Download or read book Barnstorming the Prairies written by Jason Weems and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-12-29 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon—and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood’s iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision’s fundamental contribution to regional identity—to Midwesternness as we understand it. Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Barnstorming the Prairies written by Jason Weems and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To Midwesterners tucked into small towns or farms early in the twentieth century, the landscape of the American heartland reached the horizon--and then imagination had to provide what lay beyond. But when aviation took off and scenes of the Midwest were no longer earthbound, the Midwestern landscape was transformed and with it, Jason Weems suggests in this book, the very idea of the Midwest itself. Barnstorming the Prairies offers a panoramic vista of the transformative nature and power of the aerial vision that remade the Midwest in the wake of the airplane. This new perspective from above enabled Americans to conceptualize the region as something other than isolated and unchanging, and to see it instead as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America's agrarian character with the more abstract forms of twentieth-century modernity. In the maps and aerial survey photography of the Midwest, as well as the painting, cinema, animation, and suburban landscapes that arose through flight, Weems also finds a different and provocative view of modernity in the making. In representations of the Midwest, from Grant Wood's iconic images to the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright to the design of greenbelt suburbs, Weems reveals aerial vision's fundamental contribution to regional identity--to Midwesternness as we understand it. Reading comparatively across these images, Weems explores how the cognitive and perceptual practices of aerial vision helped to resymbolize the Midwestern landscape amid the technological change and social uncertainty of the early twentieth century"--
Download or read book Power and Progress on the Prairie written by Thomas Biolsi and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical exploration of how modernity and progress were imposed on the people and land of rural South Dakota The Rosebud Country, comprising four counties in rural South Dakota, was first established as the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1889 to settle the Sicangu Lakota. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, white homesteaders arrived in the area and became the majority population. Today, the population of Rosebud Country is nearly evenly divided between Indians and whites. In Power and Progress on the Prairie, Thomas Biolsi traces how a variety of governmental actors, including public officials, bureaucrats, and experts in civil society, invented and applied ideas about modernity and progress to the people and the land. Through a series of case studies—programs to settle “surplus” Indian lands, to “civilize” the Indians, to “modernize” white farmers, to find strategic sites for nuclear missile silos, and to extend voting rights to Lakota people—Biolsi examines how these various “problems” came into focus for government experts and how remedies were devised and implemented. Drawing on theories of governmentality derived from Michel Foucault, Biolsi challenges the idea that the problems identified by state agents and the solutions they implemented were inevitable or rational. Rather, through fine-grained analysis of the impact of these programs on both the Lakota and white residents, he reveals that their underlying logic was too often arbitrary and devastating.
Download or read book Gas Mask Nation written by Gennifer Weisenfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons. Gas Mask Nation explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense—or bōkū—through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan’s imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country. The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.
Download or read book Chemical Lands written by David D. Vail and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the elaborate relationship between farmers, aerial sprayers, agriculturalists, crop pests, chemicals, and the environment. The controversies in the 1960s and 1970s that swirled around indiscriminate use of agricultural chemicals—their long-term ecological harm versus food production benefits—were sparked and clarified by biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). This seminal publication challenged long-held assumptions concerning the industrial might of American agriculture while sounding an alarm for the damaging persistence of pesticides, especially chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT, in the larger environment. In Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America’s Grasslands since 1945 David D. Vail shows, however, that a distinctly regional view of agricultural health evolved. His analysis reveals a particularly strong ethic in the North American grasslands where practitioners sought to understand and deploy insecticides and herbicides by designing local scientific experiments, engineering more precise aircraft sprayers, developing more narrowly specific chemicals, and planting targeted test crops. Their efforts to link the science of toxicology with environmental health reveal how the practitioners of pesticides evaluated potential hazards in the agricultural landscape while recognizing the production benefits of controlled spraying. Chemical Lands adds to a growing list of books on toxins in the American landscape. This study provides a unique Grasslands perspective of the Ag pilots, weed scientists, and farmers who struggled to navigate novel technologies for spray planes and in the development of new herbicides/insecticides while striving to manage and mitigate threats to human health and the environment.
Download or read book Carlisle Vs Army written by Lars Anderson and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2007 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the seminal November 1912 football matchup between college football powerhouse Army--which included cadet Dwight Eisenhower--and the Native American team from Carlisle, a team that was coached by the inventive Pop Warner and included the legendary Jim Thorpe. 50,000 first printing.
Download or read book Wingwalker written by Rosemary Wells and published by Hyperion. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wells waltzes readers through the stubbly cornfields of a lost America--a land of small farms, distant radio music, and county fairs where couples danced on the wings of planes. Full color.
Download or read book Grant Wood s Secrets written by Sue Taylor and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography "Return from Bohemia" for the first time ever, Sue Taylor integrates the artist’s own recollections into interpretations of his art. As Wood dressed in overalls and boasted about his beloved Midwest, he consciously engaged in regionalist strategies, performing a farmer masquerade of sorts. In doing so, he also posed as conventionally masculine, hiding his homosexuality from his rural community. Thus, he came to experience himself as a double man. This book conveys the very real threats under which Wood lived and pays tribute to his resourceful responses, which were often duplicitous and have baffled art historians who typically take them at face value.
Download or read book World War I and American Art written by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented look at the ways in which American artists reacted to the war. Artists took a leading role in chronicling the war, crafting images that influenced public opinion, supported mobilization efforts, and helped to shape how the war's appalling human toll was memorialized. The book brings together paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera, spanning the diverse visual culture of the period to tell the story of a crucial turning point in the history of American art---
Download or read book A Companion to American Agricultural History written by R. Douglas Hurt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a solid foundation for understanding American agricultural history and offers new directions for research A Companion to American Agricultural History addresses the key aspects of America’s complex agricultural past from 8,000 BCE to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Bringing together more than thirty original essays by both established and emerging scholars, this innovative volume presents a succinct and accessible overview of American agricultural history while delivering a state-of-the-art assessment of modern scholarship on a diversity of subjects, themes, and issues. The essays provide readers with starting points for their exploration of American agricultural history—whether in general or in regards to a specific topic—and highlights the many ways the agricultural history of America is of integral importance to the wider American experience. Individual essays trace the origin and development of agricultural politics and policies, examine changes in science, technology, and government regulations, offer analytical suggestions for new research areas, discuss matters of ethnicity and gender in American agriculture, and more. This Companion: Introduces readers to a uniquely wide range of topics within the study of American agricultural history Provides a narrative summary and a critical examination of field-defining works Introduces specific topics within American agricultural history such as agrarian reform, agribusiness, and agricultural power and production Discusses the impacts of American agriculture on different groups including Native Americans, African Americans, and European, Asian, and Latinx immigrants Views the agricultural history of America through new interdisciplinary lenses of race, class, and the environment Explores depictions of American agriculture in film, popular music, literature, and art A Companion to American Agricultural History is an essential resource for introductory students and general readers seeking a concise overview of the subject, and for graduate students and scholars wanting to learn about a particular aspect of American agricultural history.
Download or read book Jet Age Aesthetic written by Vanessa R. Schwartz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning look at the profound impact of the jet plane on the mid-century aesthetic, from Disneyland to Life magazine Vanessa R. Schwartz engagingly presents the jet plane’s power to define a new age at a critical moment in the mid-20th century, arguing that the craft’s speed and smooth ride allowed people to imagine themselves living in the future. Exploring realms as diverse as airport architecture, theme park design, film, and photography, Schwartz argues that the jet created an aesthetic that circulated on the ground below. Visual and media culture, including Eero Saarinen’s airports, David Bailey’s photographs of the jet set, and Ernst Haas’s experiments in color photojournalism glamorized the imagery of motion. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of The Walt Disney Studios, Schwartz also examines the period’s most successful example of fluid motion meeting media culture: Disneyland. The park’s dedication to “people-moving” defined Walt Disney’s vision, shaping the very identity of the place. The jet age aesthetic laid the groundwork for our contemporary media culture, in which motion is so fluid that we can surf the internet while going nowhere at all.
Download or read book In Love and Struggle written by Stephen M. Ward and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Boggs (1919-1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) were two largely unsung but critically important figures in the black freedom struggle. Born and raised in Alabama, James Boggs came to Detroit during the Great Migration, becoming an automobile worker and a union activist. Grace Lee was a Chinese American scholar who studied Hegel, worked with Caribbean political theorist C. L. R. James, and moved to Detroit to work toward a new American revolution. As husband and wife, the couple was influential in the early stages of what would become the Black Power movement, laying the intellectual foundation for racial and urban struggles during one of the most active social movement periods in recent U.S. history. Stephen Ward details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses' lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward's book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.
Download or read book The Environmental Uncanny written by Brian A. Irwin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Environmental Uncanny argues that the increasing destitution of our world is the result of a certain forgetfulness: we have forgotten that the basis of our knowledge is not calculative reason, but our participation in the natural world. The modern built environment is exemplary of this forgetfulness, and induces an uncanniness that can help us to understand the nature of our environmental crisis. This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on the global environmental crisis. Ranging from traditional phenomenology, including substantial discussion of both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, to philosophy of biology, to architectural and urban design theory, to landscape photography, it makes illuminating connections to paint a multifaceted picture. Tracing the root causes of dwindling biodiversity, deforestation and suburban sprawl, we can find how might we mark the path back toward a mode of rich inhabitation in a contemporary age. In charting out how it is that we are losing our world, Irwin offers a thought as to how we might regain it.
Download or read book Imagining the Heartland written by Britt E. Halvorson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction -- The Midwest and white virtue -- Heartland histories -- Inside out : the global production of insular whiteness -- No place like home : the "ordinary" Midwest through popular fiction and fantasy -- Theater of whitness : mass media discourses on the Midwest region -- Conclusion -- Appendix A : bibliography of films referenced in chapter 4 -- Appendix B : bibliography of media articles referenced in chapter 5.
Download or read book Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas written by Fernando Luiz Lara and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.
Download or read book Imaging Animal Industry written by Emily Kathryn Morgan and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imaging Animal Industry focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. Drawing on archival collections across the American Midwest, this book relates a history of the meatpacking industry's use of images in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the process, it reveals the key role that images, particularly photographs, have played in assisting with the rise of industrial meat production.
Download or read book The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism written by Gregory A. Borchard and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 3333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journalism permeates our lives and shapes our thoughts in ways that we have long taken for granted. Whether it is National Public Radio in the morning or the lead story on the Today show, the morning newspaper headlines, up-to-the-minute Internet news, grocery store tabloids, Time magazine in our mailbox, or the nightly news on television, journalism pervades our lives. The Encyclopedia of Journalism covers all significant dimensions of journalism, such as print, broadcast, and Internet journalism; U.S. and international perspectives; and history, technology, legal issues and court cases, ownership, and economics. The encyclopedia will consist of approximately 500 signed entries from scholars, experts, and journalists, under the direction of lead editor Gregory Borchard of University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
