacy on the arc of gospel music history. In-depth and powerful, Sallie Martin, Mother of Gospel Music tells the story of one woman's role in shaping the music and business of Black gospel.

The game's surprising influence on Christianity in the United States From the game's early days, college football and a strain of muscular Christianity built a mutually reinforcing culture that taught lessons in America's dominant religious, gendered, and racial belief systems. Christians of many denominations embraced the game to shape and reshape their faith to meet the changing social demands of the twentieth century. Hunter M. Hampton analyzes the impact of football on Christian college campuses. Baptists and Latter-day Saints, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics sought spiritual and personal meaning on the gridiron. Fans watched the action to find God's lessons for them. Wins and losses expressed the divine will while the game's popularity offered a potent way to evangelize non-believers. Hampton also investigates the sport's place in providing a stage for fostering Christian manhood, male community, gender dominance, and on-the-field displays of heroic savagery that served a higher purpose. Provocative and engaging, The Gridiron Gospel looks at the All-American fusion of physical and spiritual muscle.

Breaking down recent films about the dark side of motherhood Twenty-first century contemporary films like Emily Atef’s Das Fremde in mir and Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama portray motherhood as a source of regret, exhaustion, rage, shame, guilt, and disgust. Olivia Landry analyzes this new feminist cinema and the ways it embraces and explores the crushing burden of mothering children. Landry surveys films released in North America, Europe, and Australia over a period beginning in 2007. As she shows, revelation and the expression of negative feelings upend the traditional image of the perfect, self-sacrificial, and happy mother. Landry tracks how radical positions like maternal regret and family abolition have replaced age-old tropes while also going beyond portrayals of maternal ambivalence. Her feminist method casts off psychoanalysis and renounces pathological approaches to motherhood to show how a generation of filmmakers have insisted on the subjective position and experience of the mother rather than that of the child. Bold and groundbreaking, Cinema of Crushing Motherhood looks at taboo-breaking films and illuminates the emotions and affects that make them so powerful.

Playing every angle for a shot at the big time Chicagoans venture to area pool halls to perfect their games and navigate league play for a shot at the APA World Pool Championships in Las Vegas. Dylan Taylor-Lehman joins a lively cast of characters under the lights and inside a subculture as old as Chicago itself. Whether running the table or waiting their turn, everyone has a story to tell and opinions to share on position play, billiards's unwritten code, and life itself. Taylor-Lehman follows four promising teams on a mission to reach Vegas before unwinding an electric account of what it takes to win the world’s premier amateur tournament—and what you take away when the balls aren’t sunk. Entertaining and immersive, Going Rackless puts readers tableside to watch a game everyone has played but few truly understand.

Black virality refers to the spread of Black performance that becomes uncontrollable because of its rapid and ubiquitous circulation through popular media. Gabriel A. Peoples examines Black people and representations of Black people that have gone viral from the eighteenth century to today. Peoples’s analysis ranges from abolitionist and proslavery visual culture to Do the Right Thing to “Bed Intruder Song” and the cellphone video of Derrion Albert’s murder. After identifying these moments, he considers how performances go viral in Black ways. He also thinks through the ways Black virality circulates ideas that materially affect Black life. As he shows, an interacting person’s vulnerability to racialized gender and racialized sexuality knowledge inspires how they spread a performance. Non-iconic elements of viral moments reveal hard-to-find nuances of Black life while the artists and others represented in viral moments promote both collective and individual liberation by harnessing their visibility and audibility. Rigorous and expansive, Goin’ Viral uses Black virality as a new way to understand and frame Black performances.