Download or read book Culture Under Canvas written by Harry P. Harrison and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1904, a showman and Redpath Leyceum Bureau manager named Keith Vawter, put the main forms of entertainment of the time—comedy and culture—on the same platform in a travelling tent, “marrying the respectability of the Lyceum to the spangles of the stage,” and named the union “Chautauqua,” after an institution established permanently on Chautauqua Lake, New York. For the next thirty years, Chautauqua tents rolled back and forth and up and down America, pitching in pastures, school yards and courthouse squares. “They offered not only the soaring oratory of a William Jennings Bryan, but also music, drama, magic, art lessons, cooking classes, low comedy and high-minded debates. Millions of eager listeners under the “big top” canvas, hot with summer’s sun, perspired freely and soaked up both erudition and amusement.” This book, first published in 1958, takes a close look at the movement that allowed men to talk freely from this new informal platform, abandoning nineteenth-century taboos.
Download or read book Selling Mrs Consumer written by Janice Williams Rutherford and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home--and a woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about gender roles, Frederick fashioned a career for herself that encouraged other women to remain at home. With the rise of home economics and scientific management, Frederick--college-educated but confined to the drudgery of housework--devised a plan for bringing the public sphere into the domestic. Her home would become her factory. She learned how to standardize tasks by observing labor-saving devices in industry and then applied this knowledge to housework. She standardized dishwashing, for example, by breaking the job into three separate operations: scraping and stacking, washing, and drying and putting away. Determined to train women to become proficient homemakers and efficient managers, Frederick secured a job writing articles for the Ladies' Home Journal. A professional career as home efficiency expert later expanded to include advertising consultant and consumer advocate. Frederick assured male advertisers that she knew women well and promised to help them sell to "Mrs. Consumer." While Frederick sought the power and influence available only to men, she promoted a division of labor by gender and therefore served the fall of the early-twentieth-century wave of feminism. Rutherford's engaging account of Christine Frederick's life reflects a dilemma that continues to affect women today--whether to seek professional gratification or adhere to traditional family values.
Download or read book A Godly Hero written by Michael Kazin and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, LOS ANGELES TIMES, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. Politician, evangelist, and reformer William Jennings Bryan was the most popular public speaker of his time. In this acclaimed biography—the first major reconsideration of Bryan’s life in forty years–award-winning historian Michael Kazin illuminates his astonishing career and the richly diverse and volatile landscape of religion and politics in which he rose to fame. Kazin vividly re-creates Bryan’s tremendous appeal, showing how he won a passionate following among both rural and urban Americans, who saw in him not only the practical vision of a reform politician but also the righteousness of a pastor. Bryan did more than anyone to transform the Democratic Party from a bulwark of laissez-faire to the citadel of liberalism we identify with Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1896, 1900, and 1908, Bryan was nominated for president, and though he fell short each time, his legacy–a subject of great debate after his death–remains monumental. This nuanced and brilliantly crafted portrait restores Bryan to an esteemed place in American history.
Download or read book Actors Audiences and Historic Theaters of Kentucky written by Marilyn Casto and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kentucky emerged as a prime site for theatrical activity in the early nineteenth century. Most towns, even quite small ones, constructed increasingly elaborate opera houses, which stood as objects of local pride and symbols of culture. These theaters often hosted amateur performances, providing a forum for talent and a focus for community social life. As theatrical attendance rose, performance halls began offering everything from drama to equestrian shows to burlesque. Today many architects believe that the design of a theater should not detract from the stage or screen. Marilyn Casto shows that nineteenth-century Kentucky audiences, however, not only expected elaborate decor but considered it a delightful part of the theatergoing experience. Embellished arches and painted and gilded walls and ceilings enhanced the theatricality of the performance while adding to the excitement of an evening out. In Actors, Audiences, and Historic Theaters of Kentucky, Casto investigates the social and architectural history of Kentucky theaters, paying special attention to the actors who performed in them and the audiences who saw it all. A captivating glimpse into a disappearing slice of American popular culture, her work examines what people considered entertaining, what they hoped to gain from theatergoing, and how they chose and experienced the theaters' architectural settings. In the social and physical design of these theaters, Casto explores nearly two centuries of the state's and nation's cultural history.
Download or read book Holy Ground Healing Water written by Donald J. Blakeslee and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people would not consider north central Kansas’ Waconda Lake to be extraordinary. The lake, completed in 1969 by the federal Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, and water supply purposes, sits amid a region known—when it is thought of at all—for agriculture and, perhaps to a few, as the home of "The World’s Largest Ball of Twine" (in nearby Cawker City). Yet, to the native people living in this region in the centuries before Anglo incursion, this was a place of great spiritual power and mystic significance. Waconda Spring, now beneath the waters of the lake, was held as sacred, a place where connection with the spirit world was possible. Nearby, a giant snake symbol carved into the earth by native peoples—likely the ancestors of today’s Wichitas—signified a similar place of reverence and totemic power. All that began to change on July 6, 1870, when Charles DeRudio, an officer in the 7th U.S. Cavalry who had served with George Armstrong Custer, purchased a tract on the north bank of the Solomon River—a tract that included Waconda Spring. DeRudio had little regard for the sacred properties of his acreage; instead, he viewed the mineral spring as a way to make money. In Holy Ground, Healing Water: Cultural Landscapes at Waconda Springs, Kansas, anthropologist Donald J. Blakeslee traces the usage and attendant meanings of this area, beginning with prehistoric sites dating between AD 1000 and 1250 and continuing to the present day. Addressing all the sites at Waconda Lake, regardless of age or cultural affiliation, Blakeslee tells a dramatic story that looks back from the humdrum present through the romantic haze of the nineteenth century to an older landscape, one that is more wonderful by far than what the modern imagination can conceive.
Download or read book The Most American Thing in America written by Charlotte Canning and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre History Between 1904 and the Great Depression, Circuit Chautauquas toured the rural United States, reflecting and reinforcing its citizens’ ideas, attitudes, and politics every summer through music (the Jubilee Singers, an African American group, were not always welcome in a time when millions of Americans belonged to the KKK), lectures (“Civic Revivalist” Charles Zueblin speaking on “Militancy and Morals”), elocutionary readers (Lucille Adams reading from Little Lord Fauntleroy), dramas (the Ben Greet Players’ cleaned-up version of She Stoops to Conquer), orations (William Jennings Bryan speaking about the dangers of greed), and special programs for children (parades and mock weddings). Theatre historians have largely ignored Circuit Chautauquas since they did not meet the conventional conditions of theatrical performance: they were not urban; they produced no innovative performance techniques, stage material, design effects, or dramatic literature. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Charlotte Canning establishes an analytical framework to reveal the Circuit Chautauquas as unique performances that both created and unified small-town America. One of the last strongholds of the American traditions of rhetoric and oratory, the Circuits created complex intersections of community, American democracy, and performance. Canning does not celebrate the Circuit Chautauquas wholeheartedly, nor does she describe them with the same cynicism offered by Sinclair Lewis. She acknowledges their goals of community support, informed public thinking, and popular education but also focuses on the reactionary and regressive ideals they sometimes embraced. In the true interdisciplinary spirit of Circuit Chautauquas, she reveals the Circuit platforms as places where Americans performed what it meant to be American.
Download or read book The Elocutionists written by Marian Wilson Kimber and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.
Download or read book Music in the Chautauqua Movement written by Paige Lush and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chautauqua movement was a truly American phenomenon, providing education and entertainment for millions of people and employing thousands of musicians in the process. While scholars have previously explored various facets of the chautauqua movement, this is the first book to trace the place of music in the movement from its inception through its decline. Drawing upon the rich collections of ephemera left by several chautauqua bureaus, this study profiles several famous musicians and introduces the reader to lesser-known musical acts that traveled the chautauqua circuits. In addition, it explores music's role in defining the chautauqua movement as "high culture," legitimizing the movement in the eyes of community leaders and setting it apart from vaudeville and other competing amusements. Finally, it addresses music's role in establishing chautauqua's identity as an American institution, specifically in the years surrounding World War I.
Download or read book The Chautauqua Moment written by Andrew Chamberlin Rieser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the rise and decline of what Theodore Roosevelt once called the "most American thing in America." The Chautauqua movement began in 1874 on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in western New York. More than a college or a summer resort or a religious assembly, it was a composite of all of these—completely derivative yet brilliantly innovative. For five decades, Chautauqua dominated adult education and reached millions with its summer assemblies, reading clubs, and traveling circuits. Scholars have long struggled to make sense of Chautauqua's pervasive yet disorganized presence in American life. In this critical study, Andrew Rieser weaves the threads of Chautauqua into a single story and places it at the vital center of fin de siècle cultural and political history. Famous for its commitment to democracy, women's rights, and social justice, Chautauqua was nonetheless blind to issues of class and race. How could something that trumpeted democracy be so undemocratic in practice? The answer, Rieser argues, lies in the historical experience of the white, Protestant middle classes, who struggled to reconcile their parochial interests with radically new ideas about social progress and the state. The Chautauqua Moment brings color to a colorless demographic and spins a fascinating tale of modern liberalism's ambivalent but enduring cultural legacy.
Download or read book Sifters written by Theda Perdue and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-03-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditions--the hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.
Download or read book Tent Show written by Donald W. Whisenhunt and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tent Show captures both the glamour the shows held for the audiences and the hard work and financial jeopardy those who performed in them faced. Donald Whisenhunt, whose father was one of Names's partners during part of the period covered, draws on family papers, letters and other original documents, and interviews, shedding light on the role this form of entertainment played in the communities it visited, the very unglamorous business that underlay the show, and the kinds of people who chose this way of life."--Jacket.
Download or read book More Montana Campfire Tales written by David Walter and published by Farcountry Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Montana history at its wildest and most intriguing. These 15 stories--illustrated with historical photographs--flash with humor, action, indignation, amazement, and admiration for what some Montanans (and visitors) added to the state's story.
Download or read book The Cultures of Celebrations written by Ray Broadus Browne and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Such celebrations are a text which provide the four births necessary for our full development - the anthropological concept of being "thrice born" (first into our culture, then into another culture we study, then back into our culture with new insights about both cultures) and finally a fourth birth into freedom from the grip of the two - and other - societies.".
Download or read book Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour written by Robert Volpicelli and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person--through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour. Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors--Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden--on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience--elite, popular, and everything in between.
Download or read book Reading on the Middle Border written by Christine Pawley and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2010-01-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative study of the uses of print in daily life
Download or read book Taking the Town written by Kolan Thomas Morelock and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between a town and its local institutions of higher education is often fraught with turmoil. The complicated tensions between the identity of a city and the character of a university can challenge both communities. Lexington, Kentucky, displays these characteristic conflicts, with two historic educational institutions within its city limits: Transylvania University, the first college west of the Allegheny Mountains, and the University of Kentucky, formerly "State College." An investigative cultural history of the town that called itself "The Athens of the West," Taking the Town: Collegiate and Community Culture in Lexington, Kentucky, 1880--1917 depicts the origins and development of this relationship at the turn of the twentieth century. Lexington's location in the upper South makes it a rich region for examination. Despite a history of turmoil and violence, Lexington's universities serve as catalysts for change. Until the publication of this book, Lexington was still characterized by academic interpretations that largely consider Southern intellectual life an oxymoron. Kolan Thomas Morelock illuminates how intellectual life flourished in Lexington from the period following Reconstruction to the nation's entry into the First World War. Drawing from local newspapers and other primary sources from around the region, Morelock offers a comprehensive look at early town-gown dynamics in a city of contradictions. He illuminates Lexington's identity by investigating the lives of some influential personalities from the era, including Margaret Preston and Joseph Tanner. Focusing on literary societies and dramatic clubs, the author inspects the impact of social and educational university organizations on the town's popular culture from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. Morelock's work is an enlightening analysis of the intersection between student and citizen intellectual life in the Bluegrass city during an era of profound change and progress. Taking the Town explores an overlooked aspect of Lexington's history during a time in which the city was establishing its cultural and intellectual identity.
Download or read book The Arts of Democracy written by Casey Nelson Blake and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America.
