Download or read book The Real Thing written by Miles Orvell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves "real things." The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Download or read book No Ordinary Time written by Doris Kearns Goodwin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and how it shaped the nation while steering it through the Great Depression and the outset of World War II. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines—Eleanor and Franklin’s marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, and FDR’s White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.

Download or read book The Deadly Percheron written by John Franklin Bardin and published by Diversion Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic, chilling tale of mystery and psychological horror that “will hold your attention to the last” (The New York Times). When a young, blond, handsome man walks into a psychiatrist’s office, stating that he believes he is losing his mind and asking questions about hallucinations, the doctor is prepared to help his new patient overcome his delusions. But as this twisting tale progresses, the line between what is real and unreal begins to blur—and the story becomes not only a murder mystery but a dark, unsettling voyage into memory, madness, torture, and despair.

Download or read book The San Diego World s Fairs and Southwestern Memory 1880 1940 written by Matthew F. Bokovoy and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American Southwest, no two events shaped modern Spanish heritage more profoundly than the San Diego Expositions of 1915-16 and 1935-36. Both San Diego fairs displayed a portrait of the Southwest and its peoples for the American public. The Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16 celebrated Southwestern pluralism and gave rise to future promotional events including the Long Beach Pacific Southwest Exposition of 1928, the Santa Fe Fiesta of the 1920s, and John Steven McGroarty's The Mission Play. The California-Pacific International Exposition of 1935-36 promoted the Pacific Slope and the consumer-oriented society in the making during the 1930s. These San Diego fairs distributed national images of southern California and the Southwest unsurpassed in the early twentieth century. By examining architecture and landscape, American Indian shows, civic pageants, tourist imagery, and the production of history for celebration and exhibition at each fair, Matthew Bokovoy peels back the rhetoric of romance and reveals the legacies of the San Diego World's Fairs to reimagine the Indian and Hispanic Southwest. In tracing how the two fairs reflected civic conflict over an invented San Diego culture, Bokovoy explains the emergence of a myth in which the city embraced and incorporated native peoples, Hispanics, and Anglo settlers to benefit its modern development.

Download or read book The Dark Side of Hopkinsville written by Ted Poston and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preserving an engaging, little-known slice of American life, The Dark Side of Hopkinsville is a collection of ten picaresque tales bearing witness to a black child's life in a southern town at the turn of the century. Born and reared in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Ted Poston (1906-1974) became the first black career-long reporter for a major metropolitan daily (the New York Post) and served as a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Negro Cabinet" in Washington in 1940. After thirty-five years at the Post, Poston was without question the "Dean of Black Journalists." Acquainted with the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Poston regaled his associates with tales of his childhood. These memories resulted in the stories collected in The Dark Side of Hopkinsville. Told from the vantage point of "Ted," a bright, high-spirited student at Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School, the stories focus on a coterie of imaginative children, their entertainments and games, ties to the church, and relations with immediate and extended families. The memorable, recurring characters in the stories are based on individuals Poston knew: Cousin Blind Mary, a fortune teller who can see into someone's future only after consulting with the servants of the family in question; Ted's father, Ephraim, "the only Negro Democrat in our Hopkinsville, Kentucky, or in the whole state of Kentucky for that matter"; Fertilizer Ferguson, whom Ted credits with coining the phrase "eating higher up on the hog"; and Ted's schoolmate Knee Baby Watkins, the "catalytic agent who precipitated the most disasterous social feud in the history of Hopkinsville." Though the presence of prejudice--both within and outside the race--is acknowledged throughout the stories, that social reality does not lessen the characters' exuberant enjoyment of being young. After watching Bronco Billy and his black sidekick, Pistol Pete, at the nickel movie on Saturdays, Ted and his friends make Pistol Pete the hero and Bronco Billy the sidekick of their games in "The Werewolf of Woolworth's." In "The Revolt of the Evil Fairies," Ted uses Palmer's Skin Success ("guaranteed to give you a light complexion in just seven days") so that he can play Prince Charming opposite his fair-skinned sweetheart in the school play. Kathleen A. Hauke has annotated the stories with recollections of the author's family and friends, who are often major characters in the stories. An extended biographical and critical introduction offers background information on the life and work of Ted Poston, and on old Hopkinsville and its residents.

Download or read book The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 1900 1940 written by Max Page and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The oxymoron "creative destruction" suggests the tensions that are at the heart of urban life: between stability and change, between particular places and undifferentiated spaces, between market forces and planning controls, and between the "natural" and "unnatural" in city growth. Page investigates these cultural counter weights through case studies of Manhattan's development, with depictions ranging from private real estate development along Fifth Avenue to Jacob Riis's slum clearance efforts on the Lower East Side, from the elimination of street trees to the efforts to save City Hall from demolition. Contrary to the popular sense of New York as an ahistorical city - the past as recalled by powerful citizens - was in fact, at the heart of defining how the city would be built."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Franklin written by Jim Hillman and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the treaties with the Delaware tribes and the forging of the Whetzel Trace opened central Indiana for settlement, the town of Franklin emerged from wilderness, echoing the development of newly christened Johnson County. Founded by Kentucky natives Simon Covert, Garret Bergen, and George King, the land that became Franklin was chosen because of ample waterways and the availability of game. Previously populated by Native Americans within the dense forest, the area was often overlooked because of flooding and harsh, thicketed landscapes. George King persuaded the Indiana Legislature to create Johnson County on December 31, 1822, before persuading the new county's commissioners to establish the town of Franklin, named after Ben Franklin, as the seat of county government.

Download or read book His Final Battle written by Joseph Lelyveld and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg In March 1944, as World War II raged and America’s next presidential election loomed, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Driven by a belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end, Roosevelt concealed his failing health and sought a fourth term—a term that he knew he might not live to complete. With unparalleled insight and deep compassion, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joseph Lelyveld delves into Roosevelt’s thoughts, preoccupations, and motives during his last sixteen months, which saw the highly secretive Manhattan Project, the roar of D-Day, the landmark Yalta Conference and FDR’s hopes for a new world order—all as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax. His Final Battle delivers an extraordinary portrait of this famously inscrutable man, who was full of contradictions but a consummate leader to the very last.

Download or read book The Death and Life of Main Street written by Miles Orvell and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Download or read book Gideon s Children written by Howard G. Franklin and published by . This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set amidst the tumultuous and transformative 1960s, Gideon's Children tells the fascinating story of the idealistic young men and women who staffed the newly formed and expanded Public Defender Offices after the Supreme Court's momentous 1963 decision that mandated the right to counsel when charged with a crime. Facing virulent bias, they summoned a warrior spirit, and like Rocky in the courtroom, bravely led a revolution within the Criminal Justice System as part of the greater Civil Rights Movement. With the spotlight focused on five young Public Defenders fiercely battling prosecutors, cops, and judges within the raw environment of murder, rape, robbery, and drugs, as the intense drama unfolds, the novel weaves together the threads that form its essential lesson: That the power of the State is enormous, and that the only true protection against governmental abuse of power is the individual's supremely valuable constitutional rights! Increasingly relevant today in view of the 1984-like issues arising under the Patriot Act and highly invasive governmental spying, this lesson reminds that the more things change, the more they stay the same, as further evidenced by the disproportionate share of young black men in our prisons, and others killed for walking and driving while black.

Download or read book Prequel written by Rachel Maddow and published by Crown. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. “A ripping read—well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same punch and assurance that she brings to a broadcast. . . . The parallels to the present day are strong, even startling.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule. That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court. None of it went as planned. While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation. That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Download or read book Memories and Melancholy written by Richard S. Scarsella and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of social and cultural articles published in regional newspapers over the past decade.

Download or read book Bibliographic Guide to Theatre Arts written by New York Public Library. Research Libraries and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Architexts of Memory written by Evelyne Ender and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a powerful model that uses literature to help fathom the nature of remembrance

Download or read book The Methodical Memory written by Sharon Crowley and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2010-08-20 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first sustained critique of current-traditional rhetorical theory, Sharon Crowley uses a postmodern, deconstructive reading to reexamine the historical development of current-traditional rhetoric. She identifies it (as well as the British new rhetoric from which it developed) as a philosophy of language use that posits universal principles of mind and discourse. Crowley argues that these philosophies are not appropriate bases for the construction of rhetorical theories, much less guides for the teaching of composition. She explains that current-traditional rhetoric is not a rhetorical theory, and she argues that its use as such has led to a misrepresentation of invention. Crowley contends that current-traditional rhetoric continues to prosper because a considerable number of college composition teachers—graduate students, part-time instructors, and teachers of literature—are not involved in the development of the curricula they are asked to teach. As a result, their voices, necessary to create any true representation of the composition teaching experience, are denied access to the scholarly conversations evaluating the soundness of the institutionalized teaching methods derived from the current-traditional approach.

Download or read book Independence Hall in American Memory written by Charlene Mires and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-11-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Independence Hall is a place Americans think they know well. Within its walls the Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, and in 1787 the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution there. Painstakingly restored to evoke these momentous events, the building appears to have passed through time unscathed, from the heady days of the American Revolution to today. But Independence Hall is more than a symbol of the young nation. Beyond this, according to Charlene Mires, it has a long and varied history of changing uses in an urban environment, almost all of which have been forgotten. In Independence Hall, Mires rediscovers and chronicles the lost history of Independence Hall, in the process exploring the shifting perceptions of this most important building in America's popular imagination. According to Mires, the significance of Independence Hall cannot be fully appreciated without assessing the full range of political, cultural, and social history that has swirled about it for nearly three centuries. During its existence, it has functioned as a civic and cultural center, a political arena and courtroom, and a magnet for public celebrations and demonstrations. Artists such as Thomas Sully frequented Independence Square when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital during the 1790s, and portraitist Charles Willson Peale merged the arts, sciences, and public interest when he transformed a portion of the hall into a center for natural science in 1802. In the 1850s, hearings for accused fugitive slaves who faced the loss of freedom were held, ironically, in this famous birthplace of American independence. Over the years Philadelphians have used the old state house and its public square in a multitude of ways that have transformed it into an arena of conflict: labor grievances have echoed regularly in Independence Square since the 1830s, while civil rights protesters exercised their right to free speech in the turbulent 1960s. As much as the Founding Fathers, these people and events illuminate the building's significance as a cultural symbol.

Download or read book The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction written by D. Underwood and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Doug Underwood asks whether much of what is now called literary journalism is, in fact, 'literary,' and whether it should rank with the great novels by such journalist-literary figures as Twain, Cather, and Hemingway, who believed that fiction was the better place for a realistic writer to express the important truths of life.