Author: Jeremy Seabrook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1787381153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373
Get Book Here
Book Description
Orphans have often been beneficiaries of charity and compassion--but society has also punished, abused and ill-treated them. Attitudes behind this maltreatment are rooted in ideas that those without parents are disruptive, malevolent, and in need of discipline. Drawing on historic documents, interviews and memoirs, Jeremy Seabrook charts history's changing and often loose definitions of "orphans," and explores their many "makers"--from natural or man-made catastrophes to the State, charity, and other social forces that have separated children, especially the poor, from their close kin. But this history is not only one of suffering: Orphans also reveals the uncounted millions taken in and loved by relatives, neighbors or strangers. Freed from constraints and driven by insecurity, many orphans--including Nelson Mandela, Marilyn Monroe and Steve Jobs--have led remarkable lives.
Author: Laurin Porter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128794
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book Here
Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright, an Emmy-winning television writer, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter of such notable films as To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and A Trip to Bountiful, the amazingly versatile Horton Foote has been a force on the American cultural scene for more than fifty years. By critical consensus, Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle -- a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays that traces the transformation over twenty-six years of a small-town southern orphan, Horace Robedaux, into a husband, father, and patriarch. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Foote, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama. Set in and near Harrison, Texas, the fictitious counterpart to Foote's native Wharton, and based partly on his father's childhood and his parents' courtship and marriage, the plays introduce two extended families -- those of Horace and his wife, Eliazbeth -- across three generations, as well as numerous townspeople whose lives intertwine with theirs. The result is a wide-ranging, intricate work of interconnected stories reminiscent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga. Porter shows how the small-town southern culture speaks through Horace while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation. She explains that Foote's signature style -- which replaces stage directions, poetic language, and suspense-driven narratives with sparse, restrained dialogue and seemingly actionless plots -- creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. Similarly, Foote uses recurring character types and motifs, interrelated images and symbols, and parallel and inverted events that reverberate within and among the plays, employing language and structure in innovative ways. In comparing the cycle with the works of William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of southern literature and American drama. Foote's emphasis, Porter concludes, is not so much on returning home as on leaving it and building a new family, contending that for Foote home is not a place but a geography of the heart. Her definitive Orphans' Home shines much-needed light on an understudied talent and proves Foote's to be a vital American voice.
Author: Lucy Frost
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1761186159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Get Book Here
Book Description
Many thousands of abandoned children were treated as free labour in late 19th century Australia, yet their stories have been hidden until now, even to their descendants. Lucy Frost's painstaking research has uncovered what really happened to the convict orphans. 'This moving story of thousands of cast away children is a vital part of our nation's history.' - David Hill, author of The Forgotten Children All families have their secrets, and a convict ancestor or an illegitimate birth were shames that families once buried deep. Among the best-hidden stories in Australia's history are those of the convict orphans. Agnes arrived on a convict transport aged four and was abandoned when her mother needed to escape an abusive husband. After their mother died and their father deserted them, Maria and Eliza Marriner were taken into state care too. Cut off from family, behind the walls of the imposing sandstone buildings of the Queen's Orphan Schools, they were among hundreds of young children entrusted to the much feared Matron Smyth. At the age of twelve, the children left the orphanage to work without pay on farms and in homes-some of them places where no child should ever have been sent. Although colonists called it white slavery, the authorities turned a blind eye to what was really happening. These are stories of abuse and abandonment, and also of great generosity and kindness from individuals who rescued and supported children. Some children managed to build happy lives for themselves, but many could not navigate a system stacked against them. There are disturbing parallels between the Queen's Orphan Schools in Hobart and other children's institutions in Australia into the 21st century. 'A beautifully written book detailing the evocative, heartbreaking stories of convict orphans painstakingly pieced together' - Professor Tanya Evans, author of Fractured Families 'A fascinating study, richly textured, and extremely well-researched' - Professor Barry Godfrey, University of Liverpool
Author: Joy Damousi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521587235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Get Book Here
Book Description
This innovative book marks a new way of looking at convict women. It tells their stories in a powerful and evocative way, drawing out broader themes of gender and sexual disorder and race and class dynamics in a colonial context. It considers the convict past in light of contemporary concerns, looking at the cultural meanings of aspects of life in the colony: on ships, in the factories and in orphanages. Using startlingly original research, Joy Damousi considers such varied topics as headshaving as punishment in the prisons and the subversive nature of laughter and play, as well as analysing the language of pollution, purity and abandonment. She also dicusses the nature of sexual relationships, including evidence of lesbianism. The book shows how understanding about sexual and racial difference was crucial for both the maintenance and disturbance of colonial society, and became a focus for cultural anxiety.
Author: Joanna Penglase
Publisher: Fremantle Press
ISBN: 9781920731663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Get Book Here
Book Description
In August 2004, Parliamentary senators wept as they presented Forgotten Australians, the report from the Senate Inquiry into the treatment of children in care. Half a million children grew up in 'care' in twentieth-century Australia, and most often these children lived with daily brutal physical and emotional abuse in the sterile environment of an institution. In Orphans of the Living, drawing from interviews, submissions to the Senate Inquiry, and her own experience, Joanna Penglase describes, for the first time, the experience from the perspective of the survivors. With tenderness, compassion and intellect, Penglase begins to unravel the seemingly inexplicable: how and why did this happen? She looks not only at the profound personal costs to these children, but the huge social and economic costs of these past policies.
Author: Jim Dent
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429919345
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
Jim Dent, author of the New York Times bestselling The Junction Boys, returns with his most powerful story of human courage and determination. More than a century ago, a school was constructed in Fort Worth, Texas, for the purpose of housing and educating the orphans of Texas Freemasons. It was a humble project that for years existed quietly on a hillside east of town. Life at the Masonic Home was about to change, though, with the arrival of a lean, bespectacled coach by the name of Rusty Russell. Here was a man who could bring rain in the midst of a drought. Here was a man who, in virtually no time at all, brought the orphans' story into the homes of millions of Americans. In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites—a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least thirty pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing—not even a football—yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams. The Mighty Mites remain a notable moment in the long history of American sports. Just as significant is the depth of the inspirational message. This is a profound lesson in fighting back and clinging to faith. The real winners in Texas high school football were not the kids from the biggest schools, or the ones wearing the most expensive uniforms. They were the scrawny kids from a tiny orphanage who wore scarred helmets and faded jerseys that did not match, kids coached by a devoted man who lived on peanuts and drove them around in a smoke-belching old truck. In writing a story of unforgettable characters and great football, Jim Dent has come forward to reclaim his place as one of the top sports authors in America today. A remarkable and inspirational story of an orphanage and the man who created one of the greatest football teams Texas has ever known . . . this is their story—the original Friday Night Lights. "This just might be the best sports book ever written. Jim Dent has crafted a story that will go down as one of the most artistic, one of the most unforgettable, and one of the most inspirational ever. Twelve Mighty Orphans will challenge Hoosiers as the feel-good sports story of our lifetime. Naturally, being from Texas, I am biased. Hooray for the Mighty Mites.'' —Verne Lundquist, CBS Sports "Coach Rusty Russell and the Mighty Mites will steal your heart as they overcome every obstacle imaginable to become a respected football team. Take an orphanage, the Depression, and mix it with Texas high school football, and Jim Dent has authored another winner, this one about the ultimate underdog.'' —Brent Musburger, ABC Sports/ESPN "No state has a roll call of legendary high school football stories like we do in Texas, and, admittedly, some of those stories have been ‘expanded' over the years when it comes to the truth. But let Jim Dent tell you about the Mighty Mites of Masonic Home, the pride of Fort Worth in the dark days of the Depression. Read this book. You will think it's fiction. You will think it's a Hollywood script. But Twelve Mighty Orphans is the truth, and nothing but. It is powerful stuff. Some eighty years later, the Mighty Mites' story remains so sacred, not even a Texan would dare tamper with these facts. And Jim Dent tells it like it was." — Randy Galloway, columnist, Fort-Worth Star Telegram
Author: Laura Peters
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526130599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 167
Get Book Here
Book Description
In one of the first studies of its kind, Orphan texts seeks to insert the orphan, and the problems its existence poses, in the larger critical areas of the family and childhood in Victorian culture. In doing so, Laura Peters considers certain canonical texts alongside lesser known works from popular culture in order to establish the context in which discourses of orphanhood operated. The study argues that the prevalence of the orphan figure can be explained by considering the family. The family and all it came to represent – legitimacy, race and national belonging – was in crisis. In order to reaffirm itself the family needed a scapegoat: it found one in the orphan figure. As one who embodied the loss of the family, the orphan figure came to represent a dangerous threat to the family; and the family reaffirmed itself through the expulsion of this threatening difference. Orphan texts will be of interest to final year undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and those interested in the areas of Victorian literature, Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, history and popular culture.
Author: Clare Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108888569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493
Get Book Here
Book Description
Clare Anderson provides a radical new reading of histories of empire and nation, showing that the history of punishment is not connected solely to the emergence of prisons and penitentiaries, but to histories of governance, occupation, and global connections across the world. Exploring punitive mobility to islands, colonies, and remote inland and border regions over a period of five centuries, she proposes a close and enduring connection between punishment, governance, repression, and nation and empire building, and reveals how states, imperial powers, and trading companies used convicts to satisfy various geo-political and social ambitions. Punitive mobility became intertwined with other forms of labour bondage, including enslavement, with convicts a key source of unfree labour that could be used to occupy territories. Far from passive subjects, however, convicts manifested their agency in various forms, including the extension of political ideology and cultural transfer, and vital contributions to contemporary knowledge production.
Author: Alabama State Bar Association
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bar associations
Languages : en
Pages : 1802
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Clare Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350000698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Leicester. Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.
