Download or read book Nightclub City written by Burton W. Peretti and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Roaring Twenties, New York City nightclubs and speakeasies became hot spots where traditions were flouted and modernity was forged. With powerful patrons in Tammany Hall and a growing customer base, nightclubs flourished in spite of the efforts of civic-minded reformers and federal Prohibition enforcement. This encounter between clubs and government-generated scandals, reform crusades, and regulations helped to redefine the image and reality of urban life in the United States. Ultimately, it took the Great Depression to cool Manhattan's Jazz Age nightclubs, forcing them to adapt and relocate, but not before they left their mark on the future of American leisure. Nightclub City explores the cultural significance of New York City's nightlife between the wars, from Texas Guinan's notorious 300 Club to Billy Rose's nostalgic Diamond Horseshoe. Whether in Harlem, Midtown, or Greenwich Village, raucous nightclub activity tested early twentieth-century social boundaries. Anglo-Saxon novelty seekers, Eastern European impresarios, and African American performers crossed ethnic lines while provocative comediennes and scantily clad chorus dancers challenged and reshaped notions of femininity. These havens of liberated sexuality, as well as prostitution and illicit liquor consumption, allowed their denizens to explore their fantasies and fears of change. The reactions of cultural critics, federal investigators, and reformers such as Fiorello La Guardia exemplify the tension between leisure and order. Peretti's research delves into the symbiotic relationships among urban politicians, social reformers, and the business of vice. Illustrated with archival photographs of the clubs and the characters who frequented them, Nightclub City is a dark and dazzling study of New York's bygone nightlife.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound written by William Gibbons and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 977 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.
Download or read book Surveillance Capitalism in America written by Josh Lauer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that a ubiquitous but often unseen surveillance infrastructure created by business and the state has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding.
Download or read book Nightclub City written by Burton W. Peretti and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrated with archival photographs of the clubs and the characters who frequented them, this book is a dark and dazzling study of New York's bygone nightlife.
Download or read book Prohibition New York City written by David Rosen and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The drunken ’20s started roaring almost immediately, but they were loudest in Manhattan. David Rosen’s [book] has all the snazzy, jazzy details.” —NY Daily News Texas Guinan was the queen of New York’s speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city’s biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown’s “Wet Zone,” Greenwich Village and Harlem for inebriated entertainment. Patrons threw cultural norms aside as free-flowing hooch lubricated the jazz joints, sex circuses and drag balls that fueled the era’s insurgent spirit. At the center of the party was Texas with her trademark catchphrases and guarantee to have a good time. Author David Rosen recounts Texas’s adventurous life alongside tales of Gotham’s nightlife when abstinence was the law of the land and breaking the law an all-American indulgence.
Download or read book Cultivating Agent in the City written by Shen NuWangZhe and published by Funstory. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 1655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of them was a young man who had been involved in cultivation since he was a child. One was a young man who wanted to bring prosperity to his country. The other was a man with lofty ambitions. In order to cheer up China, he would use all sorts of methods. Money, beauties, power, and status had all become nothing in his eyes. Only the strength of his countrymen was his ultimate dream. And how the protagonist uses his special ability to develop his own power.
Download or read book City Songs and American Life 1900 1950 written by Michael L. Lasser and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nothing defines the songs of the great American songbook more richly and persuasively than their urban sensibility. During the first half of the twentieth century, songwriter such as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, and Thomas 'Fats' Waller flourished in New York City, the home of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem. Many of these remarkably deft and forceful creators were native New Yorkers. Others got to Gotham as fast as they could. Either way, it was as if, from their vantage point on the West Side of Manhattan, these artists were describing America--not its geography of politics, but its heart--to Americans and to the world at large. In City songs and American life, 1900-1950, renowned author and broadcaster Michael Lasser offers an evocative and probing account of the popular songs--including some written originally for the stage or screen--that America heard, and sang, and danced to during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. Lasser demonstrates how the spirit of the teeming city pervaded these wildly diverse songs. Often that spirit took form overtly in songs that portrayed the glamor of Broadway of the energy and jazz age culture of Harlem. But a city-bred spirit--or even a specifically New York City way of feeling and talking--also infused many other widely known and loved songs, stretching from the early decades of the century to the twenties (the age of the flapper, bathtub gin, and women's right to vote), the Great Depression, and, finally, World War II. Throughout this remarkable book, Lasser emphasizes how the soul of city life, as echoes in the nation's songs, developed and changed in tandem with economic, social, and political currents in America as a whole"--Dust jacket flap.
Download or read book Bright Light City written by Larry Gragg and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.
Download or read book Supreme City written by Donald L. Miller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --
Download or read book City of Chicago V Hollins written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victory City written by John Strausbaugh and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From John Strausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and The Village, comes the definitive history of Gotham during the World War II era. New York City during World War II wasn't just a place of servicemen, politicians, heroes, G.I. Joes and Rosie the Riveters, but also of quislings and saboteurs; of Nazi, Fascist, and Communist sympathizers; of war protesters and conscientious objectors; of gangsters and hookers and profiteers; of latchkey kids and bobby-soxers, poets and painters, atomic scientists and atomic spies. While the war launched and leveled nations, spurred economic growth, and saw the rise and fall of global Fascism, New York City would eventually emerge as the new capital of the world. From the Gilded Age to VJ-Day, an array of fascinating New Yorkers rose to fame, from Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes to Joe Louis, to Robert Moses and Joe DiMaggio. In Victory City, John Strausbaugh returns to tell the story of New York City's war years with the same richness, depth, and nuance he brought to his previous books, City of Sedition and The Village, providing readers with a groundbreaking new look into the greatest city on earth during the most transformative -- and costliest -- war in human history.
Download or read book Not Bad for Delancey Street written by Mark Cohen and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was amazing. "A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country's No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment," Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, Rose ran a larger organization than any other producer in America. "He's clever, clever, clever," said Rose's first wife, the legendary Fanny Brice. "He's a smart little goose." Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose is the first biography in fifty years of the producer, World's Fair impresario, songwriter, nightclub and theater owner, syndicated columnist, art collector, tough guy, and philanthropist, and the first to tell the whole story of Rose's life. He combined a love for his thrilling and lucrative American moment with sometimes grandiose plans to aid his fellow Jews. He was an exaggerated exemplar of the American Jewish experience that predominated after World War II: secular, intermarried, bent on financial success, in love with Israel, and wedded to America. The life of Billy Rose was set against the great events of the twentieth century, including the Depression, when Rose became rich entertaining millions; the Nazi war on the Jews, which Rose combated through theatrical pageants that urged the American government to act; the postwar American boom, which Rose harnessed to attain extraordinary wealth; and the birth of Israel, where Rose staked his claim to immortality. Mark Cohen tells the unlikely but true story, based on exhaustive research, of Rose's single-handed rescue in 1939 of an Austrian Jewish refugee stranded in Fascist Italy, an event about which Rose never spoke but which surfaced fifty years later as the nucleus of Saul Bellow's short novel The Bellarosa Connection.
Download or read book Talk with You Like a Woman written by Cheryl D. Hicks and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial upl
Download or read book The Bishop and the Butterfly written by Michael Wolraich and published by Union Square & Co.. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The 1931 murder of 'Broadway Butterfly' Vivian Gordon exposed an explosive story of graft, corruption and entrapment that went all the way to the top of the state. Wolraich brings a journalist’s eye and a novelist’s elegance to this story of Jazz Age New York.”—New York Times Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes. Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets? As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham’s powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall.
Download or read book Beryl Halley written by Jacob L. Bapst and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-08-09 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in rural Ohio in 1897, Beryl Halley was educated at a strict Freewill Baptist school. After briefly teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, she joined the navy in 1918 before her unlikely path led her to Broadway, then to the Ziegfeld Follies (1923-1925). She also appeared in Earl Carroll's Vanities and other revues, as well as in films, and had a widely publicized brush with the law (over alleged nudity) in 1926. She retired from show business in 1930, married an insurance executive and had a family, later reappearing in the public eye as an officer in the Ziegfeld Girls' Club. Making her home in Houston in the 1950s, she worked as legal secretary for a large law firm. Her death at age 90 was unpublicized. Her story is told here for the first time.
Download or read book Americans in a World at War written by Brooke L. Blower and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections. On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper's passengers--among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy--upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the "American Century."
Download or read book Chinook written by Richard Wambolt and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I don’t go looking for it, but trouble seems to find me.” It’s the summer of 1977 in Medicine Hat, Alberta and twelve-year-old Will Widmann’s biggest problems are worrying about starting junior high in the fall, maintaining his summer lawn-mowing business, and avoiding the bullying Lowe brothers. But a bigger problem emerges when he meets Harper, a tough-talking teenaged girl who seems to be hiding in fear for her life. Will doesn’t know it yet, but evil has come to sleepy Medicine Hat, and by helping Harper he’ll be running afoul of a criminal gang and ending up at the centre of a robbery, kidnapping, and murder plot that puts him into heart-stopping danger. Told in Will Widmann’s anxious, self-deprecating, and frequently hilarious voice, Chinook is a fast-paced thriller with a painfully observant perspective on emerging from childhood into adolescence as well as touching relationships; colorful, specific characters; complicated family dynamics; and sharp, funny dialogue.
