American by Paper

American by Paper PDF Author: Kate Vieira
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950091
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
American by Paper reveals how two groups of immigrants who share a primary language nevertheless have very different experiences of literacy in the United States. It describes the social realities facing documented and undocumented immigrants who use everyday acts of writing to negotiate papers—the visas, green cards, and passports that promise access to the American Dream. It is both an ethnography, filled with illuminating details about contemporary immigrant lives, and a critical intervention into two leading—and conflicting—scholarly ideas of literacy and its social role. Although popular thinking and scholarship have viewed literacy as a method of culturally assimilating immigrants into the nation, Kate Vieira finds that upward mobility and social inclusion in the United States are tied to literacy in complex ways. She draws from extensive interviews with Portuguese-speaking migrants who live and work together in a former mill town in Massachusetts that she calls South Mills: one group from the Azores, who are usually documented, and another from Brazil, who are usually undocumented. She explains how these migrants experience literacy not as a vehicle for assimilation (as educational policy makers often assert) nor as a means of resisting oppression (as literacy scholars often hope) but instead as tied up in papers, particularly in the papers that confer legal status. Papers and literacy are inextricably bound together, both promoting and constraining opportunities, and they shape why and how migrants read and write. Vieira builds on insights from literacy theories that have long been in opposition to each other in order to develop a new sociomaterial theory of literacy, one that takes into account its inseparable link to paper, forms, and documentation. This point of view leads to a deeper understanding of how literacy actually accrues meaning by circulating, and recirculating, through institutions and the lives of individuals.

American by Paper

American by Paper PDF Author: Kate Vieira
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950091
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
American by Paper reveals how two groups of immigrants who share a primary language nevertheless have very different experiences of literacy in the United States. It describes the social realities facing documented and undocumented immigrants who use everyday acts of writing to negotiate papers—the visas, green cards, and passports that promise access to the American Dream. It is both an ethnography, filled with illuminating details about contemporary immigrant lives, and a critical intervention into two leading—and conflicting—scholarly ideas of literacy and its social role. Although popular thinking and scholarship have viewed literacy as a method of culturally assimilating immigrants into the nation, Kate Vieira finds that upward mobility and social inclusion in the United States are tied to literacy in complex ways. She draws from extensive interviews with Portuguese-speaking migrants who live and work together in a former mill town in Massachusetts that she calls South Mills: one group from the Azores, who are usually documented, and another from Brazil, who are usually undocumented. She explains how these migrants experience literacy not as a vehicle for assimilation (as educational policy makers often assert) nor as a means of resisting oppression (as literacy scholars often hope) but instead as tied up in papers, particularly in the papers that confer legal status. Papers and literacy are inextricably bound together, both promoting and constraining opportunities, and they shape why and how migrants read and write. Vieira builds on insights from literacy theories that have long been in opposition to each other in order to develop a new sociomaterial theory of literacy, one that takes into account its inseparable link to paper, forms, and documentation. This point of view leads to a deeper understanding of how literacy actually accrues meaning by circulating, and recirculating, through institutions and the lives of individuals.

American Paper Son

American Paper Son PDF Author: Wayne Hung Wong
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252030147
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
During the height of racist anti-Chinese U.S. immigration laws, illegal aliens were able to come into the States under false papers identifying them as the sons of those who had returned to China to marry and have children. American Paper Son is the story of one such Chinese immigrant who came to Wichita, Kansas, in 1935 as a thirteen-year-old "paper son" to help in his father's restaurant there. This vivid first-person account addresses significant themes in Asian American history through the lens of Wong's personal stories. Wong served in one of the all-Chinese units of the 14th Air Force in China during World War II and he discusses the impact of race and segregation on his experience. After the war he found a wife in Taishan, brought her to the US, and became involved in the government's infamous Confession program (an amnesty program for immigrants). Wong eventually became a successful real estate entrepreneur in Wichita. Rich with poignant insights into the realities of life as part of a very small Chinese American population in a Midwestern town, this memoir provides an important new view of the Asian American experience away from the West Coast. Benson Tong adds a scholarly introduction and useful annotations.

American Paper Mills, 1690-1832

American Paper Mills, 1690-1832 PDF Author: John Bidwell
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584659645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
A comprehensive account of early papermaking in America

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature PDF Author: Jonathan Senchyne
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781625344731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

Paper Trails

Paper Trails PDF Author: Cameron Blevins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190053690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history of how the US Post made the nineteenth-century American West. There were five times as many post offices in the United States in 1899 than there are McDonald's restaurants today. During an era of supposedly limited federal government, the United States operated the most expansive national postal system in the world. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late nineteenth-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a truly dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. It had taken Anglo-Americans the better part of two hundred years to occupy the eastern half of the continent, yet they occupied the West within a single generation. As millions of settlers moved into the region, they relied on letters and newspapers, magazines and pamphlets, petitions and money orders to stay connected to the wider world. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West. The western postal network bore little resemblance to the civil service bureaucracies typically associated with government institutions. Instead, the US Post grafted public mail service onto private businesses, contracting with stagecoach companies to carry the mail and paying local merchants to distribute letters from their stores. These arrangements allowed the US Post to rapidly spin out a vast and ephemeral web of postal infrastructure to thousands of distant places. The postal network's sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power.

Paper Soldiers

Paper Soldiers PDF Author: Clarence R. Wyatt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226917955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Praised and condemned for its aggressive coverage of the Vietnam War, the American press has been both commended for breaking public support and bringing the war to an end and accused of misrepresenting the nature and progress of the war. While in-depth combat coverage and the instantaneous power of television were used to challenge the war, Clarence R. Wyatt demonstrates that, more often than not, the press reported official information, statements, and views. Examining the relationship between the press and the government, Wyatt looks at how difficult it was to obtain information outside official briefings, what sort of professional constraints the press worked under, and what happened when reporters chose not to "get on the team." "Wyatt makes the Diem period in Saigon come to life—the primitive communications, the police crackdowns, the quarrels within the news organizations between the pessimists in Saigon and the optimists in Washington and New York."—Peter Braestrup, Washington Times "An important, readable study of the Vietnam press corps—the most maligned group of journalists in modern American history. Clarence Wyatt's insights and assessments are particularly valuable now that the media is rapidly growing in its influence on domestic and international affairs."—Peter Arnett, CNN foreign correspondent

Paper Son

Paper Son PDF Author: Tung Pok Chin
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781566398015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Chin's story speaks for the many Chinese who worked in urban laundries and restaurants, but it also introduces an unusually articulate man's perspective on becoming a Chinese American."--BOOK JACKET.

American Family of the Colonial Era Paper Dolls

American Family of the Colonial Era Paper Dolls PDF Author: Tom Tierney
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 9780486243948
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Spanning three generations, an American colonial family of eight is shown in period attire in a variety of situations as they live out the drama of the American Revolution and its aftermath. The 32 authentic costumes are further enhanced by Tom Tierney's well-researched and scrupulously accurate text. Together they offer fashion and costume historians a precise, full-color view of prevailing fashions and trends of the late eighteenth century. Paper doll enthusiasts of all ages will delight in these finely rendered figures in typical Colonial raiment, while aficionados of Americana will follow with rapt attention this sartorial record of one family's progress through pre- and post-Revolution to a final frontier expedition.

Little African Girl Paper Doll

Little African Girl Paper Doll PDF Author: Tom Tierney
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486274411
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
One charming little girl paper doll and eight authentic costumes: Xhosa robe, Zulu dance costume, sheath and headdress of a Baule queen, Fulani dancer's costume, plus outfits from Swaziland, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zanzibar.

The Other Side of Assimilation

The Other Side of Assimilation PDF Author: Tomas Jimenez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520295706
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The (not-so-strange) strangers in their midst -- Salsa and ketchup : cultural exposure and adoption -- Spotlight on white : fade to black -- Living with difference and similarity -- Living locally, thinking nationally