Download or read book An American Obsession written by Jennifer Terry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on original research from medical texts, psychiatric case histories, pioneering statistical surveys, first-person accounts, legal cases, sensationalist journalism, and legislative debates, Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age. Terry's overarching argument is compelling: that homosexuality served as a marker of the "abnormal" against which malleable, tenuous, and often contradictory concepts of the "normal" were defined. One of the few histories to take into consideration homosexuality in both women and men, Terry's work also stands out in its refusal to erase the agency of people classified as abnormal. She documents the myriad ways that gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities have coauthored, resisted, and transformed the most powerful and authoritative modern truths about sex. Proposing this history as a "useable past," An American Obsession is an indispensable contribution to the study of American cultural history.
Download or read book Football written by Mark F. Bernstein and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2001-09-19 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League. With their long winning streaks, distinctive traditions, and impressive victories, Ivy teams started a national obsession with football in the first decades of the twentieth century that remains alive today. In so doing they have helped develop our ideals about the role of athletics in college life.
Download or read book Americanon written by Jess McHugh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An elegant, meticulously researched, and eminently readable history of the books that define us as Americans. For history buffs and book-lovers alike, McHugh offers us a precious gift.”—Jake Halpern, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author “With her usual eye for detail and knack for smart storytelling, Jess McHugh takes a savvy and sensitive look at the 'secret origins' of the books that made and defined us. . . . You won't want to miss a one moment of it.”—Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss and the New York Times bestselling Jim Henson The true, fascinating, and remarkable history of thirteen books that defined a nation Surprising and delightfully engrossing, Americanon explores the true history of thirteen of the nation’s most popular books. Overlooked for centuries, our simple dictionaries, spellers, almanacs, and how-to manuals are the unexamined touchstones for American cultures and customs. These books sold tens of millions of copies and set out specific archetypes for the ideal American, from the self-made entrepreneur to the humble farmer. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Webster's Dictionary, Emily Post’s Etiquette: Americanon looks at how these ubiquitous books have updated and reemphasized potent American ideals—about meritocracy, patriotism, or individualism—at crucial moments in history. Old favorites like the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book are seen in this new way—not just as popular books but as foundational texts that shaped our understanding of the American story. Taken together, these books help us understand how their authors, most of them part of a powerful minority, attempted to construct meaning for the majority. Their beliefs and quirks—as well as personal interests, prejudices, and often strange personalities—informed the values and habits of millions of Americans, woven into our cultural DNA over generations of reading and dog-earing. Yet their influence remains uninvestigated--until now. What better way to understand a people than to look at the books they consumed most, the ones they returned to repeatedly, with questions about everything from spelling to social mobility to sex. This fresh and engaging book is American history as you’ve never encountered it before.
Download or read book OverSuccess written by Jim Rubens and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2008 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are one in three American adults pervasively dissatisfied with their lives? Why is major depression seven times more likely among those born after 1970 than their grandparents? Why are one in four of us addicted to at least one substance or behavior? Why is America drowning in record personal and public debt? Why did over 100,000 people humiliate themselves this year auditioning for Fox's American Idol? Why are 80 percent of women unhappy with their bodies? What is it about contemporary America that connects the swelling incidence of depression, behavioral addictions, eating disorders, debt, materialism, sleep deprivation, family breakdown, rudeness, fame fixation, ethical collapse, mistrust, and monstrous acts of personal violence? Drawing from emerging science in several fields and insights about our transformed social lives, Rubens explains how genes, commercial culture, and global hyper-competition have locked tens of millions of Americans into an unwinnable success benchmarks race and unleashed an epidemic of status defeat. OverSuccess shows how and why the resulting social and psychological pathologies are different for baby boomers, men, and women. Offering hope for our future, Rubens outlines 20 ways that individuals, businesses, and voluntary organizations can satisfy the American drive for recognition and personal achievement without the toxic burdens of OverSuccess. These cures range from holding the door for strangers and somatic cell gene therapy, to responsible displays of wealth and building village-scale social and business organizations.
Download or read book Race Large Print 16pt written by Studs Terkel and published by ReadHowYouWant. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1992 at the height of the furor over the Rodney King incident, Studs Terkel's Race was an immediate bestseller. In a rare and revealing look how at how people in America truly feel about race, Terkel brings out the full complexity of the thoughts and emotions of both blacks and whites, uncovering a fascinating narrative of changing opinions. Preachers and street punks, college students and Klansmen, interracial couples, the nephew of the founder of apartheid, and Emmett Till's mother are among those whose voices appear in Race. In all, nearly one hundred Americans talk openly about attitudes that few are willing to admit in public; feelings about affirmative action, gentrification, secret prejudices, and dashed hopes.
Download or read book Winning written by Francesco Duina and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why winning doesn’t always lead to happiness Most of us are taught from a young age to be winners and avoid being losers. But what does it mean to win or lose? And why do we care so much? Does winning make us happy? Winning undertakes an unprecedented investigation of winning and losing in American society, what we are really after as we struggle to win, our collective beliefs about winners and losers, and much more. Francesco Duina argues that victory and loss are not endpoints or final destinations but gateways to something of immense importance to us: the affirmation of our place in the world. But Duina also shows that competition is unlikely to provide us with the answers we need. Winning and losing are artificial and logically flawed concepts that put us at odds with the world around us and, ultimately, ourselves. Duina explores the social and psychological effects of the language of competition in American culture. Primarily concerned with our shared obsessions about winning and losing, Winning proposes a new mind-set for how we can pursue our dreams, and, in a more satisfying way, find our proper place in the world.
Download or read book When More Is Not Better written by Roger L. Martin and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: We have treated the economy as a machine, pursuing ever-greater efficiency as an inherent good. But efficiency has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with it has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economy, from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already-rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). With lucid analysis and engaging anecdotes, Martin argues that we must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policy makers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.
Download or read book How Rights Went Wrong written by Jamal Greene and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2021 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
Download or read book America s Obsession written by Richard O. Davies and published by Cengage Learning. This book was released on 1994 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines sports as a microcosm of national life, from the use of sports seasons to mark time (i.e. football, baseball and basketball as opposed to spring, summer and autumn) to the propensity for starving our educational system while dumping millions into stadium and high-school athletic programs.
Download or read book The Kennedy Obsession written by John Hellmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time.
Download or read book American Green The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn written by Ted Steinberg and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-03-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ted Steinberg proves once again that he is a master storyteller as well as our foremost environmental historian.”—Mike Davis The rise of the perfect lawn represents one of the most profound transformations in the history of the American landscape. American Green, Ted Steinberg's witty exposé of this bizarre phenomenon, traces the history of the lawn from its explosion in the postwar suburban community of Levittown to the present love affair with turf colorants, leaf blowers, and riding mowers.
Download or read book Reinventing Richard Nixon written by Daniel Frick and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-04-21 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nixon's the One!" proclaimed his campaign paraphernalia. "Tricky Dick!" retorted his detractors. From presidential savior for conservative America to bte noire for the political Left, the Richard Nixon persona has worn many masks and labels. In fiction and poetry and pop songs, in television and film, no other national political figure has so thoroughly saturated our public consciousness with so many contrasting images. Focusing on the process of Nixon's continuous reinvention, Daniel Frick reveals a figure who continues to expose key fault lines in the nation's self-definition. Drawing on references ranging from All in the Family to Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, he shows how Nixon has become one of America's most durable and multifaceted icons in the ongoing and fierce debates over the import and meaning of the last sixty years of national life. Examining Nixon's autobiographies and political memorabilia, Frick offers far-reaching perceptions not only of the man but of Nixon's version of himself-contrasted with those who would interpret him differently. He cites reinventions of Nixon from the late 1980s, particularly the museum at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, to demonstrate the resilience of certain national mythic narratives in the face of liberal critiques. And he recounts how celebrants at Nixon's state funeral, at which Bob Dole's eulogy depicted a God-fearing American hero, attempted to bury the sources of our divisions over him, rendering in some minds the judgment of "redeemed statesman" to erase his status as "disgraced president." With dozens of illustrations-Nixon posing with Elvis (the National Archives' most requested photo), Nixonian cultural artifacts, classic editorial cartoons—no other book collects in one place such varied images of Nixon from so many diverse media. These reinforce Frick's probing analysis to help us understand why we disagree about Nixon—and why it matters how we resolve our disagreements. Whether your image of Nixon is shaped by his autobiography Six Crises, Oliver Stone's surprisingly sympathetic film Nixon, John Adams's landmark opera Nixon in China, or by the saga of Watergate, Reinventing Richard Nixon expands on all perspectives. It shows how, through these contradictory mythic stories, we continue to reinvent, much like Nixon himself, our own sense of national identity.
Download or read book Hunger for the Wild written by Michael L. Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have had an enduring yet ambivalent obsession with the West as both a place and a state of mind. Michael L. Johnson considers how that obsession originated, how it has determined attitudes toward and activities in the West, and how it has changed over the centuries.
Download or read book Obsessed written by Mika Brzezinski and published by Weinstein Books. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling author and cohost of MSNBC's Morning Joe describes her own struggles with food and body image and offers insights from notable people in all fields to discuss their successes with food and diet.
Download or read book Naming the Antichrist written by Robert C. Fuller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antichrist, though mentioned a mere four times in the Bible, and then only obscurely, has exercised a tight hold on popular imagination throughout history. This has been particularly true in the U.S., says author Robert C. Fuller, where Americans have tended to view our nation as uniquely blessed by God--a belief that leaves us especially prone to demonizing our enemies. In Naming the Antichrist, Fuller takes us on a fascinating journey through the dark side of the American religious psyche, from the earliest American colonists right up to contemporary fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Hal Lindsey. Fuller begins by offering a brief history of the idea of the Antichrist and its origins in the apocalyptic thought in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and traces the eventual 71Gws how the colonists saw Antichrist personified in native Americans and French Catholics, in Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the witches of Salem, in the Church of England and the King. He looks at the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, showing how such prominent Americans as Yale president Timothy Dwight and the Reverend Jedidiah Morse (father of Samuel Morse) saw the work of the Antichrist in phenomena ranging from the French Revolution to Masonry. In the twentieth century, he finds a startling array of hate-mongers--from Gerald Winrod (who vilified Roosevelt as a pawn of the Antichrist) to the Ku Klux Klan--who drew on apocalyptic imagery in their attacks on Jews, Catholics, blacks, socialists, and others. Finally, Fuller considers contemporary fundamentalist writers such as Hal Lindsey (author of The Late Great Planet Earth, with some 19 million copies sold), Mary Stewart Relfe (whose candidates for the Antichrist have included such figures as Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II, and Anwar Sadat), and a host of others who have found Antichrist in the sinister guise of the European Economic Community, the National Council of Churches, feminism, New Age religions, and even supermarket barcodes and fibre optics (the latter functioning as "the eye of the Antichrist"). Throughout, Fuller reveals in vivid detail how our unique American obsession with the Antichrist reflects the struggle to understand ourselves--and our enemies--within the mythic context of the battle of absolute good versus absolute evil. From the Scofield Reference Bible (no other book had greater impact on the American Antichrist tradition) to the Scopes Monkey Trial, Fuller provides an informative and often startling look at a thread that weaves persistently throughout American religious and cultural life.
Download or read book The Lie Detectors written by Ken Alder and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating history of the lie detector, Ken Alder exposes some persistent truths about our culture: why we long to know the secret thoughts of our fellow citizens; why we believe in popular science; and why we embrace ?truthiness.? For centuries people searched in vain for a way to unmask liars, seeking clues in the body?s outward signs: in blushing cheeks and shifty eyes. Not until the 1920s did a cop with a PhD team up with an entrepreneurial high school student and claim to have invented a foolproof machine capable of peering directly into the human heart. Scientists repudiated the technique, and judges banned its results from criminal trials, but in a few years their polygraph had transformed police work, seized headlines, and enthralled the nation.ø In this book, Alder explains why America?and only America?has embraced this mechanical method of reading the human soul. Over the course of the twentieth century, the lie detector became integral to our justice system, employment markets, and national security apparatus, transforming each into a game of bluff and bluster. The lie detector device may not reliably read the human mind, but this lively account shows that the instrument?s history offers a unique window into the American soul.
Download or read book The New Temperance written by David Wagner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war on drugs ... the campaigns against smoking cigarettes ... v-chips to control what children watch on TV ... censoring the Internet and Calvin Klein jeans ads...bipartisan lectures about the dangers of teen sex ... constant warnings about food and fat ... all are examples of what David Wagner terms the "New Temperance." The New Temperance contrasts the new obsession with personal behavior in America during the last two decades with the brief period of relative freedom in the 1960s and early 1970s and suggests strong consistencies with our past. In particular, the late twentieth century appears to have re-created the mood of the Victorian and Progressive Periods, when social movements such as the Temperance, Social Purity, and Vice and Vigilance movements held sway. The New Temperance questions the constant mantra in the media and in political debates about the dangers of personal behavior and challenges America's love affair with repression.
