Download or read book American Cornball written by Christopher Miller and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Cornball is Christopher Miller's irresistibly funny illustrated survey of popular humor—the topics that used to make us laugh, from hiccups and henpecked-husbands to outhouses and old maids—and what it tells us about our country yesterday and today. Miller revisits nearly 200 comic staples that have been passed down through our culture for generations, many originating from the vaudeville age. He explores the (often unseemly) contexts from which they arose, why they were funny in their time, and why they eventually lost their appeal. The result is a kind of taxonomy of humor during America's golden age that provides a deeper, more profound look at the prejudices, preoccupations, and peculiarities of a nation polarized between urban and rural, black and white, highborn and lowbrow. As he touches on issues of racism and sexism, cultural stereotypes and violence, Miller reveals how dramatically our moral sensibilities have shifted, most notably in the last few decades. Complete with more than 100 period illustrations, American Cornball is a richly entertaining survey of our shifting comic universe.
Download or read book American Cornball written by Christopher Miller and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The American Voter Stupid and Ignorant written by Walt Kienia and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-02-08 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Eve, stupid people have existed and multiplied. Far too many stumble through life, fortunate that breathing is involuntary, with ignorance and without common sense. It is not surprising then, that they bring their brainless way of life to the voting arena. The American Voter: Stupid and Ignorant, takes an anecdotal, historical, and statistical look at how the voters, from Eisenhower to Obama, through the eyes of the professionals, and nonprofessionals, who have reported on this nonsense, have stumbled into a voting booth with only slightly more cognitive ability than a vegetable. God Bless America!
Download or read book The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English written by Tom Dalzell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-07-25 with total page 1120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English offers the ultimate record of modern American Slang. The 25,000 entries are accompanied by citations that authenticate the words as well as offer lively examples of usage from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, television shows, musical lyrics, and Internet user groups. Etymology, cultural context, country of origin and the date the word was first used are also provided. This informative, entertaining and sometimes shocking dictionary is an unbeatable resource for all language aficionados out there.
Download or read book Ice written by Amy Brady and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-06-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unexpected and unexplored ways that ice has transformed a nation—from the foods Americans eat, to the sports they play, to the way they live today—and what its future might look like on a swiftly warming planet. Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way—and to overlook what aspects of society might just melt away as the planet warms. In Ice, journalist and historian Amy Brady shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America: from the introduction of mixed drinks “on the rocks,” to the nation’s first-ever indoor ice rink, to how delicacies like ice creams and iced tea revolutionized our palates, to the ubiquitous ice machine in every motel across the US. But Ice doesn’t end in the past. Brady also explores the surprising present-day uses of ice in sports, medicine, and sustainable energy—including cutting-edge cryotherapy breast-cancer treatments and new refrigerator technologies that may prove to be more energy efficient—underscoring how precious this commodity is, especially in an age of climate change.
Download or read book True to the Code written by Peter Devine and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A solitary aviator checks his instruments before taking off on a flight that will mean glory or, more likely, death. A fearless war correspondent relies upon the kindness of strangers to pursue her next big story. The best baseball player in the world enjoys a night out on the town in the company of a few close friends. A brilliant theoretical physicist mixes martinis under the stars in the New Mexican wilderness. These and other sharply etched vignettes offer intimate glimpses into the lives of extraordinary people who, living by their own codes, were shaped by America and who shaped America in return. Photographs of that era display the stress factor quite clearly in Gus Grissoms pinched features, the lunar craters under his eyes, the thousand-yard stare in his gaze as he does his level best to deliver the undeliverable. In his brief stops in Houston, Betty notices that her husband, who has always made a point of not bringing his work or his worries home with him, can no longer afford himself that respite, and she and the boys get a measure of the strain. In a moment of darkness, he says to her, If theres ever a serious accident in the program, its probably going to be me. Not exactly dinner-table conversation. From The Wingman
Download or read book American Made written by Harold C Livesay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Made is a best-selling collection of biographical sketches that introduces key trends of American business.The book details American business through time by presenting the history of people who forever changed the way that Americans do business. Harold Livesay maintains clarity and intellectual acumen while highlighting two themes: globalization and the impact of information technology on business. This edition includes updated stories of its hallmark historical business figures with the latest scholarship as well as additional biographies of figures that have redefined American business in recent years.
Download or read book Seattle and the Demons of Ambition written by Fred Moody and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-12-08 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Founded in 1851 as a four-cabin outpost named "New York Pretty-Soon," Seattle has long struggled with an identity crisis. From a nearly lawless port, to a sedate, conventional company town defined by Boeing Aircraft, to an accessible paradise for artists and recovering urbanites, Seattle repeatedly tried and failed to become bigger, wealthier, more like "major league" cities. In the late 1980s, Seattle's time suddenly arrived. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, McCaw Cellular/AT&T Wireless, and dozens of local dot.com startups began to drive a booming national economy. Seattle became a city of instant millionaires and brand name shopping, skyscrapers and sports franchises-- the place everyone wanted to visit, topping lists of America's "most desirable" cities. But with such wealth came consequences: overdevelopment, paralyzing traffic, racial and class divisions, and a street population of teenagers discarded by the new culture, whose rage and disaffection fueled the rise of bands such as Nirvana. Striving to reach its ambitions, Seattle seemed to be losing the struggle for its soul. And when it hosted the 1999 World Trade Organization convention, the city's conflicted personalities clashed, as violent riots by residents and a coalition of protestors left the downtown decimated and the nation transfixed by the spectacle of globalization gone wrong. In Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, Fred Moody uses his own background as a native son, along with wide-ranging encounters with others, to trace the growing pains of the city he loves. Profiling Bill Gates and never-quite-champion football coach Chuck Knox, a pair of ambitious entrepreneurs and a homeless sculptor once profiled in the New Yorker, grunge music superstars and the preyed-upon children of the documentary "Streetwise," Moody offers a dramatic, entertaining, and insightful portrait of the city that defined economic and technological change in the America of the 1990s.
Download or read book Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office written by and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions written by Orin Hargraves and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans and Britons are exposed to unedited texts, scripts, and speech from one another's dialects at an unprecedented and accelerating rate. Most people have no trouble understanding the general meaning of language in the other dialect, but readers and listeners very often fail to understand or misunderstand critical words, references, and allusions for lack of familiarity of the social and cultural contexts that underlie various usages. This book remedies this gap in understanding by cataloguing the differences that language users on either side of the Atlantic are likely to encounter in their dealings with the other dialect. By taking a culturally neutral stance it addresses the needs of both British and American readers and listeners. The thematic organization of the book allows the user to access language differences in various subject areas, where words likely to be needed at the same time can all be found together. Chapters include; Politics, Law, and Government; Business and Money; Medicine and Healthcare; Education; Food, Clothing, and Shelter; Transportation; Sports; and Profanity and Obscenity, in addition to basic information on orthography, weights and measures, etc. The appendices and extensive index provide a ready point of entry for quick look-ups, and there will be an extra chapter on Canadian, Australian, and Asian English.
Download or read book The American Wife written by Elaine Ford and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Elaine Ford’s collection roams the territory between the intellect and the heart. She writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational. Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness. This writer grips the reader with her keen knowledge of the psyche of individuals-—their motives and secrets—and also with the surprising things that happen to them.” —Laura Kasischke, judge, Michigan Literary Fiction Awards Of Elaine Ford’s novel, Missed Connections, the Washington Post wrote that it is a work “of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity.” That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford’s stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath. In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed. Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world.
Download or read book The Contemporary American Monologue written by Eddie Paterson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talk-show confessions, online rants, stand-up routines, inspirational speeches, banal reflections and calls to arms: we live in an age of solo voices demanding to be heard. In The Contemporary American Monologue Eddie Paterson looks at the pioneering work of US artists Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith and Karen Finley, and the development of solo performance in the US as a method of cultural and political critique. Ironic confession, post-punk poetry, investigations of race and violence, and subversive polemic, this book reveals the link between the rise of radical monologue in the late 20th century and history of speechmaking, politics, civil rights, individual freedom and the American Dream in the United States. It shows how US artists are speaking back to the cultural, political and economic forces that shape the world. Eddie Paterson traces the importance of the monologue in Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Chekov, Pinter, O'Neill and Williams, before offering a comprehensive analysis of several of the most influential and innovative American practitioners of monologue performance. The Contemporary American Monologue constitutes the first book-length account of US monologists that links the tradition of oratory and speechmaking in the colony to the appearance of solo performance as a distinctly American phenomenon.
Download or read book The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English written by Tom Dalzell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booklist Top of the List Reference Source The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new edition of the authoritative work on slang details the slang and unconventional English of the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English published sources given for each entry, often including an early or significant example of the term’s use in print. hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term’s origins and meaning New to this edition: A new preface noting slang trends of the last five years Over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia New terms from the language of social networking Many entries now revised to include new dating, new citations from written sources and new glosses The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning – it’s rude, it’s delightful, and it’s a prize for anyone with a love of language.
Download or read book The American Midwest written by Andrew R. L. Cayton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-08 with total page 1918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.
Download or read book Making the American Body written by Jonathan Black and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you thought the fitness craze was about being healthy, think again. Although Charles Atlas, Jack LaLanne, Jim Fixx, Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and Jillian Michaels might well point the way to a better body, they have done so only if their brands brought in profits. In the first book to tell the full story of the American obsession with fitness and how we got to where we are today, Jonathan Black gives us a backstage look at an industry and the people that have left an indelible mark on the American body and the consciousness it houses. Spanning the nation's fitness obsession from Atlas to Arnold, from Spinning to Zumba, and featuring an outrageous cast of characters bent on whipping us into shape while simultaneously shaping the way we view our bodies, Black tells the story of an outsized but little-examined aspect of our culture. With insights drawn from more than fifty interviews and attention to key developments in bodybuilding, aerobics, equipment, health clubs, running, sports medicine, group exercise, Pilates, and yoga, Making the American Body reveals how a focus on fitness has shaped not only our physiques but also, and more profoundly, American ideas of what "fitness" is.
Download or read book American Outlaw written by Jesse James and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Discovery Channel star offers an honest reflection on the highs and lows of his life, from his troubled youth to his failed marriages, and discusses his struggle to overcome his own personal demons and make peace with his past.
Download or read book American Presidents Year by Year written by Julie Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 1841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating multi-volume set illuminates the panorama of American history through the personal and professional stories of the nation's presidents. Arranged chronologically, and covering George Washington to George W. Bush, it juxtaposes the lives of each year's current, former, and future living presidents against each other and the historical backdrop of their times. Each chapter opens with a summary of the year and describes the major issues and events the incumbent president faced. Separate sections within each chapter - "Former Presidents" and "Future Presidents" - detail important developments in the lives of past and future presidents month by month during that same year, highlighting political, social, and personal decisions that helped shape the course of American history.
