Download or read book In Sight of America written by Dr. Anna Pegler-Gordon and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When restrictive immigration laws were introduced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they involved new requirements for photographing and documenting immigrants--regulations for visually inspecting race and health. This work is the first to take a comprehensive look at the history of immigration policy in the United States through the prism of visual culture. Including many previously unpublished images, and taking a new look at Lewis Hine's photographs, Anna Pegler-Gordon considers the role and uses of visual documentation at Angel Island for Chinese immigrants, at Ellis Island for European immigrants, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Including fascinating close visual analysis and detailed histories of immigrants in addition to the perspectives of officials, this richly illustrated book traces how visual regulations became central in the early development of U.S. immigration policy and in the introduction of racial immigration restrictions. In so doing, it provides the historical context for understanding more recent developments in immigration policy and, at the same time, sheds new light on the cultural history of American photography.
Download or read book Landscape in Sight written by John Brinckerhoff Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During a long and distinguished career, John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996) brought about a new understanding and appreciation of the American landscape. Hailed in 1995 by New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp as 'America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies,' Jackson founded Landscape Magazine in 1951, taught at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote nearly 200 essays and reviews. This appealing anthology of his most important writings on the American landscape, illustrated with his own sketches and photographs, brings together Jackson’s most famous essays, significant but less well known writings, and articles that were originally published unsigned or under various pseudonyms. Jackson also completed a new essay for this volume, 'Places for Fun and Games,' a few months before his death. Focusing not on nature but on landscape - land shaped by human presence - Jackson insists in his writings that the workaday world gives form to the essential American landscape. In the everyday places of the countryside and city, he discerns texts capable of revealing important truths about society and culture, present and past. For this collection Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz provides an introduction that discusses the larger body of Jackson’s writing and locates each of the selected essays within his oeuvre. She also includes a complete bibliography of Jackson’s writings.
Download or read book Out Of Sight Out Of Mind written by Yvonne Vissing and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because they're small, they're easy to overlook. Because their voices don't carry far, it's hard to hear them. We'd rather not look too closely or listen too carefully. And if we don't see them, maybe they'll just go away. But the invisible homeless cannot simply fly away to never-never land, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or make a wish upon a star. These homeless people are children, and they are not always in the inner cities, as Yvonne Vissing shows in this poignant study of families, housing, and poverty. As many as a third of our nation's homeless are found in rural and small-town America. They are all too commonly out of sight-and out of mind. Homelessness in small towns and rural areas is on the rise. Drawing on interviews with and case studies of three hundred children and their families, with supporting statistics from federal, state, and private agencies, Vissing illustrates the impact this social problem has upon education, health, and the economy. Families vividly describe the ways they have fallen through cracks in the social structure, from home ownership into homelessness. Looking toward the future, Vissing asks if homeless children are destined to become dysfunctional adults and provides a sixteen-year-old girl's moving testimony of the vagabond life her homeless family led. While the economy and the very nature of the family have changed over past decades, housing, education, and human service industries have failed to adapt. Vissing provides a planning model for improving support networks within communities and challenges Americans with a fundamental philosophical question: Do homeless children merit fullscale social intervention? Ultimately, Out of Sight, Out of Mind compels us not merely to voice concerns for family and community values, but also to assert this commitment consciously through improved essential services.
Download or read book A Government Out of Sight written by Brian Balogh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-06 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Government Out of Sight revises our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout the nineteenth century.
Download or read book These Truths A History of the United States written by Jill Lepore and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Download or read book A History of America in Ten Strikes written by Erik Loomis and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America “A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam Chomsky Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment. For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past. In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up. Strikes include: Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40) Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65) The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886) The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902) The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912) The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937) The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946) Lordstown (Ohio, 1972) Air Traffic Controllers (1981) Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)
Download or read book Seeing Silicon Valley written by Mary Beth Meehan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Also published in French as Visages de la Silicon Valley.
Download or read book Coming to America written by Betsy Maestro and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 1996 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the evolving history of immigration to the United States, a long saga about people coming first in search of food and then, later in a quest for religious and political freedom, safety, and prosperity.
Download or read book How the Word Is Passed written by Clint Smith and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021
Download or read book Our America written by Walter Benn Michaels and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.
Download or read book The View from Flyover Country written by Sarah Kendzior and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory. "A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays. A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. “Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire “Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune
Download or read book Hidden in Plain Sight written by Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pimp-controlled sex workers, exploited migrants, domestic servants, and sex trafficking of runaway and homeless youth are just a few of the many forms of sex trafficking and labor trafficking going on all around the world-including in the United States. This book exposes both well-known and more obscure forms of human trafficking, documenting how these heinous crimes are encountered in our daily lives. What types of human trafficking crimes are being committed here in the United States? Who are the victims of traffickers? How do we all unknowingly consume the services and products of slavery? And why are human traffickers able to maintain their illicit operations with relative impunity-indeed, with less than .01 percent of human traffickers ever being held accountable for their crimes? Hidden in Plain Sight: America's Slaves of the New Millennium documents how human trafficking and its byproducts touch every community in America, from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods to middle-class suburbs and alcoves of wealthy estates. It presents information derived from narrative accounts of real-life trafficking cases, interviews with convicted human traffickers, empirical research, and criminal case files to expose the grim realities of human trafficking in America, perpetrated by Americans. Readers will grasp the origins, evolution, and extent of the problem; understand how trafficking plays an unrecognized role in our day-to-day lives; and see why advancements in awareness and anti-trafficking resources have not changed the status quo. The victims of trafficking continue to be criminalized by law enforcement, and the offenders continue to exploit and profit from new recruits. This book equips readers with the knowledge needed to identify human trafficking cases and advocate for policy changes to end this scourge in America.
Download or read book Dear America written by Jose Antonio Vargas and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER “This riveting, courageous memoir ought to be mandatory reading for every American.” —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow “l cried reading this book, realizing more fully what my parents endured.” —Amy Tan, New York Times bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins “This book couldn’t be more timely and more necessary.” —Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of What Is the What and The Monk of Mokha Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “the most famous undocumented immigrant in America,” tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. “This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom.” —Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America
Download or read book America s Backyard written by Grace Livingstone and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has shaped Latin American history, condemning it to poverty and inequality by intervening to protect the rich and powerful. America’s Backyard tells the story of that intervention. Using newly declassified documents, Grace Livingstone reveals the US role in the darkest periods of Latin American history, including Pinochet’s coup in Chile, the Contra War in Nicaragua and the death squads in El Salvador. She shows how George W Bush’s administration used the War on Terror as a new pretext for intervention; how it tried to destabilise leftwing governments and push back the ‘pink tide’ washing across the Americas. America’s Backyard also includes chapters on drugs, economy and culture. It explains why US drug policy has caused widespread environmental damage yet failed to reduce the supply of cocaine, and it looks at the US economic stake in Latin America and the strategies of the big corporations. Today Latin Americans are demanding respect and an end to the Washington Consensus. Will the White House listen?
Download or read book Who are We written by Samuel P. Huntington and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America was founded by settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of later immigrants came gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the "denationalization" of American élites. September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism, but already there are signs that this is fading. This book shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans.--From publisher description.
Download or read book The Lost Continent written by Bill Bryson and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.
Download or read book A Beginner s Guide to America written by Roya Hakakian and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stirring, witty, and poignant glimpse into the bewildering American immigrant experience from someone who has lived it. Hakakian's "love letter to the nation that took her in [is also] a timely reminder of what millions of human beings endure when they uproot their lives to become Americans by choice" (The Boston Globe). Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice," Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others. She captures the texture of life in a new place in all its complexity, laying bare both its beauty and its darkness as she discusses race, sex, love, death, consumerism, and what it is like to be from a country that is in America's crosshairs. Her tenderly perceptive and surprisingly humorous account invites us to see ourselves as we appear to others, making it possible for us to rediscover our many American gifts through the perspective of the outsider. In shattering myths and embracing painful contradictions that are unique to this place, A Beginner's Guide to America is Hakakian's candid love letter to America.
