A01=Andie Tucher
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
American folklore genealogy
ancestral identity formation
ancestral moral imagination
archival correspondence insights
archival reconstruction methods
Author_Andie Tucher
automatic-update
battlefield memory culture
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=WQY
communal memory networks
COP=United States
cultural memory transmission
Delivery_Pre-order
domestic folklore artifacts
domestic mythmaking
domestic storytelling culture
emotional inheritance patterns
emotional resilience history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
everyday life historiography
family legend analysis
family saga sociology
flood and fire survival stories
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
frontier escape narratives
generational trauma echoes
Gilded Age domesticity
hidden ancestry revelations
hope and disappointment themes
household narrative craft
hybrid fact-fiction recollection
imaginative lineage crafting
imaginative truth blending
imagined past landscapes
intergenerational longing
intergenerational storytelling
intimate historical perspective
Language_English
local history society research
meaning-seeking narratives
memory distortion patterns
mistaken identity legends
mythic family anecdotes
narrative memory studies
narrative self-judgment
narrative wish fulfillment
national happiness ideals
oral tradition dynamics
ordinary people's history
PA=Temporarily unavailable
perception versus reality theme
personal archive research
personal meaning-making
pirate folklore ties
Price_€20 to €50
private history narratives
private mythic geographies
PS=Active
regional American lore
romantic elopement lore
sentimental story traditions
shadow family histories
softlaunch
sorrow and recompense motifs
storyteller psychology
Product details
- ISBN 9781625341280
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 134 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 31 Oct 2014
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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For more than four hundred years, members of the author’s family have been telling stories about their American lives. They have told of impassioned elopements and heart-breaking kidnaps, of hairbreadth escapes and shocking murders, of bigamists, changelings, patriots, Indians, fires, floods, and how the great-grandmother of Chief Justice John Marshall married the pirate Blackbeard by mistake.
In this beautifully written work, Andie Tucher considers family stories as another way to look at history, neither from the top down nor the bottom up but from the inside out. She explores not just what happened—everywhere from Jamestown to Boonesborough, from the bloody field at Chickamauga to the metropolis of the Gilded Age—but also what the storytellers thought or wished or hoped or feared happened. She offers insights into what they valued, what they lost, how they judged their own lives and found meaning in them. The narrative touches on sorrow, recompense, love, pain, and the persistent tension between hope and disappointment in a nation that by making the pursuit of happiness thinkable also made unhappiness regrettable.
Based on extensive research in archives, local history societies, and family-history sources as well as conversations and correspondence, Happily Sometimes After offers an intimate and unusual perspective on how ordinary people used stories to imagine the world they wished for, and what those stories reveal about their relationships with the world they actually had.
In this beautifully written work, Andie Tucher considers family stories as another way to look at history, neither from the top down nor the bottom up but from the inside out. She explores not just what happened—everywhere from Jamestown to Boonesborough, from the bloody field at Chickamauga to the metropolis of the Gilded Age—but also what the storytellers thought or wished or hoped or feared happened. She offers insights into what they valued, what they lost, how they judged their own lives and found meaning in them. The narrative touches on sorrow, recompense, love, pain, and the persistent tension between hope and disappointment in a nation that by making the pursuit of happiness thinkable also made unhappiness regrettable.
Based on extensive research in archives, local history societies, and family-history sources as well as conversations and correspondence, Happily Sometimes After offers an intimate and unusual perspective on how ordinary people used stories to imagine the world they wished for, and what those stories reveal about their relationships with the world they actually had.
Andie Tucher is associate professor of communications at Columbia Journalism School. She is author of Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians.
