A01=Dorothee E. Kocks
american dream
american history
american tradition
american west
Author_Dorothee E. Kocks
Category=DSB
Category=JH
Category=NHK
civil rights
ella baker
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family farm
frontier
geography
government
history
homestead program
josephine johnson
landscape
local communities
manifest destiny
mari sandoz
national consciousness
nonfiction
old west
place
politics
rural community
settling the west
small community
small town
social justice
space
the west
welfare state
wild west
Product details
- ISBN 9780520222809
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this innovative and exciting synthesis of historical analysis, literary criticism, and personal essay, Dorothee E. Kocks explores the links between place and political ideals in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the iconography of the American West. "Dream a Little" explores the American tradition of using the land to reveal and elaborate our dreams for social justice. Writing with a novelist's sensitivity toward language, Kocks explores the idea that Americans have historically looked to the land for answers to society's problems. To illustrate this point, she shows that the frontier state with its homestead program was actually the predecessor of the modern welfare state. Instead of money, the federal government gave away land. Kocks shows how we have 'forgotten' the politics and history behind this giveaway and unravels the significance of this forgetting for our national consciousness. In the second half of the book, Kocks journeys into three symbolic landscapes: the West, the family farm, and the small community. She looks at these landscapes through the eyes of writers Mari Sandoz and Josephine Johnson, and civil rights activist Ella Baker.
Interweaving her own life experiences in this analysis, she traces the relationship between geography and democracy, and of the hopes we attach to the West.
Dorothee E. Kocks is a writer living in Salt Lake City and a member of the auxiliary faculty at the University of Utah.
