Download or read book My Detroit Growing Up Greek and American in Motor City written by Dan Georgakas and published by Smyrna Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Detroit is a unique blend of traditional ethnic memoir and a historian's account of the decline and fall of America's most populous industrial city. The interaction of American culture and ethnic consciousness is evident on almost every page. Archbishop Iakovos marches with Martin Luther King, Maria Callas becomes as famous as Marilyn Monroe. Greek diners become neighborhood hangouts. The reader is taken in ever widening circles from the particulars of Greek American culture to the core of an embattled Motor City awash in racism and corruption.
Download or read book Detroit I Do Mind Dying written by Dan Georgakas and published by South End Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic--along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past threee decades by Georgakas and Surkin.
Download or read book Motor City Music written by Mark Slobin and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motor City Music is a pioneering study of the musical life of an American metropolis. 1940s-60s Detroit produced prominent musicians, from jazz to classical to ethnic. Author Mark Slobin begins with a reflection on his life growing up in Detroit, stresses public-school music, surveys neighborhood musical life, and covers industry, labor, the counterculture, media, and the record industry, including Motown.
Download or read book Middlesex written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.
Download or read book Greek Americans written by Peter C. Moskos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an engrossing account of Greek Americans their history, strengths, conflicts, aspirations, and contributions. Blending sociological insight with historical detail, Peter C. and Charles C. Moskos trace the Greek-American experience from the wave of mass immigration in the early 1900s to today. This is the story of immigrants, most of whom worked hard to secure middle-class status. It is also the story of their children and grandchildren, many of whom maintain an attachment to Greek ethnic identity even as they have become one of America's most successful ethnic groups.As the authors rightly note, the true measure of Greek-Americans is the immigrants themselves who came to America without knowing the language and without education. They raised solid families in the new country and shouldered responsibilities for those in the old. They laid the basis for an enduring Greek-American community.Included in this completely revised edition is an introduction by Michael Dukakis and chapters relating to the early struggles of Greeks in America, the Greek Orthodox Church, success in America, and the survival and expansion of Greek identity despite intermarriage. This work will be of value to scholars of ethnic studies, those interested in Greek culture and communities, and sociologists and historians.
Download or read book Educating Greek Americans written by Fevronia K. Soumakis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection considers Greek American formal and informal educational efforts, institutions, and programs, broadly conceived, as they evolved over time throughout the United States. The book’s focus on Greek Americans aims to highlight the vast array of educational responses to local needs and contexts as this distinct, yet, heterogeneous immigrant community sought to maintain its linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage for over one hundred years. The chapters in this volume amend the scholarly literature that thus far has not only overlooked Greek American educational initiatives, but has also neglected to recognize and analyze the community’s persistence in sustaining them. This book is an important contribution to an understanding of Greek Americans’ long overdue history as a significant diaspora community within an American context.
Download or read book Midnight at the Barrelhouse written by George Lipsitz and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010-03-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.” Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton. Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians. Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.
Download or read book My Detroit written by Dan Georgakas and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Up Against the Real written by Nadja Millner-Larsen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of 1960s activist art group Black Mask. With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Up Against the Real examines how and why the group ultimately rejected art in favor of what its members deemed “real” political action. Exploring this notorious example of cultural activism that rose from the ruins of the avant-garde, Millner-Larsen makes a critical intervention in our understanding of political art.
Download or read book Immigrants in American History 4 volumes written by Elliott Robert Barkan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 3748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopedia is a unique collection of entries covering the arrival, adaptation, and integration of immigrants into American culture from the 1500s to 2010. Few topics inspire such debate among American citizens as the issue of immigration in the United States. Yet, it is the steady influx of foreigners into America over 400 years that has shaped the social character of the United States, and has favorably positioned this country for globalization. Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration is a chronological study of the migration of various ethnic groups to the United States from 1500 to the present day. This multivolume collection explores dozens of immigrant populations in America and delves into major topical issues affecting different groups across time periods. For example, the first author of the collection profiles African Americans as an example of the effects of involuntary migrations. A cross-disciplinary approach—derived from the contributions of leading scholars in the fields of history, sociology, cultural development, economics, political science, law, and cultural adaptation—introduces a comparative analysis of customs, beliefs, and character among groups, and provides insight into the impact of newcomers on American society and culture.
Download or read book The Flint Coney written by Dave Liske and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-25 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vehicle City Success Story The history of Flint's food culture has always been largely overshadowed by the stories of its industries. But the origins and rapid expansion of the number of Macedonian Coney shops in Flint paralleled the explosive growth of the city's automotive industry throughout the twentieth century. Born of an immigrant escaping the war-torn Balkans in the early 1900s who combined his idea for one dish with the skills of butchering and meatpacking experts from Wisconsin and Germany, the simple Flint Coney became an institution among the city's autoworkers, tradespeople, and families. Mainstays such as Flint Original Coney Island, Angelo's, and Atlas were frequented by regular patrons for decades, with others such as Capitol and Starlite carrying on those traditions today. Genesee County native Dave Liske explores these global origins and the cultural history of the Flint Coney.
Download or read book Jim Crow Terminals written by Anke Ortlepp and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century’s transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States. When segregationists inscribed local definitions of whiteness and blackness onto sites of interstate and even international transit, they not only brought the incongruities of racial separation into sharp relief but also obligated the federal government to intervene. Ortlepp looks at African American passengers; civil rights organizations; the federal government and judiciary; and airport planners, architects, and managers as actors in shaping aviation’s legal, cultural, and built environments. She relates the struggles of black travelers—to enjoy the same freedoms on the airport grounds that they enjoyed in the aircraft cabin—in the context of larger shifts in the postwar social, economic, and political order. Jim Crow terminals, Ortlepp shows us, were both spatial expressions of sweeping change and sites of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities. Hence, this new study situates itself in the scholarly debate over the multifaceted entanglements of “race” and “space.”
Download or read book Pomegranate Seeds written by Dean Kostos and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Publisher: This volume is the first-ever collection of poems in English by 49 prominent Greek-American poets from throughout the United States. The poems cover a variety of topics and styles.
Download or read book Contours of White Ethnicity written by Yiorgos Anagnostou and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.
Download or read book Bomb Culture written by Jeff Nuttall and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of print for fifty years, Jeff Nuttall's legendary exploration of radical 1960s art, music, and protest movements. “Bomb Culture is an abscess that lances itself. An extreme book, unreasonable but not irrational. Abrasive, contemptuous, attitudinizing, ignorant and yet brilliant.” —Dennis Potter Out of print for fifty years, Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture has achieved legendary status as a powerful, informative, and spirited exploration of 1960s alternative society and counterculture. Nuttall's confessional account of the period investigates the sources of its radical art, music, and protest movements as well as the beliefs, anxieties, and conceits of its key agitators, including his own. Nuttall argued that a tangible psychic dread of nuclear holocaust pervaded both high and low cultures, determining their attitude and content, much as the horrors of World War I had nourished the tactics and aesthetics of Dadaism. Accompanying the original text is a new foreword by author Iain Sinclair, who was closely acquainted with Jeff Nuttall and participated in the turbulent underground culture described in Bomb Culture. This anniversary edition is rounded out with an afterword by writer Maria Fusco and a contextual introduction by the book's editors which includes photographs and images of Nuttall's distinctive artwork as well as further archival materials.
Download or read book The Black Jacobins Reader written by Charles Forsdick and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel
Download or read book A 500 House in Detroit written by Drew Philp and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.
