Download or read book Imagining Niagara written by Patrick McGreevy and published by Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niagara Falls was a lightning rod for nineteenth-century enthusiasms. Although travelers came to the falls to experience a place they considered outside the world of their ordinary lives, they brought with them their contemporary concerns. Many tourists were obsessed with the mysteries of death, others with scientific or religious speculation. The way they imagined Niagara Falls found expression in a torrent of writings and images that took a variety of forms. Patrick McGreevy begins with the question, What can these visions of Niagara tell us about the place itself? The landscape surrounding the falls contains not only parks and religious shrines but also circuses, horror museums, and factories. People travel to Niagara not only to experience nature but also to celebrate marriages or commit suicide. One way to make sense of these bizarre "human accumulations", as H. G. Wells called them, is to take seriously the Niagaras people have imagined. This book focuses on four interlocking themes that recur time and again in descriptions of the falls: Niagara as a thing imagined from afar, as a metaphor for death, as an embodiment of nature, and as a focus of future events. Using the skills of a cultural geographer, McGreevy discovers some surprising connections between the Niagara people have imagined and the one they made, between its natural grandeur and its industrial exploitation, between Frederick Law Olmsted's Reservation and the Love Canal.
Download or read book Imagining America written by Peter Conrad and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his book Imagining America (originally published in 1980), Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope, Americans are unkempt brutes, throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells, they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale, sterile society. For W. H. Auden, Americans are an existential people, sad citizens of a deracinated modern world, suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood, they are bland, sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images, which Peter Conrads’s narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors, however, praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological, mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind. Imagining America is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written, it presents an argumentative tour de force in a style that is witty and diverting.
Download or read book The Economy of Icons written by Ernest Sternberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1999-09-30 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though many still think that we live in an information economy, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the driving force in 21st-century capitalism is not information, but image. Through studies of food processing, real estate development, tourism, movies, and labor performances, he examines how businesses endow products with evocative meaning. It has become common wisdom that we live in a postindustrial information society in which data and calculation underlie wealth. But now that information is as routinely produced as industrial or agricultural goods, businesses are discovering that they best achieve competitive advantage by producing what consumers most dearly seek—personal meaning. The 21st-century economy produces just that: not merely information, but evocative images; not just commodities, but meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg shows, foods now appeal through their sensuality and nostalgia; houses and stores draw customers through their exoticism; people sell their labor through the deliberate performance of the self for the market; and tourist destinations offer up carefully crafted thematic experiences. Whereas farms, factories, and information processors once stood at the core of the economy, now movie studios do, producing the product valued above all, meaningful content, from which downstream firms acquire the themes that animate desire. Now that meaning pervades production, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry once reserved for the humanities make sense in the study of the economy. Drawing on art history and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a mode of cultural analysis adapted to the study of commercial production. Through comparative studies of diverse economic sectors, ranging from food processing to tourism, Sternberg carries out an iconographic analysis of the new economy. This is a provocative study for scholars, students, and professionals dealing with marketing and consumer research, culture and media studies, socio-economics, and economic geography.
Download or read book The Yankee Road written by James D. McNiven and published by Wheatmark, Inc.. This book was released on 2015 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lockport written by Kathleen L. Riley and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2005-11-16 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings in the early 19th century at the site where art triumphed over nature, when the Erie Canals Flight of Five locks was one of the wonders of the world, Lockport burst almost overnight into a thriving community that eventually outgrew the canal that gave it life. After many years of challenge and change, the city now looks to its glorious past to ensure its future.
Download or read book Household Gods written by Sara Georgini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Providence of John and Abigail Adams -- John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams at prayer -- Charles Francis Adams on pilgrimage -- The cosmopolitan Christianity of Henry Adams -- Higher than a city upon a hill.
Download or read book Building on a Borrowed Past written by Sally J. Southwick and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation "A highly original study that is of particular importance as communities across the United States and elsewhere explore heritage tourism as a way to boost local economies, Sally J. Southwick's book Building on a Borrowed Past: Place and Identity in Pipestone, Minnesota demonstrates how small-town citizens and boosters contributed to the generic image of "the Indian" in American culture and describes the process of one culture absorbing the heritage of another for civic advantage."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Newlyweds on Tour written by Barbara Penner and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2009 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original, richly illustrated analysis of American honeymooning, 1820-1900, that offers fresh insights into the intersecting histories of tourism, consumerism, sentiment, sexuality, and conjugality
Download or read book North of Empire written by Jody Berland and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-07 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly two decades, Jody Berland has been a leading voice in cultural studies and the field of communications. In North of Empire, she brings together and reflects on ten of her pioneering essays. Demonstrating the importance of space to understanding culture, Berland investigates how media technologies have shaped locality, territory, landscape, boundary, nature, music, and time. Her analysis begins with the media landscape of Canada, a country that offers a unique perspective for apprehending the power of media technologies to shape subjectivities and everyday lives, and to render territorial borders both more and less meaningful. Canada is a settler nation and world power often dwarfed by the U.S. cultural juggernaut. It possesses a voluminous archive of inquiry on culture, politics, and the technologies of space. Berland revisits this tradition in the context of a rich interdisciplinary study of contemporary media culture. Berland explores how understandings of space and time, empire and margin, embodiment and technology, and nature and culture are shaped by broadly conceived communications technologies including pianos, radio, television, the Web, and satellite imaging. Along the way, she provides a useful overview of the assumptions driving communications research on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, and she highlights the distinctive contributions of the Canadian communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Berland argues that electronic mediation is central to the construction of social space and therefore to anti-imperialist critique. She illuminates crucial links between how space is traversed, how it is narrated, and how it is used. Making an important contribution to scholarship on globalization, Berland calls for more sophisticated accounts of media and cultural technologies and their complex “geographies of influence.”
Download or read book Beyond Walls Re inventing the Canada United States Borderlands written by Victor Konrad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of a new era of security imperatives for many countries. The border between Canada and the United States suddenly emerged from relative obscurity to become a focus of constant attention by media, federal and state/provincial governments on both sides of the boundary, and the public at large. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Canada-USA border in its 21st century form, placing it within the context of border and borderlands theory, globalization and the changing geopolitical dialogue. It argues that this border has been reinvented as a 'state of the art', technology-steeped crossing system, while the image of the border has been engineered to appear consistent with the 'friendly' border of the past. It shows how a border can evolve to a heightened level of security and yet continue to function well, sustaining the massive flow of trade. It argues whether, in doing so, the US-Canada border offers a model for future borderlands. Although this model is still evolving and still aspires toward better management practices, the template may prove useful, not only for North America, but also in conflict border zones as well as the meshed border regions of the EU, Africa's artificial line boundaries and other global situations.
Download or read book Margaret Junkin Preston Poet of the Confederacy written by Stacey Jean Klein and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the life and prolific writings of Stonewall Jackson's sister-in-law
Download or read book The Double edged Sword written by Zoltán Simon and published by Akademiai Kiado. This book was released on 2003 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it
Download or read book The View from Vermont written by Blake A. Harrison and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2006 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its small native population, proximity to major metropolitan areas, and bucolic rural beauty, Vermont was fated to be a tourist mecca, forever associated in the popular imagination with maple syrup, fall colors, and ski bunnies. Tourism, for good and ill, has always been the decisive factor in the conception of rural Vermont. What is surprising, however, is the degree to which we have accepted this notion of rural Vermont as a somehow timeless entity. Blake Harrison's rich and rewarding study instead presents the construction of Vermont's landscape as a complex and ever-changing dynamic informed by progressive, modernist, and reformist thought, competing views of economic expansion, rural and urban prejudice and social exclusion, and (more recently) by land use planning and environmentalism. This broad-based study includes the early history of Vermont tourism, the concomitant abandonment of farms with the rise of the summer home, the creation of an "unspoiled" Vermont (from billboards, at least), the impact of Vermont's ski industry on tradition-bound tourism, and later efforts to legislate growth and protect an increasingly static ideal of a rural Vermont.While grounded within a specific Vermont view, Harrison has much to contribute to broader studies of rural places, tourism, and landscapes in American culture. His analysis of how physical landscapes affect and are affected by our imagined landscape, and the insight afforded by his juxtaposition of leisure and labor, will deeply inform our understanding of rural tourist landscapes for years to come. This is a truly interdisciplinary work that will satisfy and challenge historians and geographers alike.
Download or read book The Paradox of Preservation written by Laura Alice Watt and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Download or read book Negotiating a River written by Daniel Macfarlane and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a megaproject half a century in the making -- a technological and engineering marvel that stands as one of the most ambitious borderlands undertakings ever embarked upon by two countries. The planning and building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project is one of the defining episodes in North American history. The project began with transnational negotiations that spanned two world wars and the formative years of the Cold War and included a failed attempt to construct an all-Canadian seaway, which was scuttled by US national security fears. Once an agreement was reached, the massive engineering and construction operation began, as did the efforts to move people and infrastructure away from the thousands of acres of land that would soon be flooded. Negotiating a River looks at the profound impacts of this megaproject, from the complex diplomatic negotiations, political manoeuvring, and environmental diplomacy to the implications on national identities and transnational relations.
Download or read book Religious Intimacies written by Mary Dunn and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection that demonstrates how emotional ties and intimate affiliations remain critical to the dimensions of modern Christianity. Scholars of religion have come a long way since William James famously made of religion a matter between man and his maker. For decades now, they have been attentive to the ways in which religion takes shape as the product of broad social forces, focusing on the dynamics of power and culture as heuristics for understanding religious phenomena and experience. What, however, might they be missing by moving too quickly from one interpretative extreme to the other—and what might we learn about religion by staying in the interstitial space between the individual in her solitude and society as a whole? Religious Intimacies, edited by Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore, brings together nine scholars of modern Christianity to probe this in-between space. In essays that range from treatments of Jesuit-indigenous relations in early modern Canada to the erotics of contemporary black theology, each contributor makes the case for the study of the presence and power of affective ties and relational dynamics between friends, lovers, and intimate others (even things) as vital to the understanding of religion. “These thoughtful and probing essays convincingly show that ties built upon affect, family, and shared convictions have continued to inform lived religious experience in modern times and shape western Christianity in significant, sometimes surprising ways.” —Jodi Bilinkoff, University of North Carolina at Greensboro “A rich collection of essays that use intimate relationships to chart a course between ‘solitude and society.’” —Tamsin Jones, Trinity College
Download or read book The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 1999 written by Peter M. Rutkoff and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2000-06-02 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an anthology of 23 papers that were presented at the Eleventh Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, held June 9-11, 1999, and co-sponsored by the State University of New York at Oneonta and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The papers focus on the antecedents of baseball and the early history of America's national pastime and are divided into five parts: "Baseball and the American Imagination," "Baseball and American Culture," "Baseball and American Society," "Baseball and American Business" and "Baseball and the Fan." The preface is by series editor Alvin L. Hall, and an introduction is provided by the editor of the volume, Peter M. Rutkoff.
