Joan Burbick

Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy

Gun Show Nation explores how and why guns have entered our national politics. To understand gun culture in the United States, Burbick traveled to gun shows, gun stores, and gun rights meetings, including the annual conventions of the National Rifle Association. Based on these experiences, confidential interviews, and historical research, this nonfiction book charts how our attachment to guns has affected our democracy and why we need to confront the way of the gun.

"A brilliant and insightful reading of gun culture," Richard Slotkin

"An indispensable ethnographic guide to America's obsession with guns," Saul
Cornell

For further information contact: The New Press at http://www.thenewpress.com

Rodeo Queens and the American Dream

Joan Burbick traveled the backroads of the West, talking with "rodeo queens," the women who promote and perform in the elaborate pageantry of the rodeo. She interviewed dozens of queens in their living rooms, kitchens, barns, bars, and ranches. They took her down the rodeo road from tiny Western towns to the show-biz glitter of Las Vegas. These women retold the national myth of the West, cracking open the heroic male world of rodeo. Their life stories reveal dramatic changes in the rodeo and the West from the 1930s to the present, including the loss or ranch lands, the fierce conflicts over gender and race, and the intense commercialization of the rodeo.

"These women with epic hats, epic hair, and epic eye shadow tell epic stories." Sherman Alexie

"[Burbick shows] the glitter and the glamour of the rodeo subculture and, at the same time, some of its deepest contradictions. --Los Angeles Times

"In the testosterone-tossed world of rode, Burbick serves up a delectable slice of Americana." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For further information, contact PublicAffairs at http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com.

Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America

The creation of a national culture in the nineteenth century coincided with a common belief that the emerging nation was diseased and in need of healing. Reading nineteenth-century narratives of health by social reformers, popular healers, and literary artists, Burbick exposes the fears and conflicts underlying the creation of an American national culture. To control the body and enforce health becomes the means to create social order and middile-class citizens. Throughout this period, Burbick discovers a fundamental uneasiness about democracy.

"Burbick has taken on a huge project and has opened up the interrelated histories of medicine, politics, and literature in important new ways," Tom Lutz, American Literature

"[Burbick privides] readings of an amazingly diverse array of nineteeth-century prose and poetry, ranging from the well known (Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick) to the little known (Domestic Medicine, by John C. Gunn). These readings are imaginative and frequently arresting." Cynthia Russett, Isis

For further information, contact Cambridge University Press at http://www.cambridge.org.

Thoreau's Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language

Challenging conventional visions of history that rested on scientific and economic beliefs in progress, Thoreau finds in natural history an alternative story of tragedy, decline, and hope. This alternative narrative of time can still be redeemed but not without an understanding of how nature and culture are interdependent.

"Burbick cogently maps Thoreau's attempts to integrate the history of the natural world with human history and to reconcile the result with a transcendental vision." Martin Bickman, Library Journal

For further information, contact The University of Pennsylvania Press at http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/