Download or read book The Evangelist and the Impresario written by Kathryn J. Oberdeck and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is culture and who has the authority to define it? If culture is comprised of hierarchies, who determines what their standards should be, and how? What are the stakes involved in conceiving some forms of culture as good and others as bad? These may sound like questions from late-twentieth-century American culture wars, but they were already in vigorous dispute a century ago. In The Evangelist and the Impresario, Kathryn Oberdeck explores how a broad range of Americans addressed these questions at the vibrant intersection of religion, vaudeville, and class politics at the turn of the twentieth century. The Evangelist and the Impresario focuses on the intriguing careers of two remarkable public figures: Irish-born socialist Alexander Irvine and Italian-American entertainment mogul Sylvester Poli. Using these two characters as "tour guides," Oberdeck leads readers through a period of upheaval in America's intellectual history when religion and entertainment combined to produce critical cultural debate. The narrative follows Irvine's career as Protestant minister, socialist activist, popular author, and vaudeville actor and Poli's success as a theatrical entrepreneur with a circuit of East Coast vaudeville houses. Examining the varied connections the two men made across the Atlantic and the United States, Oberdeck traces the way Irvine drew on the formulas and themes of Poli's entertainment world to develop novel, popular approaches to evangelism and class politics. As both men sought audiences across lines of class as well as race, ethnicity, and gender, the author contends, their careers demonstrate how these intersecting dimensions of social difference informed definitivedebates about cultural standards among ordinary Americans. Irvine, Poli, and their audiences in theater, religion, and working-class politics pondered these differences in ways that helped to reformulate cultural hierarchies of Protestant uplift and Darwinian struggle into concepts of cultural pluralism. Thus, far from simply recounting biographies, Oberdeck traces cultural trajectories, mapping alliances that shaped the careers of two men whose engagement with popular audiences helped to transform intellectual arguments taking place in the twentieth-century public sphere. By charting connections across their converging paths, this stimulating book shows how Irvine, Poli, and the communities they addressed challenged the cultural vocabularies of class distinction in their era. In the process, it reveals how entertainment audiences, trade-unionist church-goers, working-class mothers, and immigrant thespians, along with cultural elites, helped to shape the terms of twentieth-century cultural debate.
Download or read book The Evangelist and the Impresario written by Kathryn J. Oberdeck and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is culture and who has the authority to define it? If culture is comprised of hierarchies, who determines what their standards should be, and how? What are the stakes involved in conceiving some forms of culture as good and others as bad? These may sound like questions from late-twentieth-century American culture wars, but they were already in vigorous dispute a century ago. In The Evangelist and the Impresario, Kathryn Oberdeck explores how a broad range of Americans addressed these questions at the vibrant intersection of religion, vaudeville, and class politics at the turn of the twentieth century. The Evangelist and the Impresario focuses on the intriguing careers of two remarkable public figures: Irish-born socialist Alexander Irvine and Italian-American entertainment mogul Sylvester Poli. Using these two characters as "tour guides," Oberdeck leads readers through a period of upheaval in America's intellectual history when religion and entertainment combined to produce critical cultural debate. The narrative follows Irvine's career as Protestant minister, socialist activist, popular author, and vaudeville actor and Poli's success as a theatrical entrepreneur with a circuit of East Coast vaudeville houses. Examining the varied connections the two men made across the Atlantic and the United States, Oberdeck traces the way Irvine drew on the formulas and themes of Poli's entertainment world to develop novel, popular approaches to evangelism and class politics. As both men sought audiences across lines of class as well as race, ethnicity, and gender, the author contends, their careers demonstrate how these intersecting dimensions of social difference informed definitivedebates about cultural standards among ordinary Americans. Irvine, Poli, and their audiences in theater, religion, and working-class politics pondered these differences in ways that helped to reformulate cultural hierarchies of Protestant uplift and Darwinian struggle into concepts of cultural pluralism. Thus, far from simply recounting biographies, Oberdeck traces cultural trajectories, mapping alliances that shaped the careers of two men whose engagement with popular audiences helped to transform intellectual arguments taking place in the twentieth-century public sphere. By charting connections across their converging paths, this stimulating book shows how Irvine, Poli, and the communities they addressed challenged the cultural vocabularies of class distinction in their era. In the process, it reveals how entertainment audiences, trade-unionist church-goers, working-class mothers, and immigrant thespians, along with cultural elites, helped to shape the terms of twentieth-century cultural debate.
Download or read book Eusebius the Evangelist written by Jeremiah Coogan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eusebius the Evangelist analyzes Eusebius of Caesarea's fourth-century reconfiguration of the Gospels as a window into broader questions of technology and textuality in the ancient Mediterranean. The four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) share language, narratives, and ideas, yet they also differ in structure and detail. The sophisticated system through which Eusebius organized this intricate web of textual relationships is known as the Eusebian apparatus. Eusebius' editorial intervention--involving tables, sectioning, and tables of contents--participates in a broader late ancient transformation in reading and knowledge. To illuminate Eusebius' innovative use of textual technologies, the study juxtaposes diverse ancient disciplines--including chronography, astronomy, geography, medicine, philosophy, and textual criticism--with a wide range of early Christian sources, attending to neglected evidence from material texts and technical literature. These varied phenomena reveal how Eusebius' fourfold Gospel worked in the hands of readers. Eusebius' creative juxtapositions of Gospel material had an enduring impact on Gospel reading. Not only did Eusebius continue earlier trajectories of Gospel writing, but his apparatus continued to generate new possibilities in the hands of readers. For more than a millennium, in over a dozen languages and in thousands of manuscripts, Eusebius' invention transformed readers' encounters with Gospel text on the page. By employing emerging textual technologies, Eusebius created new possibilities of reading, thereby rewriting the fourfold Gospel in a significant and durable way.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class written by Ian Peddie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class is the first extensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Encompassing contemporary research in ethnomusicology, sociology, cultural studies, history, and race studies, the volume explores the intersections between music and class, and how the meanings of class are asserted and denied, confused and clarified, through music. With chapters on key genres, traditions, and subcultures, as well as fresh and engaging directions for future scholarship, the volume considers how music has thought about and articulated social class. It consists entirely of original contributions written by internationally renowned scholars, and provides an essential reference point for scholars interested in the relationship between popular music and social class.
Download or read book Labor Histories written by Eric Arnesen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This collection emphatically answers, "No!" These thirteen essays delve into subjects like migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender. Written by former students of preeminent labor figure and historian David Montgomery, the works advance the argument that class remains indispensable to the study of working Americans and their place in the broad drama of our shared national history.
Download or read book Mexico on Main Street written by Colin Gunckel and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era’s film culture. Gunckel’s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles.
Download or read book The Rise of Gridiron University written by Brian M. Ingrassia and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quarterback sends his wide receiver deep. The crowd gasps as he launches the ball. And when he hits his man, the team's fans roar with approval-especially those with the deep pockets. Make no mistake; college football is big business, played with one eye on the score, the other on the bottom line. But was this always the case? Brian M. Ingrassia here offers the most incisive account to date of the origins of college football, tracing the sport's evolution from a gentlemen's pastime to a multi-million dollar enterprise that made athletics a permanent fixture on our nation's campuses and cemented college football's place in American culture. He takes readers back to the late 1800s to tell how schools embraced the sport as a way to get the public interested in higher learning-and then how football's immediate popularity overwhelmed campuses and helped create the beast we know today. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Ingrassia proves that the academy did not initially resist the inclusion of athletics; rather, progressive reformers and professors embraced football as a way to make the ivory tower less elitist. With its emphasis on disciplined teamwork and spectatorship, football was seen as a "middlebrow" way to make the university more accessible to the general public. What it really did was make athletics a permanent fixture on campus with its own set of professional experts, bureaucracies, and ostentatious cathedrals. Ingrassia examines the early football programs at universities like Michigan, Stanford, Ohio State, and others, then puts those histories in the context of Progressive Era culture, including insights from coaches like Georgia Tech's John Heisman and Notre Dame's Knute Rockne. He describes how reforms emerged out of incidents such as Teddy Roosevelt's son being injured on the field and a section of grandstands collapsing at the University of Chicago. He also touches on some of the problems facing current day college football and shows us that we haven't come far from those initial arguments more than a century ago. The Rise of Gridiron University shows us where and how it all began, highlighting college football's essential role in shaping the modern university-and by extension American intellectual culture. It should have wide appeal among students of American studies and sports history, as well as fans of college football curious to learn how their game became a cultural force in a matter of a few decades.
Download or read book The Religion of Democracy written by Amy Kittelstrom and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of religion’s role in the American liberal tradition through the eyes of seven transformative thinkers Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation’s founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far less simplistic than today’s debates would suggest. In The Religion of Democracy, historian Amy Kittelstrom shows how religion and democracy have worked together as universal ideals in American culture—and as guides to moral action and to the social practice of treating one another as equals who deserve to be free. The first people in the world to call themselves “liberals” were New England Christians in the early republic. Inspired by their religious belief in a God-given freedom of conscience, these Americans enthusiastically embraced the democratic values of equality and liberty, giving shape to the liberal tradition that would remain central to our politics and our way of life. The Religion of Democracy re-creates the liberal conversation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth by tracing the lived connections among seven transformative thinkers through what they read and wrote, where they went, whom they knew, and how they expressed their opinions—from John Adams to William James to Jane Addams; from Boston to Chicago to Berkeley. Sweeping and ambitious, The Religion of Democracy is a lively narrative of quintessentially American ideas as they were forged, debated, and remade across our history.
Download or read book Consumers Imperium Volume 2 of 2 EasyRead Comfort Edition written by and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fun Factory written by Rob King and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company—home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties—made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In The Fun Factory, Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Fun Factory offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.
Download or read book Consumers Imperium Volume 2 of 2 EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition written by and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau written by Antoinette M. Burton and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-26 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antoinette Burton uses a mid-twentieth-century Indian-American authors career to analyze broader issues of postwar Americas understanding of itself and the wider world.
Download or read book Vaudeville Melodies written by Nicholas Gebhardt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.
Download or read book The Art of Artertainment Nobrow American Style written by Peter Swirski and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artertainment is more than a novel aesthetic term reflecting the fact that art and entertainment have cross-pollinated each other throughout history. It is a creative strategy that purposely intertwines highbrow and lowbrow aesthetics in the name of reaching the connoisseurs and the masses. The Art of Artertainment sets out to unravel the jumble of aesthetic faultlines and prejudices found wherever we find artistic crossovers—which is to say, everywhere. Revisionist, iconoclastic, and artertaining in its own right, it provides a new framework for the analysis of American nobrow culture from the Colonial times to the digitally turbocharged present.
Download or read book Inside Greenwich Village written by Gerald W. McFarland and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant portrait of a celebrated urban enclave at the turn of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Understanding America written by Peter H Schuck and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is America? Is it a hegemonic superpower, composed of ruthlessly selfish capitalists? Or is it a land of hope and glory, a shelter for the huddled masses, and a beacon of freedom and enlightenment? The definition of this complex nation has been debated substantially, yet all seem to agree on one thing: it is unique. The idea of an exceptional America can be traced all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century observations of a newly formed democracy that seemed determined to distinguish itself from the rest. Little, it seems, has changed. Building on de Tocqueville's concept of American exceptionalism, this collection of essays, contributed by some of the nation's top scholars and thinkers, takes on the weighty task of sizing up America in a way its people and others can comprehend. Far more than simple history, they outline the current state of American institutions and policies -- from the legal system to marriage to the military to the Drug War -- and anticipate where these are headed in the future.
Download or read book The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston written by Jody Marie Weber and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston provides a regional history of the physical education pioneers who established the groundwork for women to participate in movement and expression. Their schools and their writing offer insights into the powerful cultural changes that were reconfiguring women's perceptions of their bodies in motion. The book examines the history from the first successful school of ballroom dance run by Lorenzo Papanti to the establishment of the Braggiotti School by Berthe and Francesca Braggiotti (two wealthy Bostonian socialites who used their power and money to support dance in Boston). The Delsartean ideas about beauty and the expressive capacity of the body freed upper-class women to explore movement beyond social dance and to enjoy movement as artistic self expression. Their interest and pleasure in early "parlor forms" engaged them as sponsors and advocates of expressive dance. Although revolutionaries such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis also garnered support from Boston and New York's social sets, in Boston the relationship of the city's elite and its native dancers was both intimate and ongoing. The Braggiotti sisters did not use this support to embark on international tours; instead they founded a school that educated the children of their sponsors and offered performances for their own community. Although later artists, Miriam Winslow and Hans Weiner, did tour nationally and internationally, the intimate relationships they maintained with the upper echelon of Boston society required that they remain sensitive to the needs of their students and their community. Through the study of these schools, the reader is offered a unique perspective on the evolution of expressive dance as it unfolded in Boston and its environs. The Evolution of Aesthetic and Expressive Dance in Boston is an important book for those interested in dance history, women's studies, and regional histories.
