Most Popular Books by Henry Glassie

In this fascinating analysis of eighteenth-century vernacular houses of Middle Virginia, Henry Glassie presents a revolutionary and carefully constructed methodology for looking at houses and interpreting from them the people who built and used them. Glassie believes that all relevant historical evidence - unwritten as well as written - must be taken into account before historical truth can be found. He in convinced that any study of man''s past must make use of nonverbal and verbal evidence, since written history - the story of man as recorded by the intellectual elite - does not tell us much about the everyday life, thoughts, and fears of the ordinary people of the past. Such people have always been in the majority, however, and a way has to be found to include them in any valid history. In Folk Housing in Middle Virginia Glassie admirably sets forth such a way. The people who lived in Middle Virginia in the eighteenth century are almost unknown to history because so little has been written about them. After Glassie selected the area - roughly Goochland and Louisa counties - for study, he selected a representative part of the countryside, recorded all the older houses there, developed a transformational grammar of traditional house designs, and examined the area''s architectural stability and change. Comparing the houses with written accounts of the period, he found that the houses became more formal and lee related to their environment at the same time as the areas established political, economic, and religious institutions were disintegrating. It is as though the builders of the houses were deliberately trying to impose order on the surrounding chaotic world. Previous orthodox historical interpretations of the period have failed to note this. Glassie has provided new insights into the intellectual and social currents of the period, and at that time has rescued a heretofore little-known people from historiographical oblivion. Combining a fresh, perceptive approach with a broad interdisciplinary body of knowledge, ha has made an invaluable breakthrough in showing the way to understand the people of history who have left their material things as their only legacy. Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. He is the author of Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States, passing the Time in Ballymenone, Irish Folktales, and The Spirit of Folk Art. He has served as president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and the American Folklore Society.

In story, song, and spontaneous essay, these texts tell of the coming of Christianity, of endless war, of the hardships and delights of rural life.

Here are 125 magnificent folktales collected from anthologies and journals published from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with tales of the ancient times and continuing through the arrival of the saints in Ireland in the fifth century, the periods of war and family, the Literary Revival championed by William Butler Yeats, and the contemporary era, these robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic stories of kings, ghosts, fairies, treasures, enchanted nature, and witchcraft are set in cities, villages, fields, and forests from the wild western coast to the modern streets of Dublin and Belfast. Edited by Henry Glassie With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Ballymenone is a district in the parish of Cleenish.

" ... Distinguished folklorist Henry Glassie has selected three hundred objects from the Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art at Santa Fe, the world''s largest cross-cultural collection of folk art ..."--Inside front cover.

"Filled with brilliant insights and tantalizing leads."--

"A beautifully written exploration of a vanishing holiday ritual that can be traced back to the dramas of the sixteenth century and beyond." --Philadelphia Inquirer

In the time of the Troubles, when there were bombs in the night and soldiers on the road, Henry Glassie journeyed to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh. He asked questions, and he listened. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world--a world which, in their view, was one of love and defeat and uncertainty, demanding faith, bravery, and wit. In his award-winning Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie set out to write a comprehensive ethnography of the community. Now, after decades of work in Asia, in Turkey and Bangladesh, in India and Japan, Glassie has returned to Ireland, using his skills as an observer, a listener, a writer, in an effort to understand how poor people in rural places suffer and laugh and carry on while history happens. Glassie''s task in The Stars of Ballymenone is to set the scene, to sketch the backdrop and clear the stage, so that Hugh Nolan and Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler, and their neighbors can tell their own tale. The Stars of Ballymenone is an integrated analysis of the complete repertory of verbal art from a community where storytelling and singing of quality remained a part of daily life. The book includes a CD so the voices of Ballymenone can be heard at last.

A masterful introduction to the artists and artisans of Bangladesh and a meditation on the nature of art and life. Henry Glassie introduces us to dozens of artists working in different mediums--potters, metal workers, painters, weavers, poets--and shares the excitement of meeting new people and discovering new art forms. 12 color photos. 445 bandw photos.

Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork, Glassie''s Vernacular Architecture synthesizes a career of concern with traditional building. He articulates the key principles of architectural analysis, and then, centering his argument in the United States, but drawing comparative examples from many locations in Europe and Asia, he shows how architecture can be a prime resource for the one who would write a democratic and comprehensive history.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven (1944-2011) was not only one of Africa''s most famous contemporary artists and the leader of the Osogbo School of Nigerian artists, he was known as the modern master of the Yoruba tradition in art. His work has been exhibited on every continent, is collected by major museums throughout the world, and in 2005, Prince was named UNESCO Artist for Peace. Henry Glassie blends life and art to create a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist. This lavishly illustrated book, part biography and part artist''s catalog, addresses tradition and innovation in Prince''s art, the development of his personal style, the force of the supernatural in Nigerian life, and the hard times of the immigrant artist in the United States.

Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors. Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves. Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.

He tells of architecture, calligraphy, woodworking, and earthenware, but lays particular emphasis on the brilliant, underglaze-painted ceramics of Kutahya and the rich, piled carpets for which Turkey has been famed for centuries. While searching for the traits that define art and the stylistic complexities that characterize Turkish creativity, Glassie focuses on the artists and their theories and practices as well as the works they produce.

Material culture records human intrusion in the environment. It is the way we imagine a distinction between nature and culture, and then rebuild nature to our own desire, by shaping, reshaping, and arranging things during our lifetimes. We live in material culture, depend upon it, take it for granted, and realize through it our grandest aspirations.

DANIEL JOHNSTON, raised on a farm in Randolph County, returned from Thailand with a new way to make monumental pots. Back home in North Carolina, he built a log shop and a whale of a kiln for wood-firing. Then he set out to create beautiful pots, grand in scale, graceful in form, and burned bright in a blend of ash and salt. With mastery achieved and apprentices to teach, Daniel Johnston turned his brain to massive installations. First, he made a hundred large jars and lined them along the rough road that runs past his shop and kiln. Next, he arranged curving clusters of big pots inside pine frames, slatted like corn cribs, to separate them from the slick interiors of four fine galleries in succession. Then, in concluding the second phase of his professional career, Daniel Johnston built an open-air installation on the grounds around the North Carolina Museum of Art, where 178 handmade, wood-fired columns march across a slope in a straight line, 350 feet in length, that dips and lifts with the heave while the tops of the pots maintain a level horizon. In 2000, when he was still Mark Hewitt''s apprentice, Daniel Johnston met Henry Glassie, who has done fieldwork on ceramic traditions in the United States, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh, China, and Japan. Over the years, during a steady stream of intimate interviews, Glassie gathered the understanding that enabled him to compose this portrait of Daniel Johnston, a young artist who makes great pots in the eastern Piedmont of North Carolina.