Download or read book Highbrows Hillbillies and Hellfire written by Steve Goodson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the Great Depression, Atlanta was the New South's "Gate City." Steve Goodson's social and cultural history looks at the variety of public amusements available to Atlantans of the day, including theater, vaudeville, dime museums, movies, radio, and classical, blues, and country music. Revealed in the ways its people embraced or condemned everything from burlesque to opera is an Atlanta unsure of its identity and acutely sensitive of its image in the eyes of the nation. While the general populace hungered for novelty and diversion, middle-class Atlantans, white and black, saw entertainment as a source of--or threat to--status and respectability. Goodson traces the roots of this tension to the city's rapid and problematic growth, its uncomfortably diverse population, and its multiplying ties to national markets. At the same time he portrays some lively individuals who shaped Atlanta's entertainment scene. Among them are impresario Laurent DeGive, tightrope walker Professor Leon, patent-medicine salesman Yellowstone Kit, country music great Fiddlin' John Carson, and blues legends Bessie Smith and Blind Willie McTell. Goodson also brings alive the atmosphere of such venues as DeGive's resplendent Grand Opera House, George Johnson's tacky Museum of Living Wonders, the pioneering Trocadero vaudeville house, and the notorious 81 Theater on Decatur Street, an avenue whose decadent promise rivaled that of Beale in Memphis and Bourbon in New Orleans. Milestone trends and events are also showcased: performances of the play Uncle Tom's Cabin and showings of the film Birth of a Nation, visits by the Metropolitan Opera Company, the debate over Sunday entertainment, the beginning of broadcasts by "The Voice of the South"--radio station WSB--and the rise of Atlanta as the earliest capital of country and blues recording. Accepted historical views of public entertainment in America suggest that ethnicity and class would be the most pronounced forces shaping this aspect of Atlanta's popular culture. Goodson finds, however, that race and evangelical Christianity also heavily influenced the circumstances in which Atlantans went about their fun. With implications for the entire urban South, this is an engaging look at how and why its major city once grasped at sophistication and progress with one hand while pushing it away with the other.
Download or read book Highbrows Hillbillies Hellfire written by Steve Goodson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "While the general populace hungered for novelty and diversion, middle-class Atlantans, white and black, saw entertainment as a source of - or threat to - status and respectability. Goodson traces the roots of this tension to the city's rapid and problematic growth, its uncomfortably diverse population, and its multiplying ties to national markets. At the same time he portrays some lively individuals who shaped Atlanta's entertainment scene. Among them are impresario Laurent DeGive, tightrope walker Professor Leon, patent-medicine salesman Yellowstone Kit, country music great Fiddlin' John Carson, and blues legends Bessie Smith and Blind Willie McTell.
Download or read book Veiled Visions written by David Fort Godshalk and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-05-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come. Nationally, the riot radicalized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. Du Bois's confrontationist stance and diminishing the accommodationist voice of Booker T. Washington. In Atlanta, fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with black elites, establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South without national intervention. Paired with black fears of renewed violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated black social divisions and repeatedly undermined black social justice movements, leaving the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation. Analyzing the interwoven struggles of men and women, blacks and whites, social outcasts and national powerbrokers, Godshalk illuminates the possibilities and limits of racial understanding and social change in twentieth-century America.
Download or read book Leo Ornstein written by Michael Broyles and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-15 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices traces the meteoric rise and heretofore inexplicable disappearance of the Russian-American, futurist-anarchist, pianist-composer from his arrival in the United States in 1906 through a career that lasted nearly a century. Outliving his admirers and critics by decades Leo Ornstein passed away in 2002 at the age of 108. Frequently compared to Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, for a time Ornstein enjoyed a kind a celebrity granted few living musicians. And then he turned his back on it all. This first, full-length biographical study draws upon interviews, journals, and letters from a wide circle of Ornstein's friends and acquaintances to track the Ornstein family as it escaped the horrors of the Russian pogroms, and it situates the Russian-Jewish-American musician as he carved out an identity amidst World War I, the flu pandemic, and the Red Scare. While telling Leo Ornstein's story, the book also illuminates the stories of thousands of immigrants with similar harrowing experiences. It also explores the immeasurable impact of his unexpected marriage in 1918 to Pauline Mallet-Prevost, a Park Avenue debutante. Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices finds Ornstein at the center of several networks that included artists John Marin, William Zorach, Leon Kroll, writers and activists Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, Edmund Wilson, and Clair Reis, the Stieglitz Circle, and a group of English composers known as the Frankfurt Five. Ornstein's story challenges directly the traditional chronology and narrative regarding musical modernism in America and its close relation to the other arts.
Download or read book In the Shadow of The Birth of a Nation written by Melvyn Stokes and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together many of the world’s leading scholars on race and film to re-consider the legacy and impact of D.W. Griffith’s deeply racist 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. While this film is often cited, there is a considerable dearth of substantial research on its initial impact and global reach. These essays fill important gaps in the history of the film, including essential work on its sources, international reception, and African American responses. This book is a key text in the history of the most infamous and controversial film ever made and offers crucial new insights to scholars and students working in film history, African American history and the history of race relations.
Download or read book Lynching and Spectacle written by Amy Louise Wood and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life. Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.
Download or read book The Pussycat of Prizefighting written by Andrew M. Kaye and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1926, Atlanta's Theodore “Tiger” Flowers became the first African-American boxer to win the world middleweight title. The next year, he was dead. More than an account of Flowers's remarkable achievements, the book is a penetrating analysis of the cultural and historical currents that defined the terms of Flowers's success. Through the prism of prizefighting, the author reveals the personal cost African-Americans faced as they attempted to earn black respect while escaping white hostility.
Download or read book Linthead Stomp written by Patrick Huber and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the origins and development of American country music in the Piedmont's mill villages celebrates the colorful cast of musicians and considers the impact that urban living, industrial music, and mass culture had on their lives and music.
Download or read book Women on Southern Stages 1800 1865 written by Robin O. Warren and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women played an integral role in the theater of the Antebellum and Civil War South. Yet their contributions have largely been overlooked by history. Southern actresses were important public figures who helped mold gender identity through their theatrical performances. Although cast in parts written by men, they subverted the norms of femininity in their public personas and in their personal lives. Educated and often wealthy but never accepted by the landed elite, women distinguished themselves by carving out an in-between class status, and many proved to be sophisticated entrepreneurs. Southern actresses also helped shape racial perceptions and regional politics as the South entered the Civil War.
Download or read book I d Fight the World written by Peter La Chapelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-09 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the United States had presidents from the world of movies and reality TV, we had scores of politicians with connections to country music. In I’d Fight the World, Peter La Chapelle traces the deep bonds between country music and politics, from the nineteenth-century rise of fiddler-politicians to more recent figures like Pappy O’Daniel, Roy Acuff, and Rob Quist. These performers and politicians both rode and resisted cultural waves: some advocated for the poor and dispossessed, and others voiced religious and racial anger, but they all walked the line between exploiting their celebrity and righteously taking on the world. La Chapelle vividly shows how country music campaigners have profoundly influenced the American political landscape.
Download or read book Music and the Making of a New South written by Gavin James Campbell and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the period of 1890 to 1925, Campbell focuses on three popular musical institutions: the New York Metropolitan Opera (which visited Atlanta each year), the Colored Music Festival, and the Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers' Convention. He shows how attempts to inscribe music with a single, public, fixed meaning were connected to much larger struggles over the distribution of social, political, cultural, and economic power. Attitudes about music extended beyond the concert hall to simultaneously enrich and impoverish both the region and the nation that these New Southerners struggled to create.
Download or read book Schooling Jim Crow written by Jay Winston Driskell and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-12-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters. In this pathbreaking book, Jay Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.
Download or read book Atlanta s Ponce de Leon Avenue written by Sharon Foster Jones and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-27 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named for the famous Spanish explorer who was said to have discovered the Fountain of Youth, Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue began as a simple country road that conveyed visitors to the famous healing springs. Now, few motorists realize that the avenue, one of Atlanta's major commuter thoroughfares, was a prestigious residential street in Victorian Atlanta, home to mayors and millionaires. An economic turn in the twentieth century transformed the avenue into a crime-ridden commercial corridor, but in recent years, Atlantans have rediscovered the street's venerable architecture and storied history. Join local historian Sharon Foster Jones on a vivid tour of the avenue - from picnics by the springs in hoopskirts and Atlanta Crackers baseball to the Fox Theatre and the days when Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Al Capone lodged in the esteemed hotels lining this magnificent avenue.
Download or read book The Culture of Property written by LeeAnn Lands and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of the idea of “neighborhood” in a major American city examines the transition of Atlanta, Georgia, from a place little concerned with residential segregation, tasteful surroundings, and property control to one marked by extreme concentrations of poverty and racial and class exclusion. Using Atlanta as a lens to view the wider nation, LeeAnn Lands shows how assumptions about race and class have coalesced with attitudes toward residential landscape aesthetics and home ownership to shape public policies that promote and protect white privilege. Lands studies the diffusion of property ideologies on two separate but related levels: within academic, professional, and bureaucratic circles and within circles comprising civic elites and rank-and-file residents. By the 1920s, following the establishment of park neighborhoods such as Druid Hills and Ansley Park, white home owners approached housing and neighborhoods with a particular collection of desires and sensibilities: architectural and landscape continuity, a narrow range of housing values, orderliness, and separation from undesirable land uses—and undesirable people. By the 1950s, these desires and sensibilities had been codified in federal, state, and local standards, practices, and laws. Today, Lands argues, far more is at stake than issues of access to particular neighborhoods, because housing location is tied to the allocation of a broad range of resources, including school funding, infrastructure, and law enforcement. Long after racial segregation has been outlawed, white privilege remains embedded in our culture of home ownership.
Download or read book Georgia Women written by Betty Wood and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in the second volume of Georgia Women portray a wide array of Georgia women who played an important role in the state's history, from little-known Progressive Era activists to famous present-day figures such as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
Download or read book Johnny Mercer written by Glenn T. Eskew and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Herndon “Johnny” Mercer (1909–76) remained in the forefront of American popular music from the 1930s through the 1960s, writing over a thousand songs, collaborating with all the great popular composers and jazz musicians of his day, working in Hollywood and on Broadway, and as cofounder of Capitol Records, helping to promote the careers of Nat “King” Cole, Margaret Whiting, Peggy Lee, and many other singers. Mercer’s songs—sung by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, and scores of other performers—are canonical parts of the great American songbook. Four of his songs received Academy Awards: “Moon River,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” Mercer standards such as “Hooray for Hollywood” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” remain in the popular imagination. Exhaustively researched, Glenn T. Eskew’s biography improves upon earlier popular treatments of the Savannah, Georgia–born songwriter to produce a sophisticated, insightful, evenhanded examination of one of America’s most popular and successful chart-toppers. Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World provides a compelling chronological narrative that places Mercer within a larger framework of diaspora entertainers who spread a southern multiracial culture across the nation and around the world. Eskew contends that Mercer and much of his music remained rooted in his native South, being deeply influenced by the folk music of coastal Georgia and the blues and jazz recordings made by black and white musicians. At Capitol Records, Mercer helped redirect American popular music by commodifying these formerly distinctive regional sounds into popular music. When rock ’n’ roll diminished opportunities at home, Mercer looked abroad, collaborating with international composers to create transnational songs. At heart, Eskew says, Mercer was a jazz musician rather than a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, and the interpenetration of jazz and popular song that he created expressed elements of his southern heritage that made his work distinctive and consistently kept his music before an approving audience.
Download or read book Torches of Light written by Ann Short Chirhart and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As turbulent social and economic changes swept the South in the first half of the twentieth century, education became the flashpoint. Ann Short Chirhart's study is the first to analyze such modernizing events in Georgia. She shows how these changes affected the creation of the state's public school system and cast its teachers in a crucial role as mediators between transformation and tradition. Depicting Georgia's steps toward modernity through teachers' professional and cultural work and the educational reforms they advocated, Chirhart presents a unique perspective on the convergence of voices across the state calling for reform or continuity, secularism or theology, equality or enforced norms, consumption or self-reliance. Although most teachers, black and white, shared backgrounds rooted in localism and evangelical Protestantism, attitudes about race and gender kept them apart. African American teachers, individually and collectively, redefined traditional beliefs to buttress ideals of racial uplift and to press for equal access to public services. White women adapted similar beliefs in different ways to enhance their efforts to train greater numbers of white students for professional and wage labor. Torches of Light is based on such sources as government archives, manuscript collections, and interviews with teachers. As Chirhart examines the ideas over which Georgians clashed, she also shows how those ideas were embodied in New Deal and U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, the political activities of the black Georgia Teachers and Educators Association, and the Georgia legislature's 1949 Minimum Foundation Act. Through two world wars and the Great Depression, teachers sought to reconcile clashing beliefs not only to renegotiate class, race, and gender roles but also to enhance their own professionalism and authority.
