Download or read book CULTURE AS HISTORY written by Warren Susman and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together for the first time the best of twenty-five years of unique critical work, Warren Susman takes us on a startling tour through the conflicts and events which have transformed the social, political, and cultural face of America in this century. Probing a rich panoply of images from the mass media and advertising, testing prevalent intellectual and economic theories, linking the revolutions in communications and technology to the rise of a new pantheon of popular heroes. Susman documents and analyzes the process through which the older, Puritan-republican, producer-capitalist culture has given way to the leisure-oriented, consumer society we now inhabit: the culture of abundance.
Download or read book American Culture American Tastes written by Michael Kammen and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them. Professor Kammen shows how the post-traditional popular culture that flourished after the 1880s became full-blown mass culture after World War II, in an era of unprecedented affluence and travel. He charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass-marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the gradual repudiation of the genteel tradition; and the commercialization of organized entertainment. He stresses the significance of television in the shaping of mass culture, and of consumerism in its reconfiguration over the past two decades. Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion. An important commentary on the often conflicting ways Americans have understood, defined, and talked about their changing culture in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Twentieth century American Art written by Erika Lee Doss and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an overview of twentieth-century American art, covering such topics as avant-garde art, pop art, abstract expressionism, and feminist art.
Download or read book Babe Ruth and the Creation of the Celebrity Athlete written by Thomas Barthel and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his first year in the majors, George Herman "Babe" Ruth knew he could profit from celebrity. Babe Ruth Cigars in 1915 marked his first attempt to cash in. Traded to the Yankees in 1920, he soon signed with Christy Walsh, baseball's first publicity agent. Walsh realized that stories of great deeds in sports were a commodity, and in 1921 sold Ruth's ghostwritten byline to a newspaper syndicate for $15,000 ($187,000 today). Ruth hit home runs while Walsh's writers made him a hero, crafting his public image as a lovable scalawag. Were the stories true? It didn't matter--they sold. Many survive but have never been scrutinized until now. Drawing on primary sources, this book examines the stories, separating exaggerated facts from clear falsehoods. This book traces Ruth's ascendance as the first great media-created superstar and celebrity product endorser.
Download or read book After Parsons written by Renee C. Fox and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Esteemed twentieth-century sociologist Talcott Parsons sought to develop a comprehensive and coherent scheme for sociology that could be applied to every society and historical epoch, and address every aspect of human social organization and culture. His theory of social action has exerted enormous influence across a wide range of social science disciplines. After Parsons, edited by Renée Fox, Victor Lidz, and Harold Bershady, provides a critical reexamination of Parsons' theory in light of historical changes in the world and advances in sociological thought since his death. After Parsons is a fresh examination of Parsons' theoretical undertaking, its significance for social scientific thought, and its implications for present-day empirical research. The book is divided into four parts: Social Institutions and Social Processes; Societal Community and Modernization; Sociology and Culture; and the Human Condition. The chapters deal with Parsons' notions of societal community, societal evolution, and modernization and modernity. After Parsons addresses major themes of enduring relevance, including social differentiation and cultural diversity, social solidarity, universalism and particularism, and trust and affect in social life. The contributors explore these topics in a wide range of social institutions—family and kinship, economy, polity, the law, medicine, art, and religion—and within the context of contemporary developments such as globalization, the power of the United States as an "empireless empire," the emergence of forms of fundamentalism, the upsurge of racial, tribal, and ethnic conflicts, and the increasing occurence of deterministic and positivistic thought. Rather than simply celebrating Parsons and his accomplishments, the contributors to After Parsons rethink and reformulate his ideas to place them on more solid foundations, extend their scope, and strengthen their empirical insights. After Parsons constitutes the work of a distinguished roster of American and European sociologists who find Parsons' theory of action a valuable resource for addressing contemporary issues in sociological theory. All of the essays in this volume take elements of Parsons' theory and critique, adapt, refine, or extend them to gain fresh purchase on problems that confront sociologists today.
Download or read book The Frontiers of Women s Writing written by Brigitte Georgi-Findlay and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the myth of the American frontier is largely the product of writings by men, a substantial body of writings by women exists that casts the era of western expansion in a different light. In this study of American women's writings about the West between 1830 and 1930, a European scholar provides a reconstruction and new vision of frontier narrative from a perspective that has frequently been overlooked or taken for granted in discussions of the frontier. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay presents a range of writings that reflects the diversity of the western experience. Beginning with the narratives of Caroline Kirkland and other women of the early frontier, she reviews the diaries of the overland trails; letters and journals of the wives of army officers during the Indian wars; professional writings, focusing largely on travel, by women such as Caroline Leighton from the regional publishing cultures that emerged in the Far West during the last quarter of the century; and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts of missionaries and teachers on Indian reservations. Most of the writers were white, literate women who asserted their own kind of cultural authority over the lands and people they encountered. Their accounts are not only set in relation to a masculine frontier myth but also investigated for clues about their own involvement with territorial expansion. By exploring the various ways in which women writers actively contributed to and at times rejected the development of a national narrative of territorial expansion based on empire building and colonization, the author shows how their accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment. Georgi-Findlay has drawn on American studies scholarship, feminist criticism, and studies of colonial discourse to examine the strategies of women's representation in writing about the West in ways that most theorists have not. She critiques generally accepted stereotypes and assumptions--both about women's writing and its difference of view in particular, and about frontier discourse and the rhetoric of westward expansion in general--as she offers a significant contribution to literary studies of the West that will challenge scholars across a wide range of disciplines.
Download or read book When Ladies Go A Thieving written by Elaine S. Abelson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-07-09 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.
Download or read book Born in the U S A written by Timothy E. Scheurer and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vision of America seen through the lyrics of its popular songs
Download or read book Art Deco Chicago written by Robert Bruegmann and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive take on American Art Deco that explores Chicago's pivotal role in developing the architecture, graphic design, and product design that came to define middle-class style in the twentieth century Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost Midway Gardens, the iconic Sunbeam Mixmaster, and Marshall Field’s famed window displays: despite the differences in scale and medium, each belongs to the broad current of an Art Deco style that developed in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. This ambitious overview of the city’s architectural, product, industrial, and graphic design between 1910 and 1950 offers a fresh perspective on a style that would come to represent the dominant mode of modernism for the American middle class. Lavishly illustrated with 325 images, the book narrates Art Deco’s evolution in 101 key works, carefully curated and chronologically organized to tell the story of not just a style but a set of sensibilities. Critical essays from leading figures in the field discuss the ways in which Art Deco created an entire visual universe that extended to architecture, advertising, household objects, clothing, and even food design. Through this comprehensive approach to one of the 20th century’s most pervasive modes of expression in America, Art Deco Chicago provides an essential overview of both this influential style and the metropolis that came to embody it.
Download or read book The Idea of a Social Studies Education written by James A. Duplass and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a fresh take on the purpose of social studies today, James A. Duplass positions philosophical counseling as a way for teachers to engage students in thinking deeply about what it means to be a citizen in a democratic society. The Idea of a Social Studies Education takes a uniquely humanistic approach to the idea of a social studies education to show how teachers can act as philosophical counselors in preparing students for active civic engagement. Duplass reminds the reader of the needs of students in modern society who seek to develop an identity worth living and the role social studies can play in students achieving that process. By focusing on the cultivation of students’ autonomy, authenticity, efficacy, and agency, Duplass’ approach avoids political biases and instead encourages critical thinking to decipher what a democratic ideology truly is.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing written by Kelly Boyd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-09 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.
Download or read book Moving Bodies written by Erik Ringmar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly we have come to live in our heads, leaving our bodies behind. The consequences have been far-reaching, of which cognitive theory has warned us, advocating a 'return to the body.' This book employs several case studies-kings performing in ballets, sea captains dancing with natives, nationalists engaged in gymnastics exercises-to demonstrate what has been lost and what could be gained by a more embodied approach to living, to history. These curious movements were ways to be, to think, to know, to imagine, and to will. They highlight the limits of historical explanations focusing on cultural factors and question currently fashionable 'cultural' and 'post-modern' perspectives. Bodies, cognitive theory tells us, are the same regardless of historical context, and they engage in the same intentional activities. Returning to our bodies and their movements enables us not only to explain historical actions anew, but also to understand ourselves better.
Download or read book Being boys written by Melanie Tebbutt and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and fresh approach to the emotions of adolescence focuses on the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years. Being Boys challenges many stereotypes about their behaviour. It offers new perspectives on familiar and important themes in interwar social and cultural history, ranging from the cinema and mass consumption to boys’ clubs, personal advice pages, street cultures, dancing, sexuality, mobility and the body. It draws on many autobiographies and personal accounts and is particularly distinctive in offering an unusual insight into working-class adolescence through the teenage diaries of the author’s father, which are interwoven with the book’s broader analysis of contemporary leisure developments. Being Boys will be of interest to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences and is also relevant to those teaching and studying in the fields of child development, education, and youth and community studies.
Download or read book Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation written by Jürgen Heideking and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, the formative period of American national identity, the authors reveal the complex interrelationships between collective identities on the local, regional, and national level which, over time, shaped the peculiar character of American nationalism. This volume combines vivid descriptions of various public celebrations with a sophisticated methodological and theoretical approach.
Download or read book Culture as History written by Warren I. Susman and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Studies written by Jack Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-29 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an annotated bibliography of 20th century books through 1983, and is a reworking of American Studies: An Annotated Bibliography of Works on the Civilization of the United States, published in 1982. Seeking to provide foreign nationals with a comprehensive and authoritative list of sources of information concerning America, it focuses on books that have an important cultural framework, and does not include those which are primarily theoretical or methodological. It is organized in 11 sections: anthropology and folklore; art and architecture; history; literature; music; political science; popular culture; psychology; religion; science/technology/medicine; and sociology. Each section contains a preface introducing the reader to basic bibliographic resources in that discipline and paragraph-length, non-evaluative annotations. Includes author, title, and subject indexes. ISBN 0-521-32555-2 (set) : $150.00.
Download or read book A Companion to American Cultural History written by Karen Halttunen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to American Cultural History offers a historiographic overview of the scholarship, with special attention to the major studies and debates that have shaped the field, and an assessment of where it is currently headed. 30 essays explore the history of American culture at all analytic levels Written by scholarly experts well-versed in the questions and controversies that have activated interest in this burgeoning field Part of the authoritative Blackwell Companions to American History series Provides both a chronological and thematic approach: topics range from British America in the Eighteenth Century to the modern day globalization of American Culture; thematic approaches include gender and sexuality and popular culture
