Pamela Haag

A helpful, engaging guide to the revision of scholarly writing by an editor and award-winning author “Pamela Haag has been called ‘the tenure whisperer’ for good reason. Any scholar who hopes to attract a wider audience of readers will benefit from the brilliant, step-by-step guidance shared here. It’s pure gold for all aspiring nonfiction writers.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America Writing and revision are two different skills. Many scholar-writers have learned something about how to write, but fewer know how to read and revise their own writing, spot editorial issues, and transform a draft from passable to great. Drawing on before and after examples from more than a decade as a developmental editor of scholarly works, Pamela Haag tackles the most common challenges of scholarly writing. This book is packed with practical, user-friendly advice and is written with warmth, humor, sympathy, and flair. With an inspiring passion for natural language, Haag demonstrates how to reconcile clarity with intellectual complexity. Designed to be an in-the-trenches desktop reference, this indispensable resource can help scholars develop a productive self-editing habit, advise their graduate and other students on style, and, ultimately, get their work published and praised.

Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation.Or so we're told.In The Gunning of America , historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional, but precisely because it was not: guns proliferated in America because throughout most of the nation's history, they were perceived as an unexceptional commodity, no different than buttons or typewriters.Focusing on the history of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, one of the most iconic arms manufacturers in America, Haag challenges many basic assumptions of how and when America became a gun culture. Under the leadership of Oliver Winchester and his heirs, the company used aggressive, sometimes ingenious sales and marketing techniques to create new markets for their product. Guns have never sold themselves" rather, through advertising and innovative distribution campaigns, the gun industry did. Through the meticulous examination of gun industry archives, Haag challenges the myth of a primal bond between Americans and their firearms. Over the course of its 150 year history, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company sold over 8 million guns. But Oliver Winchester,a shirtmaker in his previous career,had no apparent qualms about a life spent arming America. His daughter-in-law Sarah Winchester was a different story. Legend holds that Sarah was haunted by what she considered a vast blood fortune, and became convinced that the ghosts of rifle victims were haunting her. She channeled much of her inheritance, and her conflicted conscience, into a monstrous estate now known as the Winchester Mystery House, where she sought refuge from this ever-expanding army of phantoms.In this provocative and deeply-researched work of narrative history, Haag fundamentally revises the history of arms in America, and in so doing explodes the clichés that have created and sustained our lethal gun culture.

Pamela Haag has written the generational big book on modern marriage, a mesmerizing, sometimes salacious look at the semi-happy ambivalence lurking just below the surface of many marriages today. The spouses may rarely fight - they may maintain a sincere affection for each other - but one or both may harbor a melancholy sense that something important is missing. Remarkably, this side of the marriage story hasn't been told or analyzed until now. Meticulously researched and injected with insightful firsthand accounts and welcome doses of humor, "Marriage Confidential" articulates for a generation that grew up believing they would have it all why they have ended up disenchanted. Haag introduces us to contemporary marriages where spouses act more like life partners than lovers; children occupy an uncontested position at the center of the marital relationship; and, even the romantic staples of sexual fidelity and passion are assailed from all sides so much so that spouses can end up having affairs online almost by accident. Blending tales from the front lines of matrimony with cultural history, surveys, and research covert-ops (such as joining an online affair-finding site and posting a personal ad in the "New York Review of Books"), Haag paints a detailed picture of the state of marriage today. And to show what's possible as well as what's melancholy in our post-romantic age, Haag seeks out marriages with a twist - rebels who are quietly brainstorming and evolving the scripts around career, money, social life, child rearing, and sex. Provocative but sympathetic, forward-thinking and bold, here, at last, is a manifesto for living large in marriage.