Cornell University has 21,600 students in 2015, about twice as many as it did in 1950.  Half of them are women, compared with one-fifth back then.  And more than one-third of today's Cornellians are black, Hispanic, or Asian.  In 1950, all of the university's minority students probably could have fit into a single lecture hall.  Cornell is also a lot richer now.  In the late 1940s, it was struggling to balance the budget and recovering from a severe case of growing pains.  Enrollment increased 40 percent between June and October 1946.  Many freshmen lived in poorly insulated temporary dorms, ate in shifts, and attended classes in Quonset huts. Postwar Cornell brings that vanishing world back to life, in the words of the people who lived through it. The book is made from the voices of over 100 Cornell alumni and friends, who describe how the University was transformed during and just after World War II. Other differences are just as striking.  In 1946, 64 percent of Cornell undergrads were veterans of World War II, attending on federal scholarships that paid most of their tuition and expenses.  Today, veterans are less than one half of one percent of the student body.  Cornell today offers "gender-inclusive housing," but in 1950, it locked women into their dorms at night.  Co-eds who violated the curfew faced disciplinary measures that escalated all the way to expulsion. Yet some of the same books that were taught in 1950 are still taught today.  Students still work too hard. They still fall in and out of love.  Some of them still party too much, although student alcohol consumption today is probably much lower than it was then.  In 1950, any 18-year-old could go into the student union and get a beer. The biggest similarity might be one in attitude.  Back in the late 1940s, some Cornell students were intently focused on addressing social problems that threatened to bring on planetary catastrophes.  Students do that today, too.  But in the 1940s, those kinds of worries were new. The students of Postwar Cornell have a unique story to tell.  They were the junior members of a campus community that went through years of unprecedented change.  They helped to create the standards of higher education we take for granted today. Shortly after the United States entered World War II in 1941, the military suddenly occupied Cornell and other campuses across the country.  In just a few months, academic buildings became training facilities for soldiers, sailors, and aviators. As the war was ending, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to fund a massive expansion of university research and scholarships. Postwar Cornellians were the first to benefit from a big new idea: that people who deserve higher education should be granted it, with substantial public support. In 1944, Title II of the GI Bill paid most of the tuition, fees, room, and board expenses for any veteran who had not received a dishonorable discharge. The bill was a spectacular success, educating fourteen future Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three US Presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, and countless teachers, scientists, doctors, engineers, lawyers, business leaders, artists, and others.  Postwar Cornellians went on to change the world. Most of this book is excerpted from oral history interviews. The book also includes contemporary articles, letters, and diary entries, and is richly illustrated with photographs and memorabilia.  Its goal is to give readers a vivid portrait of Cornell from 1944 to 1952, drawn from eyewitness reports.  

Postwar Cornell: How The Greatest Generation Transformed A University, 1944-1952

History

Edmondson, Brad

Americas

Cayuga Lake Books

Jack Hopper was born in Philadelphia in 1934. He attended Central High School and Muhlenberg College, and spent his twenties avoiding obligations. He married Wendy Berzine in 1966, and began his long association with AMS Press in New York City as an editor. He founded the magazine Works: A Quarterly of Writing. His first collection of poetry, Miscellany, appeared in 1962; a second round, The Ympes of Wanton Youthe, came out in 1994. He is partially retired and lives in Ithaca, New York.

Doubles: Poems 1995-2012

Literature & Fiction

Hopper, John

Poetry

A witch-haunted temple in India Carrying a spear in New York City operas Witnessing a revolution in Guatemala Mediums, spiritual seekers, and frauds Teaching at a maximum security prison Love rides the rails These are some of the subjects in this lively collection of personal essays and travel writing - eloquent inner quests and journeys of discovery to out-of-the-way destinations.

What Can You Do: Personal Essays & Travel Writing

Hower, Edward

Literary

The Finger Lakes Region of New York is easy to find on a map. But is there something more intangible here, a spirit that can touch the human heart? This anthology of poems from more than 100 authors includes the well established and those just commencing the poetic craft. You will find a wide variety of voices and content here attesting to a felt connection with the Finger Lakes, and also poems that take a reader to other regions where poetry alone can sail. Be prepared for delight!

From the Finger Lakes: A Poetry Anthology

Hopper, Jack

In choosing Peter Fortunato for a Pablo Neruda Award, Stanley Kunitz told the author, "You've discovered your legend. Now where will it take you?" Entering the Mountain is the result. "These poems brilliantly meld personal history, myth, and the heart's irrefutable music. The great poem, 'Every Wizard, ' like so much in this fine collection, is not only a testimony to history--his father's complicated immigrant experience--but to how each of us must honor the weight of love. We can celebrate Art, craft, and the intricacies of how a poem makes us feel, but Fortunato, like a seer, reminds us of the mind's irrepressible provender and the heart's irreducible calculus." --Kenneth A. McClane"The first thing we notice about the poetry of Peter Fortunato is the strength of voice as he delves into memories of family and kinship, and a cultural heritage going back to Italy and even classical Greece. An important theme in Entering the Mountain is performance, performance of music, of magic, escape artistry, the performance of rituals and celebrations of both the living and the dead, acts of homage and affection in our daily lives." --Robert Morgan" These poems] walk the reader into a world that is full of mystery yet grounded in the poet's commitment to seeing and recording the natural world and his place in it, inviting us to be part of his magician's story." --Bertha Rogers

Entering the Mountain

Fortunato, Peter

In NY Votes for Women: A Suffrage Centennial Anthology, twenty-one women explore questions in a variety of engaging memoirs, stories and poems. They will leave you with fresh ideas about what the inspiring past implies for our uncertain future.

NY Votes for Women: A Suffrage Centennial Anthology

Traveling Through Glass

Harris, Lisa

Lisa Harris' book length poem, Dwelling Space, is a precise exploration of the world. To enter this space with her is to linger with bees among flowers and stand with her among all things green. This is poetry that ponders diverse landscapes and listens to the languages of sea otters, wolf eels, and trigger fish; this is a voyage to the Brazilian rain forest, to the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, to Greece, and a journey from Coastal Georgia north to the Allegheny Mountains. But ultimately, in Dwelling Space, Harris is a gardener of time and dust, sharing a holy passport for destinations beyond borders. The Bardian, winter 2018, commented on Harris' first collection of poems, Traveling Through Glass, a collaboration with visual artist, Patricia Brown: "This multi-disciplinary collaboration, in which Brown sketched in charcoal a model dancing to Harris's poems, engages the intellect ("we leave and never arrive, as Zeno predicted, reductio ad absurdum") and also the senses ("Tenor toned your velvet voice makes a pillow for me to choose.")"

Dwelling Space

Russell Bourne's poems will move readers into the spaces of their own hearts as they share the poet's journeys to places he loves. Whether the speaker of a poem is alone or in the company of a beloved, the poems generously share their details, creating intimacy, as well as awareness of how precious and fleeting all of life is. These poems have the weight of stillness, the gravity of contemplation, and the freedom of the senses that give them wings. Bourne is a poet to read slowly and savor. And then to read again.

Between Sky and Water: Poems of Maine, the Finger Lakes, and Changing Weather

Bourne, Russell

Angela Cannon-Crothers’ essays explore our natural world with scientific inquiry and poetic wonder in an era of changing environments, seasons, and climate. As an ecologist and a passionate observer, she writes on subjects that range from canoe guiding to foraging, from gardening to homesteading to teaching children to enjoy the outdoors. Her words will guide you along a trail of curiosity, illuminating your own journeys into nature.

Changing Seasons in the Finger Lakes

Cannon-Crothers, Angela

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Books by Cayuga Lake Books