Download or read book Social History of the United States 10 volumes written by Brian Greenberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 4860 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ten-volume encyclopedia explores the social history of 20th-century America in rich, authoritative detail, decade by decade, through the eyes of its everyday citizens. Social History of the United States is a cornerstone reference that tells the story of 20th-century America, examining the interplay of policies, events, and everyday life in each decade of the 1900s with unmatched authority, clarity, and insight. Spanning ten volumes and featuring the work of some of the foremost social historians working today, Social History of the United States bridges the gap between 20th-century history as it played out on the grand stage and history as it affected—and was affected by—citizens at the grassroots level. Covering each decade in a separate volume, this exhaustive work draws on the most compelling scholarship to identify important themes and institutions, explore daily life and working conditions across the economic spectrum, and examine all aspects of the American experience from a citizen's-eye view. Casting the spotlight on those whom history often leaves in the dark, Social History of the United States is an essential addition to any library collection.
Download or read book Handbook to Life in America written by Rodney P. Carlisle and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the history, events and people of the early twentieth-century in America.
Download or read book Victorian America 1876 to 1913 written by Crandall A. Shifflett and published by Almanacs of American Life. This book was released on 1996 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian America, 1876 to 1913 investigates America during a period of immense innovation and profound change. Illustrating numerous aspects of American life, both public and private, the book is a kind of mosaic, from which we discover what Americans ate; what they wore; what they did for entertainment; what songs they sang; what games they played; what books they read; who they voted for; what they worried about; how much they earned and how they spent it; what they grew, manufactured, and produced; how they did or did not provide social services; how they celebrated themselves in three World s Fairs; and much, much more. Readers will find in these pages many perspectives on the culture, the arts, the economy, the politics, and the conditions of ordinary life in the United States during the period between the Civil War and World War I. They will find evidence of diversity, growth, and prosperity, as well as of bigotry, economic blight, and miserable existences wasted in ill-compensated toil. They will find the mansions of Newport and the slums of the Lower East Side, the open door to immigrants and the confinement of the Indians of the western frontier, the capital accumulation of the robber barons and the struggles of workers including child labor for dignity and decent wages. They will find the overwhelming development of technology for example, the invention and spread of the light bulb, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and the movies as it fueled the country s growth and changed America forever. In short, Victorian America, 1867 to 1913 reflects all the variety and contradiction of American life in this extraordinary historical era. Carefully chosen and representative information, in a concise, easy-to-use mix of documents, text, tables, and illustrations, allows the reader to sample the texture and flavor of Victorian America.
Download or read book Constructing Opportunity written by Elizabeth K. Eder and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constructing Opportunity: American Women Educators in Early Meiji Japan tells the story of Margaret Clark Griffis and Dora E. Schoonmaker, two extraordinary women who transcended the traditional boundaries of nation, class, and gender by living and working in an alternative cultural setting outside the United States in the 1870s. Author Elizabeth K. Eder draws on numerous primary sources, including unpublished diaries and letters, to give both an intimate biographical account of these women's lives and an examination of the social and institutional frameworks of their professional lives in Japan.
Download or read book Americans Recaptured written by Molly K. Varley and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-10-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was on the frontier, where “civilized” men and women confronted the “wilderness,” that Europeans first became Americans—or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890–1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that citizens’ individual suffering had been heroic, and that settlers’ contact with Indians and wilderness still characterized the nation’s “soul.” Furthermore, in the act of memorializing white Indian captives—through statues, parks, and reissued narratives—small towns found a way of inscribing themselves into the national story. By drawing out the connections between actual captivity, captivity narratives, and the memorializing of white captives, Varley shows how Indian captivity became a means for Progressive Era Americans to look forward by looking back. Local boosters and cultural commentators used Indian captivity to define “Americanism” and to renew those frontier qualities deemed vital to the survival of the nation in the post-frontier world, such as individualism, bravery, ingenuity, enthusiasm, “manliness,” and patriotism. In Varley’s analysis of the Progressive Era mentality, contact between white captives and Indians represented a stage in the evolution of a new American people and affirmed the contemporary notion of America as a melting pot. Revealing how the recitation and interpretation of these captivity narratives changed over time—with shifting emphasis on brutality, gender, and ethnographic and historical accuracy—Americans Recaptured shows that tales of Indian captivity were no more fixed than American identity, but were consistently used to give that identity its own useful, ever-evolving shape.
Download or read book Just One of the Boys written by Gillian M Rodger and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-01-04 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Female-to-male crossdressing became all the rage in the variety shows of nineteenth-century America and began as the domain of mature actresses who desired to extend their careers. These women engaged in the kinds of raucous comedy acts usually reserved for men. Over time, as younger women entered the specialty, the comedy became less pointed and more centered on the celebration of male leisure and fashion. Gillian M. Rodger uses the development of male impersonation from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to illuminate the history of the variety show. Exploding notions of high- and lowbrow entertainment, Rodger looks at how both performers and forms consistently expanded upward toward respectable—and richer—audiences. At the same time, she illuminates a lost theatrical world where women made fun of middle-class restrictions even as they bumped up against rules imposed in part by audiences. Onstage, the actresses' changing performance styles reflected gender construction in the working class and shifts in class affiliation by parts of the audiences. Rodger observes how restrictive standards of femininity increasingly bound male impersonators as new gender constructions allowed women greater access to public space while tolerating less independent behavior from them.
Download or read book The Age of Acrimony written by Jon Grinspan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics. Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century's end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans' voting rates crashed and never fully recovered. This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today. The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America's unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation's politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system's enduring capacity to reinvent itself.
Download or read book The Last Turn written by Lee Seglem and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001-04-25 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Smash-mouth politics, racial violence, immigrant-bashing, drug abuse, crummy health care, high-tech wizardry, greed, sex, graft -- and football. Sounds like last night's television newsmagazine, doesn't it? Just one small technical problem: We're not talking now. This is about then. . ." So begins THE LAST TURN, Lee Seglem's thought-provoking and thoroughly readable examination of trends, attitudes and daily life in America when the nation last crossed the great temporal divide between centuries. While much ink and many computer bytes (and sound bites) have been spilled in recent years in a headlong rush to peer into the new millennium, this book takes a reflective, and refreshing, look backward. What really happened during the years that bridged the 19th and 20th Centuries? How far have Americans really come? Fair warning to those who cling to a belief in the mythic "good old days": THE LAST TURN provides a provocative, surprising and entertaining look at some very real, and often disturbing, parallels in time.
Download or read book Newsprint Metropolis written by Julia Guarneri and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At the close of the nineteenth century, new printing and paper technologies fueled an expansion of the newspaper business. Newspapers soon saturated the United States, especially its cities, which were often home to more than a dozen dailies apiece. Using New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago as case studies, Julia Guarneri shows how city papers became active agents in creating metropolitan spaces and distinctive urban cultures. Newsprint Metropolis offers a vivid tour of these papers, from the front to the back pages. Paying attention to much-loved features, including comic strips, sports pages, advice columns, and Sunday magazines, she tells the linked histories of newspapers and of the cities they served. Guarneri shows how themed sections for women, businessmen, sports fans, and suburbanites illustrated entire ways of life built around consumer products. But while papers provided a guide to individual upward mobility, they also fostered a climate of civic concern and responsibility. Charity campaigns and metropolitan sections painted portraits of distinctive, cohesive urban communities. Real estate sections and classified ads boosted the profile of the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities' roles as economic and information hubs. All the while, editors were drawing in new reading audiences--women, immigrants, and working-class readers--helping to give rise to the diverse, contentious, and commercial public sphere of the twentieth century." -- Publisher's description
Download or read book Refined Tastes written by Wendy A. Woloson and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at sugar in 19th-century American culture and how it rose in popularity to gain its place in the nation’s diet today. American consumers today regard sugar as a mundane and sometimes even troublesome substance linked to hyperactivity in children and other health concerns. Yet two hundred years ago American consumers treasured sugar as a rare commodity and consumed it only in small amounts. In Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America, Wendy A. Woloson demonstrates how the cultural role of sugar changed from being a precious luxury good to a ubiquitous necessity. Sugar became a social marker that established and reinforced class and gender differences. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Woloson explains, the social elite saw expensive sugar and sweet confections as symbols of their wealth. As refined sugar became more affordable and accessible, new confections—children’s candy, ice cream, and wedding cakes—made their way into American culture, acquiring a broad array of social meanings. Originally signifying male economic prowess, sugar eventually became associated with femininity and women’s consumerism. Woloson’s work offers a vivid account of this social transformation—along with the emergence of consumer culture in America. “Elegantly structured and beautifully written . . . As simply an explanation of how Americans became such avid consumers of sugar, this book is superb and can be recommended highly.” —Ken Albala, Winterthur Portfolio “An enlightening tale about the social identity of sweets, how they contain not just chewy centers but rich meanings about gender, about the natural world, and about consumerism.” —Cindy Ott, Enterprise and Society
Download or read book American Decades Primary Sources written by Cynthia Rose and published by American Decades Primary Sourc. This book was released on 2004 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains over two thousand primary sources on twentieth-century American history and culture, featuring seventy-five different types of sources, arranged chronologically in twelve categories, including the arts, education, government and politics, media, medicine and health, religion, and sports.
Download or read book Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima written by Gillian M Rodger and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich, imaginative survey of variety musical theater, Gillian M. Rodger masterfully chronicles the social history and class dynamics of the robust, nineteenth-century American theatrical phenomenon that gave way to twentieth-century entertainment forms such as vaudeville and comedy on radio and television. Fresh, bawdy, and unabashedly aimed at the working class, variety honed in on its audience's fascinations, emerging in the 1840s as a vehicle to accentuate class divisions and stoke curiosity about gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing acts were a regular feature of these entertainments, and Rodger profiles key male impersonators Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner while examining how both gender and sexuality gave shape to variety. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, variety theater developed into a platform for ideas about race and whiteness. As some in the working class moved up into the middling classes, they took their affinity for variety with them, transforming and broadening middle-class values. Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima places the saloon keepers, managers, male impersonators, minstrels, acrobats, singers, and dancers of the variety era within economic and social contexts by examining the business models of variety shows and their primarily white, working-class urban audiences. Rodger traces the transformation of variety from sexualized entertainment to more family-friendly fare, a domestication that mirrored efforts to regulate the industry, as well as the adoption of aspects of middle-class culture and values by the shows' performers, managers, and consumers.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth written by Robert J. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.
Download or read book Racial Ethnic and Homophobic Violence written by Michel Prum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions by internationally recognized specialists, this book, a perfect complement to courses in criminology and hate crime, provides a key resource for understanding how racism and homophobia work to produce violence. Hate-motivated violence is now deemed a ‘serious national problem’ in most Western societies. With contributions by British, Australian, American, Canadian, Irish, Italian and French researchers, this book addresses a wide spectrum of types of violence, including, genocide, urban riots, inter-ethnic fighting and forms of hate crime targeting gay and lesbian people. Contributors to this volume also consider the political groups responsible for outbursts of hatred, their modes of operation and the institutional aspects of hate crime. Opening up an interdisciplinary perspective on the ways in which certain groups or individuals are transformed into expiatory victims, this compelling book is an essential read for all postgraduate law students and researchers interested in hate crime and society.
Download or read book The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot written by Matthew Spady and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An illuminating treat! . . . it retraces the neighborhood’s fascinating arc from remote woodland estate to the enduring Beaux Arts streetscape.” —Eric K. Washington, award-winning author of Boss of the Grips This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. It tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today. A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839 and John James Audubon’s purchase of fourteen acres of farmland, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb. “This well-documented saga of demographics chronicles a dazzling cast of characters and a plot fraught with idealism, speculation, and expansion, as well as religious, political, and real estate machinations.” —Roberta J.M. Olson, PhD, Curator of Drawings, New-York Historical Society The story of the area’s evolution from hinterland to suburb to city is comprehensively told in Matthew Spady’s fluidly written new history.” —The New York Times
Download or read book Senior High Core Collection written by Raymond W. Barber and published by H. W. Wilson. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features annotations for more than 6,200 works in the main volume (2007), and more than 2,400 new titles in three annual supplements published 2008 through 2010. New coverage of biographies, art, sports, Islam, the Middle East, cultural diversity, and other contemporary topics keeps your library's collection as current as today's headlines.
Download or read book America 1908 written by Jim Rasenberger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-06-08 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An entertaining survey” (Publishers Weekly) through the highs and lows of a spectacular, pivotal year in American history—1908. A captivating look at a bygone era through the lens of a single, surprisingly momentous American year one century ago. 1908 was the year Henry Ford launched the Model T, the Wright Brothers proved to the world that they had mastered the art of flight, Teddy Roosevelt decided to send American naval warships around the globe, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series (a feat they have never yet repeated), and six automobiles set out on an incredible 20,000 mile race from New York City to Paris via the frozen Bering Strait. A charming and knowledgeable guide, Rasenberger takes readers back to a time of almost limitless optimism, even in the face of enormous inequality, an era when the majority of Americans believed that the future was bound to be better than the past, that the world’s worst problems would eventually be solved, and that nothing at all was impossible. As Thomas Edison succinctly said that year, “Anything, everything is possible.”
