Download or read book Obituaries in American Culture written by Janice Hume and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Within the short period of a year, she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse,” reported The National Intelligencer on the death of Elizabeth Buchanan in 1838. Such obituaries fascinate us. Few of us realize that, when examined historically, they can reveal not only information about the departed but also much about American culture and about who and what we value. They also offer hints about the way Americans view death. This book also will fascinate, for it surveys more than 8,000 newspaper obituaries from 1818 to 1930 to show what they reveal about our culture. It shows how, in memorializing individual citizens, obituaries make a public expression of our values. Far from being staid or morbid, these death notices offer a lively look at a changing America. Indeed, obits are little windows through which to view America's cultural history. In the nineteenth century, they spoke of a person's character, in the twentieth of a person's work and wealth. In the days when women were valued mainly in their relationships with men, their obituaries were about the men in their lives. Then, as now, important friendships make a difference, for sometimes a death has been deemed newsworthy only because of whom the deceased knew. In 1838 when a fifty-year-old Virginian named William P. Custis died “after a long and wasting illness,” readers of The Daily National Intelligencer learned about his generous hospitality, his sterling business principles, and his kindness as a neighbor and husband. Custis's obituary not only recorded the fact of his death but also celebrated his virtues. The newspaper obituary has a commemorative role. It distills the essence of a citizen's life, and it reflects what society values and wants to remember about the deceased. Throughout our history, these published accounts have revealed changing values. They provide a link between public remembrances of individuals and the collective memory of a great American past. In obits of yesteryear, men were brave, gallant, vigilant, bold, honest, and dutiful. Women were patient, resigned, obedient, affectionate, amiable, pious, gentle, virtuous, tender, and useful. Mining newspapers of New York City, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, along with two early national papers, Niles' Weekly Register and The National Intelligencer, Janice Hume has produced a portrait of America, an entertaining history, and a revealing look at the things Americans have valued.

Download or read book The Economist Book of Obituaries written by Keith Colquhoun and published by Bloomberg Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 10 years, "The Economist" has included unique and original obituaries in a popular column. The selections are remarkable because of the people written about, the surprising lives they led, and the brilliant writing style. This volume gathers 200 of the best obituaries.

Download or read book Journalism in a Culture of Grief written by Carolyn Kitch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the cultural meanings of death in American journalism and the role of journalism in interpretations and enactments of public grief, which has returned to an almost Victorian level. A number of researchers have begun to address this growing collective preoccupation with death in modern life; few scholars, however, have studied the central forum for the conveyance and construction of public grief today: news media. News reports about death have a powerful impact and cultural authority because they bring emotional immediacy to matters of fact, telling stories of real people who die in real circumstances and real people who mourn them. Moreover, through news media, a broader audience mourns along with the central characters in those stories, and, in turn, news media cover the extended rituals. Journalism in a Culture of Grief examines this process through a range of types of death and types of news media. It discusses the reporting of horrific events such as September 11 and Hurricane Katrina; it considers the cultural role of obituaries and the instructive work of coverage of teens killed due to their own risky behaviors; and it assesses the role of news media in conducting national, patriotic memorial rituals.

Download or read book Obituaries in American Culture written by Hume, Janice and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What obituaries tell us about our culture, past and present, based upon a study of more than 8,000 newspaper obituaries from 1818 to 1930

Download or read book Popular Media and the American Revolution written by Janice Hume and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Revolution—an event that gave America its first real "story" as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins—continues to live on in the public's memory, celebrated each year on July 4 with fireworks and other patriotic displays. But to identify as an American is to connect to a larger national narrative, one that begins in revolution. In Popular Media and the American Revolution, journalism historian Janice Hume examines the ways that generations of Americans have remembered and embraced the Revolution through magazines, newspapers, and digital media. Overall, Popular Media and the American Revolution demonstrates how the story and characters of the Revolution have been adjusted, adapted, and co-opted by popular media over the years, fostering a cultural identity whose founding narrative was sculpted, ultimately, in revolution. Examining press and popular media coverage of the war, wartime anniversaries, and the Founding Fathers (particularly, "uber-American hero" George Washington), Hume provides insights into the way that journalism can and has shaped a culture's evolving, collective memory of its past. Dr. Janice Hume is a professor and head of the Department of Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is author of Obituaries in American Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and co-author of Journalism in a Culture of Grief (Routledge, 2008).

Download or read book Working the Dead Beat written by Sandra Martin and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize and selected as a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and an iTunes Store Best Book Globe and Mail columnist Sandra Martin honours the lives of Canada's famous, infamous, and unsung heroes in this unique collection of obituaries of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Here are Canadian icons such as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, social activist June Callwood, and urban theorist Jane Jacobs. Here are builders such as feminist and editor Doris Anderson, and businessman and famed art collector Ken Thomson. Here are our rogues, rascals, and romantics; our service men and women; and here are those private citizens whose lives have had an undeniable public impact. Finally, Martin interweaves these elegant and eloquent biographies with the autobiography of the obit writer, offering an exclusive and intimate view of life on the dead beat. Beautifully written, compelling, and vivid, Working the Dead Beat is a tribute to those individuals who, each on their own and as a collective, tell the story of our country, and to the life of the obit writer who chronicles their extraordinary lives.

Download or read book Re Presenting Wilma Rudolph written by Rita Liberti and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilma Rudolph was born black in Jim Crow Tennessee. The twentieth of 22 children, she spent most of her childhood in bed suffering from whooping cough, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. She lost the use of her left leg due to polio and wore leg braces. With dedication and hard work, she became a gifted runner, earning a track and field scholarship to Tennessee State. In 1960, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Her underdog story made her into a media darling, and she was the subject of countless articles, a television movie, children’s books, biographies, and she even featured on a U.S. postage stamp. In this work, Smith and Liberti consider not only Rudolph’s achievements, but also the ways in which those achievements are interpreted and presented as historical fact. Theories of gender, race, class, and disability collide in the story of Wilma Rudolph, and Smith and Liberti examine this collision in an effort to more fully understand how history is shaped by the cultural concerns of the present. In doing so, the authors engage with the metanarratives which define the American experience and encourage more complex and nuanced interrogations of contemporary heroic legacy.

Download or read book Early Chinese Religion Part One Shang Through Han 1250 BC 220 AD 2 Vols written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-12-24 with total page 1281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together, and for the first time in any language, the 24 essays gathered in these volumes provide a composite picture of the history of religion in ancient China from the emergence of writing ca. 1250 BC to the collapse of the first major imperial dynasty in 220 AD. It is a multi-faceted tale of changing gods and rituals that includes the emergence of a form of “secular humanism” that doubts the existence of the gods and the efficacy of ritual and of an imperial orthodoxy that founds its legitimacy on a distinction between licit and illicit sacrifices. Written by specialists in a variety of disciplines, the essays cover such subjects as divination and cosmology, exorcism and medicine, ethics and self-cultivation, mythology, taboos, sacrifice, shamanism, burial practices, iconography, and political philosophy. Produced under the aegis of the Centre de recherche sur les civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine (UMR 8155) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris).

Download or read book The Civil War Soldier and the Press written by Katrina J. Quinn and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War Soldier and the Press examines how the press powerfully shaped the nation’s understanding and memory of the common soldier, setting the stage for today’s continuing debates about the Civil War and its legacy. The history of the Civil War is typically one of military strategies, famous generals, and bloody battles, but to Americans of the era, the most important story of the war was the fate of the soldier. In this edited collection, new research in journalism history and archival images provide an interdisciplinary study of citizenship, representation, race and ethnicity, gender, disability, death, and national identity. Together, these chapters follow the story of Civil War soldiers, from enlistment through battle and beyond, as they were represented in hometown and national newspapers of the time. In discussing the same pages that were read by soldiers’ families, friends, and loved ones during America’s greatest conflict, the book provides a window into the experience of historical readers as they grappled with the meaning and cost of patriotism and shared sacrifice. Both scholarly and approachable, this book is an enriching resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in Civil War history, American history, journalism, and mass communication history.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Journalism written by Stephen L. Vaughn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-12-11 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of American Journalism explores the distinctions found in print media, radio, television, and the internet. This work seeks to document the role of these different forms of journalism in the formation of America's understanding and reaction to political campaigns, war, peace, protest, slavery, consumer rights, civil rights, immigration, unionism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and more. This work also explores the intersections between journalism and other phenomena in American Society, such as law, crime, business, and consumption. The evolution of journalism's ethical standards is discussed, as well as the important libel and defamation trials that have influenced journalistic practice, its legal protection, and legal responsibilities. Topics covered include: Associations and Organizations; Historical Overview and Practice; Individuals; Journalism in American History; Laws, Acts, and Legislation; Print, Broadcast, Newsgroups, and Corporations; Technologies.

Download or read book The World of Obituaries written by Mushira Eid and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unusual book, the world of obituaries looks at obituaries as a rich source of information on cultural representation of gender. It examines obituaries published from 1938 to 1998 in three cultures - Egypt, Iran, and the United States - to analysis how women and men are represented in their death notices and how these representations have change over time. It also shows how obituaries, viewed as texts, at times converge within but often diverge from expected norms. Mushira Eid has applied quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques to 4,400 obituaries, using names, titles, and occupations as linguistic symbols of identity. Data were collected for a month at ten-year intervals to measure change. From them, she demonstrates differences within the world of obituaries, relates this world to the world at large, and constructs a model based on this comparison. Resulting facts are placed within the context of women's movements in the three cultures and other sociocultural and political events that influenced the perception of gender roles. The World of Obituaries offers a unique synthesis of information on women and public space in three cultures. It opens a new window on gende

Download or read book The Obituary as Collective Memory written by Bridget Fowler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first serious academic study of obituaries, this book focuses on how societies remember. Bridget Fowler makes great use of the theories of Pierre Bordieu, arguing that obituaries are one important component in society's collective memory. This book, the first of its kind, will find a place on every serious sociology scholar's bookshelves.

Download or read book Writing with Scissors written by Ellen Gruber Garvey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it.

Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Download or read book Digital Death written by Christopher M. Moreman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating work explores the meaning of death in the digital age, showing readers the new ways digital technology allows humans to approach, prepare for, and handle their ultimate destiny. With DeadSocialTM one can create messages to be published to social networks after death. Facebook's "If I Die" enables users to create a video or text message for posthumous publication. Twitter _LIVESON accounts will keep tweeting even after the user is gone. There is no doubt that the digital age has radically changed options related to death, dying, grieving, and remembering, allowing people to say goodbye in their own time and their own unique way. Drawing from a range of academic perspectives, this book is the only serious study to focus on the ways in which death, dying, and memorialization appear in and are influenced by digital technology. The work investigates phenomena, devices, and audiences as they affect mortality, remembrances, grieving, posthumous existence, and afterlife experience. It examines the markets to which the providers of such services are responding, and it analyzes the degree to which digital media is changing views and expectations related to death. Ultimately, the contributors seek to answer an even more important question: how digital existences affect both real-world perceptions of life's end and the way in which lives are actually lived.

Download or read book An Introduction to Religious Language written by Valerie Hobbs and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious language is all around us, embedded in advertising, politics and news media. This book introduces readers to the field of theolinguistics, the study of religious language. Investigating the ways in which people talk to and about God, about the sacred and about religion itself, it considers why people make certain linguistic choices and what they accomplish. Introducing the key methods required for examining religious language, Valerie Hobbs acquaints readers with the most common and important theolinguistic features and their functions. Using critical corpus-assisted discourse analysis with a focus on archaic and other lexical features, metaphor, agency and intertextuality, she examines religious language in context. Highlighting its use in both expected locations, such as modern-day prayer and politics, and unexpected locations including advertising, sport, healthcare and news media, Hobbs analyses the shifting and porous linguistic boundaries between the religious and the secular. With discussion questions and further readings for each chapter, as well as a companion website featuring suggested answers to the reflection tasks, this is the ideal introduction to the study of religious language.

Download or read book Extraordinary Ordinariness written by Simon Wendt and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays looks at everyday heroes and heroines--ordinary men, women, and children who are honored for actual or imagined feats. Comparing the United States, Germany, and Britain, it asks both when this particular hero type first emerged and how it was discussed and depicted in political discourse, mass media, literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Looking across fields of study, countries, and centuries, this book sheds new light on the many social, cultural, and political functions that our everyday heroes have served.