Cultural Secrets as Narrative Form: Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America examines the interplay between the familiar and the forgotten in tales of America's first century as a nation. By studying both the common concerns and the rising tensions between the known and the unknown, the told and the untold, this book offers readers new insight into the making of a nation through stories. Here, identity is built not so much through the winnowing competition of perspectives as through the cumulative layering of stories, derived from sources as diverse as rumors circulating in early patriot newspapers and the highest achievements of aesthetic culture. And yet this is not a source study: the interaction of texts is reciprocal, and the texts studied are not simply complementary but often jarring in their interrelations. The result is a new model of just how some of America's central episodes of self-definition -- the Puritan legacy, the Revolutionary War, and the Western frontier -- have achieved near mythic force in the national imagination. The most powerful myths of national identity, this author argues, are not those that erase historical facts but those able to transform such facts into their own deep resources. Book jacket.

Reid, Kerr, and Miller seek to redress the lack of systematic, generalizable research on women's representation in state and municipal bureaucracies by focusing specifically on the representation of female managers in high-level policy and decision-making positions in their agencies or departments. Their primary interest is in examining the distribution of women and men in state and municipal administrative and professional positions by agency and over time (from 1987 through 1997) in order to determine if, first, agency missions are associated with glass walls and glass ceilings, and, second, whether, relative to white women, African American women and Latinas have made progress in laying claim to a greater share of managerial positions in public-sector agencies. Their analysis reveals a richly textured and complicated set of factors and interrelationships that vary widely across different policy areas, agency contexts, and levels of government. They show continued patterns of underrepresentation in agencies with regulatory and distributive policy commitments while showing some improvements in those agencies that tend to be traditionally populated by women, health, welfare, and social services, for example.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

An anthology of verse in both modern and traditional styles by the prize-winning poet and artist, Margaret Havill Reid, including original artwork created especially for this edition.