Download or read book Vampires Dragons and Egyptian Kings written by Eric C. Schneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They called themselves "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings." They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They fought--and sometimes killed--to protect and expand their territories. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by West Side Story and infamous by the media. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive. Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores. We learn what it meant to be a "down bopper" or a "jive stud," to "fish" with a beautiful "deb" to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the "Ivy League look." He outlines the unwritten rules of gang behavior, the paths members followed to adulthood, and the effects of gang intervention programs, while also providing detailed analyses of such notorious gang-related crimes as the murders committed by the "Capeman," Salvador Agron. Schneider focuses on the years from 1940 to 1975, but takes us up to the present in his conclusion, showing how youth gangs are no longer social organizations but economic units tied to the underground economy. Written with a profound understanding of adolescent culture and the street life of New York, this is a powerful work of history and a compelling story for a general audience.
Download or read book Supernatural Assault in Ancient Egypt written by Mogg Morgan and published by . This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are in your bed. It is dark, you hear footsteps coming up the stairs and into your room. There is someone there -- a presence. They lie on you or beside you, gripping you tightly, crushing you into the bed. You can't move. There may be a sound, a grunt or a strange smell. Time passes, you are paralysed with fear. Eventually the entity changes, expanding or contracting, moving away from you, sinking to the floor. With a great effort of will you manage to move the tip of your finger, then the hand until movement returns to your whole body and the experience ends. You have been visited by the old 'hag'. Dreams, the real theatre or perhaps battlefield of magick, influenced by cosmic tides that ebb and flow through us as they did the ancient Egyptians. Over the millennia we have lost contact with these tides, and stand alienated from Nature. To restore that first 'Eden' we must undertake an exercise in the archaeology of knowledge. We must reconstruct the ancient Egyptian Wheel of the Year, revealing archaic, pre-dynastic Mysteries, the Lunar Mysteries of Horus and Seth.
Download or read book The Ecology of Homicide written by Eric C. Schneider and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-11-13 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like so many big cities in the United States, Philadelphia has suffered from a strikingly high murder rate over the past fifty years. Such tragic loss of life, as Eric C. Schneider demonstrates, does not occur randomly throughout the city; rather, murders have been racialized and spatialized, concentrated in the low-income African American populations living within particular neighborhoods. In The Ecology of Homicide, Schneider tracks the history of murder in Philadelphia during a critical period from World War II until the early 1980s, focusing on the years leading up to and immediately following the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court decision and the shift to easier gun access and the resulting spike in violence that followed. Examining the transcripts of nearly two hundred murder trials, The Ecology of Homicide presents the voices of victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as the enforcers of the law—using, to an unprecedented degree, the words of the people who were actually involved. In Schneider's hands, their perspectives produce an intimate record of what was happening on the streets of Philadelphia in the decades from 1940 until 1980, describing how race factored into everyday life, how corrosive crime was to the larger community, how the law intersected with every action of everyone involved, and, most critically, how individuals saw themselves and others. Schneider traces the ways in which low-income African American neighborhoods became ever more dangerous for those who lived there as the combined effects of concentrated poverty, economic disinvestment, and misguided policy accumulated to sustain and deepen what he calls an "ecology of violence," bound in place over time. Covering topics including gender, urban redevelopment, community involvement, children, and gangs, as well as the impact of violence perpetrated by and against police, The Ecology of Homicide is a powerful link between urban history and the contemporary city.
Download or read book Studying Youth Gangs written by James F. Short and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2006 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an introduction to the study of gangs how we define them, what we know and not know about gangs. This title offers both a domestic and international view of processes of delinquency and gang formation and identity. It is suitable for criminal justice, sociology and social work, parole practitioners, and public defenders.
Download or read book Cracks in the Pavement written by Martin Sanchez-Jankowski and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Neighborhoods have been central to American sociology since its inception, yet we have understood little about how the institutions in urban communities evolve, disappear, or persist over time. Instead, as of late, many scholars have treated neighborhoods as collections of individuals and families, ignoring the institutional ecology. Understanding the dynamic role of local institutions is critical not only to sociological scholarship but also to important public policy debates about urban poverty. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski offers the reader an important, comprehensive look at how local institutions ranging from barbershops to street gangs to public housing both reflect and shape the culture and daily rhythms of the residents who live with them. His ecological perspective offers an important missing link in debates about 'neighborhood effects' and should be read by anyone interested in understanding urban poverty."—Dalton Conley, author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America "In his famous and moving preface to Les Miserables, Victor Hugo warns us that as long as there is poverty, such tales will be told. But stories are not often told about the resurgence of poor communities—their struggles to mobilize and change their condition. But this book does just that—filling in the rest of the picture; and not of individual Horatio Algers, but with textured and critical analysis of the barriers these communities face and the pathways they take to achieve social change."—Troy Duster, New York University
Download or read book The Bronx written by Evelyn Gonzalez and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bronx is a fascinating history of a singular borough, mapping its evolution from a loose cluster of commuter villages to a densely populated home for New York's African American and Hispanic populations. In recounting the varied and extreme transformations this community has undergone, Evelyn Gonzalez argues that racial discrimination, rampant crime, postwar liberalism, and big government were not the only reasons for the urban crisis that assailed the Bronx during the late 1960s. Rather, a combination of population shifts, public housing initiatives, economic recession, and urban overdevelopment caused its decline. Yet she also proves that ongoing urbanization and neighborhood fluctuations are the very factors that have allowed the Bronx to undergo one of the most successful and inspiring community revivals in American history. The process of building and rebuilding carries on, and the revitalization of neighborhoods and a resurgence of economic growth continue to offer hope for the future.
Download or read book Labor s Text written by Laura Hapke and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hapke's book, remarkable in scope and inclusiveness, offers those concerned with American working people a mine of information about and analysis of the 'rich lived history of American laborers' as that has been represented in fictions of every kind. She provides an invaluable foundation for understanding the dirtiest of America's dirty big secrets: the pervasivness of class differences, class discrimination, indeed of class conflict in this, the wealthiest nation in history. Hers is an indispensable guided tour through more than a century and a half of literary representations of 'hands' at their looms, pikets on the line, agitators on their soapboxes, ordinary working women, men, and children in kitchens, parks, factories, and fields across America." --Paul Lauter, A.K. & G.M. Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College "Labor's Text sets over 150 years of the multi-ethnic literature of work in the context of the history that informed it--the history of labor organizing, of industrial change, of social transformations, and of shifting political alignments. Any scholar of American literature or American history cannot help but be enlightened by this boldly ambitious and illuminating book." -- Shelly Fisher Fishkin, professor of American studies, University of Texas, Austin "Labor's Text traverses nearly two centuries of the U.S. literary response in fiction to workers and the work experience. Casting her net more broadly than any of her predecessors, Hapke's revision of the genre includes many recent writing not usually recognized as part of the tradition. Coming at a moment when there is a steady increase in interest about 'class' from color- and gender-inflected perspectives, this is a work of committed scholarship that may well prove to be a crucial compass to reorient the thinking and scholarship of a new generation." -- Alan Wald, author of Writing from the Left "A stunning work of scholarship. . . . It is an extraordinary achievement and an immense contribution to working-class studies." --Janet Zandy, author of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings Laura Hapke is a professor of English at Pace University. The winner of two Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Book awards, she is the author of Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s and other books on labor fiction and working-class studies.
Download or read book East Harlem Remembered written by Christopher Bell and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The community of East Harlem in New York City lays claim to a rich and culturally diverse history. Once home to 35 ethnicities and 27 languages, the neighborhood attracted Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants in the early 20th century and later saw an influx of Puerto Rican immigrants and African Americans. In this oral history, former and current residents recount the early days, the post-World War II rise of public housing, the departure of Eastern European inhabitants, the growth of Latino and African American populations, the spirited 1960s, the urban blight of the 1980s, and the more recent resurgence and gentrification. This story of strength and struggle provides a vivid portrait of a fascinating community and the many resilient people who have called it home.
Download or read book Mexican New York written by Robert Smith and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Mexican New York' offers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants & their children in New York & in Mexico.
Download or read book Street Stories written by Robert Jackall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they move between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth is examined through their personal stories, in a collection that captures the real-life exploits, investigations, sensibilities, and consciousness of detectives in an urban environment.
Download or read book From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors written by Peter W.Y. Lee and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, studies examining youth culture on the silver screen start with James Dean. But the angst that Dean symbolized—anxieties over parents, the “Establishment,” and the expectations of future citizen-soldiers—long predated Rebels without a Cause. Historians have largely overlooked how the Great Depression and World War II impacted and shaped the Cold War, and youth contributed to the national ideologies of family and freedom. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors explores this gap by connecting facets of boyhood as represented in American film from the 1930s to the postwar years. From the Andy Hardy series to pictures such as The Search, Intruder in the Dust, and The Gunfighter, boy characters addressed larger concerns over the dysfunctional family unit, militarism, the “race question,” and the international scene as the Korean War began. Navigating the political, social, and economic milieus inside and outside of Hollywood, Peter W.Y. Lee demonstrates that continuities from the 1930s influenced the unique postwar moment, coalescing into anticommunism and the Cold War.
Download or read book Sin City North written by Holly M. Karibo and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sin City North explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications. In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland.
Download or read book Sharecropping Ghetto Slum written by H. Viscount Nelson Jr. and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These insightful words stated during the 1930s by Reverend Richard Robert Wright Jr. spoke to a twentieth-century reality that white Americans held toward the nations black citizenry. African Americans of higher station resented being judged by the less-successful members of the race. After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, class distinctions between African Americans became increasingly significant. With the legal demise of racial discrimination, scores of ambitious blacks who embraced middle-class values took advantage of newly created opportunities to enter mainstream America. Ambitious African Americans who coveted a higher standard of living displayed a quest for higher education, presented evidence of a strong work ethic, and endorsed the concept of deferred gratification.
Download or read book Spatial Regulation in New York City written by Themis Chronopoulos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores and critiques the process of spatial regulation in post-war New York, focusing on the period after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, examining the ideological underpinnings and practical applications of urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, anti-vagrancy laws, and order-maintenance policing. It argues that these practices were part of a class project that deflected attention from the underlying causes of poverty, eroded civil rights, and sought to enable real estate investment, high-end consumption, mainstream tourism, and corporate success.
Download or read book The City Game written by Matthew Goodman and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The powerful story of a college basketball team who carried an era’s brightest hopes—racial harmony, social mobility, and the triumph of the underdog—but whose success was soon followed by a shocking downfall “A masterpiece of American storytelling.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove NAMED ONE OF THE BEST SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW The unlikeliest of champions, the 1949–50 City College Beavers were extraordinary by every measure. New York’s City College was a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for its intellectual achievements and political radicalism than its athletic prowess. Only two years after Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier—and at a time when the National Basketball Association was still segregated—every single member of the Beavers was either Jewish or African American. But during that remarkable season, under the guidance of the legendary former player Nat Holman, this unheralded group of city kids would stun the basketball world by becoming the only team in history to win the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. This team, though, proved to be extraordinary in another way: During the following season, all of the team’s starting five were arrested by New York City detectives, charged with conspiring with gamblers to shave points. Almost overnight these beloved heroes turned into fallen idols. The story centers on two teammates and close friends, Eddie Roman and Floyd Layne, one white, one black, each caught up in the scandal, each searching for a path to personal redemption. Though banned from the NBA, Layne continued to devote himself to basketball, teaching the game to young people in his Bronx neighborhood and, ultimately, with Roman’s help, finding another kind of triumph—one that no one could have anticipated. Drawing on interviews with the surviving members of that championship team, Matthew Goodman has created an indelible portrait of an era of smoke-filled arenas and Borscht Belt hotels, when college basketball was far more popular than the professional game. It was a time when gangsters controlled illegal sports betting, the police were on their payroll, and everyone, it seemed, was getting rich—except for the young men who actually played the games. Tautly paced and rich with period detail, The City Game tells a story both dramatic and poignant: of political corruption, duplicity in big-time college sports, and the deeper meaning of athletic success.
Download or read book Sin Sex Subversion written by David Rosen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the tumultuous 1950s in America, sex was as threatening to the nation’s moral order as communism. New York was the capital of the post–World War II world and the epicenter of a fierce culture war over music, theatre, movies, fashion, and literature, as well as birth control, homosexuality, adolescent sex, pornography, and prostitution. Over the last half-century, America’s social life—especially notions of culture, sexuality, and politics—has fundamentally changed, and what were once sinful or subversive sexual practices have been integrated into the marketplace, irreversibly changing American moral values; the once illicit has become an industry of more than $50 billion. Drawing on first-person interviews, unpublished memoirs, newspaper accounts, contemporary studies, government documents, and recent scholarship, Sin, Sex & Subversion argues that “deviant” sexuality was subversive, and that unique New York “outsiders” of the 1950s set the stage for the following decades and the world we know today. In each chapter, author David Rosen examines a critical moral issue through an in-depth profile of figures such as Liberace, Samuel Roth, Bettie Page, the Rosenbergs, and others. Through these individuals, Rosen shows how those who operated outside the law or who challenged popular values, even if they were silenced in their time, ended up paving the way for a new normal. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history—books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Download or read book Global Gangs written by Jennifer M. Hazen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangs, often associated with brutality and senseless destructive violence, have not always been viewed as inherently antagonistic. The first studies of gangs depicted them as alternative sources of order in urban slums where the state’s authority was lacking, and they have subsequently been shown to be important elements in some youth life cycles. Despite their proliferation there is little consensus regarding what constitutes a gang. Used to denote phenomena ranging from organized crime syndicates to groups of youths who gather spontaneously on street corners, even the term “gang” is ambiguous. Global Gangs offers a greater understanding of gangs through essays that investigate gangs spanning across nations, from Brazil to Indonesia, China to Kenya, and from El Salvador to Russia. Volume editors Jennifer M. Hazen and Dennis Rodgers bring together contributors who examine gangs from a comparative perspective, discussing such topics as the role the apartheid regime in South Africa played in the emergence of gangs, the politics behind child vigilante squads in India, the relationship between immigration and gangs in France and the United States, and the complex stigmatization of youths in Mexico caused by the arbitrary deployment of the word “gang.” Featuring an afterword by renowned U.S. gang researcher Sudhir Venkatesh, this volume provides a comprehensive look into the experience of gangs across the world and in doing so challenges conventional notions of identity. Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, George Mason U; José Miguel Cruz, Florida International U; Steffen Jensen, DIGNITY–Danish Institute Against Torture; Gareth A. Jones, London School of Economics and Political Science; Marwan Mohammed, École Normale Supérieure, Paris; Jacob Rasmussen, Roskilde U; Loren Ryter, U of Michigan; Rustem R. Safin, National Research Technological U, Russia; Alexander L. Salagaev, National Research Technological U, Russia; Atreyee Sen, U of Manchester; Mats Utas, Nordic Africa Institute; Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia U; James Diego Vigil, U of California, Irvine; Lening Zhang, Saint Francis U.
