Download or read book Out in the Country written by Mary L. Gray and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention An unprecedented contemporary account of the online and offline lives of rural LGBT youth From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker’s Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today’s rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important book shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age.

Download or read book America Abroad written by Stephen G. Brooks and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade and a half of exhausting wars, punishing economic setbacks, and fast-rising rivals has called into question America's fundamental position and purpose in world politics. Will the US continue to be the only superpower in the international system? Should it continue advancing the world-shaping grand strategy it has followed since the Cold War? Or should it focus on internal problems? America Abroad takes stock of these debates and provides a powerful defense of American globalism. Since the end of World War Two, world politics has been shaped by two constants: America's position as the most powerful state, and its strategic choice to be deeply engaged in the world. But if America disengages from the world and reduces its footprint overseas, core US security and economic interests would be jeopardized. While America should remain globally engaged, it has to focus primarily on its core interests or run the risk of overextension. A bracing rejoinder to the critics of American globalism-a more potent force than ever in the Trump era-America Abroad is a powerful reminder that a robust American presence is crucial for maintaining world order.

Download or read book Inside Game Outside Game written by David Rusk and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2001-05-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to David Rusk, focusing on programs aimed at improving inner-city neighborhoods--playing the " inside game" --is a losing strategy. Achieving real improvement requires matching the " inside game" with a strong " outside game" of regional strategies to overcome growing fiscal disparities, concentrated poverty, and urban sprawl.

Download or read book Forgotten Americans written by Isabel Sawhill and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation’s economic inequalities One of the country’s leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society—economic, cultural, and political—and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. While many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

Download or read book Outside America written by Dan Moos and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new study of those excluded from the national narrative of the West. Dan Moos challenges both traditional and revisionist perspectives in his exploration of the role of the mythology of the American West in the creation of a national identity. While Moos concurs with contemporary scholars who note that the myths of the American West depended in part upon the exclusion of certain groups - African Americans, Native Americans, and Mormons - he notes that many scholars, in their eagerness to identify and validate such excluded positions, have given short shrift to the cultural power of the myths they seek to debunk. That cultural power was such, Moos notes, that these disenfranchised groups themselves sought to harness it to their own ends through the active appropriation of the terms of those myths in advocating for their own inclusion in the national narrative. that, because the construction of American culture was never designed to accommodate these outsiders, their writings display a division between their imagined place in the narrative of the nation and their effacement within the real West marked by intolerance and inequality.

Download or read book Outside America written by Hikaru Fujii and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the "outside" as a space of freedom has always been central in the literature of the United States. This concept still remains active in contemporary American fiction; however, its function is being significantly changed. Outside, America argues that, among contemporary American novelists, a shift of focus to the temporal dimension is taking place. No longer a spatial movement, the quest for the outside now seeks to reach the idea of time as a force of difference, a la Deleuze, by which the current subjectivity is transformed. In other words, the concept is taking a "temporal turn." Discussing eight novelists, including Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Paul Theroux, and Annie Proulx, each of whose works describe forces of given identities-masculine identity, historical temporality, and power, etc.-which block quests for the outside, Fujii shows how the outside in these texts ceases to be a spatial idea. With due attention to critical and social contexts, the book aims to reveal a profound shift in contemporary American fiction.

Download or read book Under the Sky We Make written by Kimberly Nicholas PhD and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ** Los Angeles Times bestseller ** It's warming. It's us. We're sure. It's bad. But we can fix it. After speaking to the international public for close to fifteen years about sustainability, climate scientist Dr. Nicholas realized that concerned people were getting the wrong message about the climate crisis. Yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in. But individuals CAN effect real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem. Nicholas explores finding purpose in a warming world, combining her scientific expertise and her lived, personal experience in a way that seems fresh and deeply urgent: Agonizing over the climate costs of visiting loved ones overseas, how to find low-carbon love on Tinder, and even exploring her complicated family legacy involving supermarket turkeys. In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power--we're going to have to seize it for ourselves.

Download or read book South to America written by Imani Perry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An elegant meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.” —Isabel Wilkerson An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America We all think we know the South. Even those who have never lived there can rattle off a list of signifiers: the Civil War, Gone with the Wind, the Ku Klux Klan, plantations, football, Jim Crow, slavery. But the idiosyncrasies, dispositions, and habits of the region are stranger and more complex than much of the country tends to acknowledge. In South to America, Imani Perry shows that the meaning of American is inextricably linked with the South, and that our understanding of its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation as a whole. This is the story of a Black woman and native Alabaman returning to the region she has always called home and considering it with fresh eyes. Her journey is full of detours, deep dives, and surprising encounters with places and people. She renders Southerners from all walks of life with sensitivity and honesty, sharing her thoughts about a troubling history and the ritual humiliations and joys that characterize so much of Southern life. Weaving together stories of immigrant communities, contemporary artists, exploitative opportunists, enslaved peoples, unsung heroes, her own ancestors, and her lived experiences, Imani Perry crafts a tapestry unlike any other. With uncommon insight and breathtaking clarity, South to America offers an assertion that if we want to build a more humane future for the United States, we must center our concern below the Mason-Dixon Line. A Recommended Read from: The New Yorker • The New York Times • TIME • Oprah Daily • USA Today • Vulture • Essence • Esquire • W Magazine • Atlanta Journal-Constitution • PopSugar • Book Riot • Chicago Review of Books • Electric Literature • Lit Hub

Download or read book Abroad at Home written by and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated, fact-filled book takes you on a trip around the United States and Canada. Presenting experiences in villages, neighborhoods, and regions that cover the breadth of North America's great global diversity - Chinatowns and Little Italys, of course, but also Polish, German, French, Russian, and Japanese enclaves - as well as landscapes that make you think you could very well be in New Zealand or Provence or Tuscany.

Download or read book Down and Out in America written by Peter H. Rossi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most accurate and comprehensive picture of homelessness to date, this study offers a powerful explanation of its causes, proposes short- and long-term solutions, and documents the striking contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the contemporary homeless population, which is younger and contains more women, children, and blacks.

Download or read book Outside the Dream written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Depicts the dangers children face from poverty, drugs, and violence. Documentary photography at its most affecting, Outside the dream rivets attention on one of our most urgent social problems: the more than 12 million children of poverty adrift in an affluent society. From 1984-1989, photographer Stephen Shames devoted himself to a major photographic study which chronicles the lives of the one out of five children in the United States who live in poverty...While documenting the plight of children living below the poverty line, Shames intimately experience daily existence in welfare hotels and abandoned buildings; he documented children living in cars, seeking shelter in churches, and struggling to survive without electricity or water. Shames' extraordinary eye bears witness to the heartbreaking and the heroic: the children who are too tired or ashamed to go to school, and the love which binds families together even in the worst of situations. The photographs which comprise Outside the dream evoke the unflinching emotional commitment of Jacob Riis' How the other half lives and Walker Evans' Let us now praise famous men. An introduction by eminent journalist Jonathan Kozol completes this stirring work.

Download or read book Outside the Gates of Eden written by Peter Bacon Hales and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural historian and author of Atomic Spaces offers a comprehensive account of the Baby Boomer years—from the atomic age to the virtual age. Born under the shadow of the atomic bomb, with little security but the cold comfort of duck-and-cover drills, the postwar generations lived through—and led—some of the most momentous changes in all of American history. In this new cultural history, Peter Bacon Hales explores those decades through a succession of resonant moments, spaces, and artifacts of everyday life. Finding unexpected connections, he traces the intertwined undercurrents of promise and peril. From newsreels of the first atomic bomb tests to the invention of a new ideal American life in Levittown; from the teen pop music of the Brill Building and the Beach Boys to Bob Dylan’s canny transformations; from the painful failures of communes to the breathtaking utopian potential of the digital age, Hales reveals a nation in transition as a new generation began to make its mark on the world it was inheriting. Outside the Gates of Eden is the most comprehensive account yet of the baby boomers, their parents, and their children, as seen through the places they built, the music and movies and shows they loved, and the battles they fought to define their nation, their culture, and their place in what remains a fragile and dangerous world.

Download or read book America in the World written by Robert B. Zoellick and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America has a long history of diplomacy–ranging from Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and James Baker–now is your chance to see the impact these Americans have had on the world. Recounting the actors and events of U.S. foreign policy, Zoellick identifies five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose. These traditions frame a closing review of post-Cold War presidencies, which Zoellick foresees serving as guideposts for the future. Both a sweeping work of history and an insightful guide to U.S. diplomacy past and present, America in the World serves as an informative companion and practical adviser to readers seeking to understand the strategic and immediate challenges of U.S. foreign policy during an era of transformation.

Download or read book Our Towns written by James Fallows and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BEST SELLER • The basis for the HBO documentary now streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

Download or read book Out Of America written by Keith B Richburg and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keith B. Richburg was an experienced and respected reporter who had paid his dues covering urban neighborhoods in Washington D.C., and won praise for his coverage of Southeast Asia. But nothing prepared him for the personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was assigned to cover Africa. In this powerful book, Richburg takes the reader on an extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to Rwanda to Zaire and finally to South Africa. He shows how he came to terms with the divide within himself: between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity. Are these really my people? Am I truly an African-American? The answer, Richburg finds, after much soul-searching, is that no, he is not an African, but an American first and foremost. To those who romanticize Mother Africa as a black Valhalla, where blacks can walk with dignity and pride, he regrets that this is not the reality. He has been there and witnessed the killings, the repression, the false promises, and the horror. "Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive," he concludes. "Thank God I am an American."

Download or read book American Nations written by Colin Woodard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • A New Republic Best Book of the Year • The Globalist Top Books of the Year • Winner of the Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction Particularly relevant in understanding who voted for who during presidential elections, this is an endlessly fascinating look at American regionalism and the eleven “nations” that continue to shape North America According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West, to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of any hotly contested election in our history.

Download or read book Doing Time on the Outside written by Donald Braman and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007-08-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Stigma, shame and hardship---this is the lot shared by families whose young men have been swept into prison. Braman reveals the devastating toll mass incarceration takes on the parents, partners, and children left behind." -Katherine S. Newman "Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading." -Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project "Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book." -Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city. Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments. Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.