Shantyboat Journal

Shantyboat Journal
Author: Harlan Hubbard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813184940

Harlan and Anna Hubbard, newly married in middle age, build the boat of their dreams and drift down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Harlan is an artist and a writer with a poet's eye for the beauty of the world. Anna is a musician and an elegant master of the arts of graceful living. For seven years (1944-1951) the Hubbards make their home on their little boat, drifting with the river, camping on the land. Together they learn how to create and sustain a self-sufficient way of life that is infinitely fulfilling. It is a "river way of life"—free-flowing, endowed with the love of nature, the discovery of community, the rewards of good work, and the joy of creativity. The journal is a witness to history, embracing the gentle spirit of an America now lost to modern "progress." It is one of the most significant renderings in our literature of a deeply felt sense of place. Out of this journal grew Harlan Hubbard's enduring classic, Shantyboat, and his idyllic Shantyboat on the Bayous. His later Payne Hollow is a Thoreauvian testament to the values embodied in the homesteading life the Hubbards lived for four decades after they completed their epic river journey. Their life together has been praised by Wendell Berry as "one of the finest accomplishments of our time." The Shantyboat Journal reveals its creation.

Shantyboat Journal

Shantyboat Journal
Author: Harlan Hubbard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 408
Release:
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813130989

Kentucky is nationally renowned for horses, bourbon, rich natural resources, and unfortunately, hindered by a deficient educational system. Though its reputation is not always justified, in national rankings for grades K-12 and higher education, Kentucky consistently ranks among the lowest states in education funding, literacy, and student achievement. In A History of Education in Kentucky, William E. Ellis illuminates the successes and failures of public and private education in the commonwealth since its settlement. Ellis demonstrates how political leaders in the nineteenth century created a culture that devalued public education and refused to adequately fund it. He also analyzes efforts by teachers and policy makers to enact vital reforms and establish adequate, equal education, and discusses ongoing battles related to religious instruction, integration, and the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). A History of Education in Kentucky is the only up-to-date, single-volume history of education in the commonwealth. Offering more than mere policy analysis, this comprehensive work tells the story of passionate students, teachers, and leaders who have worked for progress from the 1770s to the present day. Despite the prevailing pessimism about education in Kentucky, Ellis acknowledges signs of a vibrant educational atmosphere in the state. By advocating a better understanding of the past, Ellis looks to the future and challenges Kentuckians to avoid historic failures and build on their successes.

Shantyboats and Roustabouts

Shantyboats and Roustabouts
Author: Gregg Andrews
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2022-12-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807179078

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews’s Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

Shantyboat

Shantyboat
Author: Harlan Hubbard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1977-01-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9780813113593

Shantyboat is the story of a leisurely journey down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. For most people such a journey is the stuff that dreams are made of, but for Harlan and Anna Hubbard, it became a cherished reality. In their small river craft, the Hubbards became one with the flowing river and its changing weathers. This book mirrors a life that is simple and independent, strenuous at times, but joyous, with leisure for painting and music, for observation and contemplation.

Payne Hollow Journal

Payne Hollow Journal
Author: Harlan Hubbard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813188326

Harlan Hubbard was Kentucky's Thoreau, and his journals are intimate records of a life lived in harmony with nature. For more than fifty years the artist, writer, and homesteader described daily activities and recorded keen observations as he sought to live simply and authentically. The third and climactic volume of his journals, Payne Hollow Journal, contains entries from the years he and his wife, Anna, lived at their Payne Hollow home along the Ohio River's Kentucky shore. There they mastered the arts of country life, building their own stone and timber house in 1952 and raising their own food. To live with nature was not a novel experience for the couple; earlier they had floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans on their homemade shantyboat. Hubbard described this journey in Shantyboat Journal, the basis for his Shantyboat and Shantyboat on the Bayous. By turns poetic and practical, Payne Hollow Journal celebrates nature's intense beauty and sometimes harsh realities as perhaps only an artist can see them. Here Hubbard reveals how dedication to work that provides sustenance—gardening, wood chopping, fishing, foraging, and raising goats-can also be fulfilling. Don Wallis's arrangement of the Payne Hollow entries reflects the seasonal changes in Hubbard and his life as well as in the natural world around him. At the beginning of this volume Hubbard writes, "When we are away from Payne Hollow, that place does not seem real or possible.... It is hard to explain our situation, to give reasons for our living this way to people who have no understanding or sympathy." A visit to the Hubbards' home through Payne Hollow Journal is ample explanation for anyone who has yearned to lead a life of simplicity and purpose.

Harlan Hubbard

Harlan Hubbard
Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813154804

By examining the life and work of celebrated painter, Harlan Hubbard, author Wendell Berry creates the perfect vehicle for emphasizing the themes of his other writings: the value of self-sufficiency, our responsibility to the environment, the holiness of everyday life, and the preference of simplicity over modern, mechanized life. Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard.

Anna Hubbard

Anna Hubbard
Author: Mia Cunningham
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813188768

Anna Eikenhout (1902-1986) was an honors graduate of Ohio State University, a fine-arts librarian, a skilled pianist, and an avid reader in three languages. Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), a little-known painter and would-be shantyboater, seemed an unlikely husband, but together they lived a life out of the pages of Thoreau's Walden. Much of what is known about the Hubbards comes from Harlan's books and journals. Concerning the seasons and the landscape, his writing was rapturous, yet he was emotionally reticent when discussing human affairs in general or Anna in particular. Yet it was through her efforts that their life on the river was truly civilized. Visitors to Payne Hollow recall Anna as a generous, gracious hostess, whose intelligence and artistry made the small house seem grander than a mansion.

The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard

The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard
Author: Harlan Hubbard
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0813153433

Harlan Hubbard (1900–1988), a Kentucky writer, environmentalist, and artist, spent many years trying to rediscover and revive the vanishing language of landscape in his watercolor paintings. Known for their sense of drifting movement and their depiction of the natural way of life fondly associated with Hubbard, they inexplicably remain his least studied artworks, despite presenting some of the best evidence of Hubbard's place in the history of landscape painting. The Watercolors of Harlan Hubbard not only argues for Hubbard's place in the art historical canon but also highlights and analyzes the artist's own voice. In this unique collection, more than two hundred watercolors are interspersed with anecdotes from those who knew Hubbard or drew inspiration from his work, offering a personal meditation on a deeply influential artist and serving as an invitation to those who have yet to discover him.

Distant Neighbors

Distant Neighbors
Author: Gary Snyder
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-05-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1619023733

"The letters are valuable for ecologists, students, and teachers of contemporary American literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant neighbors networked, negotiated, and remained friends." —San Francisco Chronicle "In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open–hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever–deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age."—Orion Magazine In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long–Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another. Snyder had thrown over all vestiges of Christianity in favor of becoming a devoted Buddhist and Zen practitioner, and had lived in Japan for a prolonged period to develop this practice. Berry's discomfort with the Christianity of his native land caused him to become something of a renegade Christian, troubled by the church and organized religion, but grounded in its vocabulary and its narrative. Religion and spirituality seemed like a natural topic for the two men to discuss, and discuss they did. They exchanged more than 240 letters from 1973 to 2013, remarkable letters of insight and argument. The two bring out the best in each other, as they grapple with issues of faith and reason, discuss ideas of home and family, worry over the disintegration of community and commonwealth, and share the details of the lives they've chosen to live with their wives and children. Contemporary American culture is the landscape they reside on. Environmentalism, sustainability, global politics and American involvement, literature, poetry and progressive ideals, these two public intellectuals address issues as broad as are found in any exchange in literature. No one can be unaffected by the complexity of their relationship, the subtlety of their arguments, and the grace of their friendship. This is a book for the ages.