Download or read book Researching American Culture written by Conrad Phillip Kottak and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies anthropological techniques to the study of contemporary American behavior
Download or read book The Creolization of American Culture written by Christopher J Smith and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Creolization of American Culture examines the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, and biography of the painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy. As a young man living in the multiethnic working-class community of New York's Lower East Side, Mount took part in the black-white musical interchange his paintings depict. An avid musician and tune collector as well as an artist, he was the among the first to depict vernacular fiddlers, banjo players, and dancers precisely and sympathetically. His close observations and meticulous renderings provide rich evidence of performance techniques and class-inflected paths of musical apprenticeship that connected white and black practitioners. Looking closely at the bodies and instruments Mount depicts in his paintings as well as other ephemera, Christopher J. Smith traces the performance practices of African American and Anglo-European music-and-dance traditions while recovering the sounds of that world. Further, Smith uses Mount's depictions of black and white music-making to open up fresh perspectives on cross-ethnic cultural transference in Northern and urban contexts, showing how rivers, waterfronts, and other sites of interracial interaction shaped musical practices by transporting musical culture from the South to the North and back. The "Africanization" of Anglo-Celtic tunes created minstrelsy's musical "creole synthesis," a body of melodic and rhythmic vocabularies, repertoires, tunes, and musical techniques that became the foundation of American popular music. Reading Mount's renderings of black and white musicians against a background of historical sites and practices of cross-racial interaction, Smith offers a sophisticated interrogation and reinterpretation of minstrelsy, significantly broadening historical views of black-white musical exchange.
Download or read book Visual Rhetoric written by Lester C. Olson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2008-03-20 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual images, artifacts, and performances play a powerful part in shaping U.S. culture. To understand the dynamics of public persuasion, students must understand this "visual rhetoric." This rich anthology contains 20 exemplary studies of visual rhetoric, exploring an array of visual communication forms, from photographs, prints, television documentary, and film to stamps, advertisements, and tattoos. In material original to this volume, editors Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope present a critical perspective that links visuality and rhetoric, locates the study of visual rhetoric within the disciplinary framework of communication, and explores the role of the visual in the cultural space of the United States. Enhanced with these critical editorial perspectives, Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture provides a conceptual framework for students to understand and reflect on the role of visual communication in the cultural and public sphere of the United States. Key Features and Benefits Five broad pairs of rhetorical action—performing and seeing; remembering and memorializing; confronting and resisting; commodifying and consuming; governing and authorizing—introduce students to the ways visual images and artifacts become powerful tools of persuasion Each section opens with substantive editorial commentary to provide readers with a clear conceptual framework for understanding the rhetorical action in question, and closes with discussion questions to encourage reflection among the essays The collection includes a range of media, cultures, and time periods; covers a wide range of scholarly approaches and methods of handling primary materials; and attends to issues of gender, race, sexuality and class Contributors include: Thomas Benson; Barbara Biesecker; Carole Blair; Dan Brouwer; Dana Cloud; Kevin Michael DeLuca; Anne Teresa Demo; Janis L. Edwards; Keith V. Erickson; Cara A. Finnegan; Bruce Gronbeck; Robert Hariman; Christine Harold; Ekaterina Haskins; Diane S. Hope; Judith Lancioni; Margaret R. LaWare; John Louis Lucaites; Neil Michel; Charles E. Morris III; Lester C. Olson; Shawn J. Parry-Giles; Ronald Shields; John M. Sloop; Nathan Stormer; Reginald Twigg and Carol K. Winkler "This book significantly advances theory and method in the study of visual rhetoric through its comprehensive approach and wise separations of key conceptual components." —Julianne H. Newton, University of Oregon
Download or read book Made in America written by Claude S. Fischer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American” —yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character. Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart—yet challenging many of their conclusions—Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.
Download or read book American Culture in the 1950s written by Martin Halliwell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. Through detailed commentary and focused case studies of influential texts and events - from Invisible Man to West Side Story, from Disneyland to the Seattle World's Fair, from Rear Window to The Americans - the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture. The two core aims of this volume are to chart the changing complexion of American culture in the years following World War II and to provide readers with a critical investigation of 'the 1950s'. The book provides an intellectual context for approaching 1950s American culture and considers the historical impact of the decade on recent social and cultural developments.
Download or read book Television and American Culture written by Jason Mittell and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Television and American Culture: An Overview introduces students to the study of television by looking at American television from a cultural perspective. The book is written for intermediate undergraduate and beginning graduate students for a range of television studies courses. Specifically, Mittell discusses television within the following contexts: the economics of the television industry, television's role within American democracy, the formal attributes of a variety of television genres, television as a site of gender and racial identity formation, television's role in everyday life, and the medium's technological and social impacts. The topical arrangement and comprehensive scope of the book differs from other television textbooks, arguing that we must incorporate a range of economic, political, aesthetic, and sociological perspectives to fully comprehend the medium of television.
Download or read book Epic in American Culture written by Christopher N. Phillips and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the concept of what it means to be 'epic' and its form in American life, literature, and art from the country's early days.
Download or read book Patterns of American Culture written by Dan Rose and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dan Rose has explored the American status system for decades. His ethnographic research into black South Philadelphia, the business community of Hazleton Pennsylvania, and the large horse farms of Chester County Pennsylvania is drawn together here to examine the cultural forms that shape American life at every level. In Patterns of American Culture, Rose draws on the fact and metaphor of colonization to demonstrate that the central motive in the contemporary United States has been and continues to be the corporate form. He begins by considering our origins as a collection of colonies, each of which was constructed as a private corporation whose purpose was to make money for its investors by providing new goods and different markets for England. Rose contends that the structure underlying American life are still corporate and that their purpose is to create new resources, new products, new landscapes, new ideas, and new markets. Today, most Americans have multiple corporate memberships—in city and state governments, in the businesses that employ them, in professional organizations or unions, and in various civic and political associations. Further, through written rules and unwritten customs, these corporations determine who we are and what we can do. Patterns of American Culture is a scholarly and poetic pursuit of the concealed energies within this vast incorporation and an analysis of how it shapes society and the lives of individuals. Rose draws from poems by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and brings ideas from such sources as performance art and cultural theory to critique this pervasive institutional order. The book closes with a fable of life in a fictitious capitalist society that both comments on ethnographic practice and reveals the disturbing estrangement inherent in any study of this type of culture. This narrative ethnography will interest scholars and students of American studies, anthropology, English, folklore, and sociology, and members of the design professions, such as architecture, landscape, and urban design.
Download or read book Environmental Values in American Culture written by Willett Kempton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do Americans view environmental issues? This study by a team of cognitive anthropologists reveals similarities in the way different groups of Americans view environmental change, while also showing that Americans may have misunderstandings about these
Download or read book Resource Sharing in Biomedical Research written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1996-12-29 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States is entering an era when, more than ever, the sharing of resources and information might be critical to scientific progress. Every dollar saved by avoiding duplication of efforts and by producing economies of scale will become increasingly important as federal funding enters an era of fiscal restraint. This book focuses on six diverse case studies that share materials or equipment with the scientific community at large: the American Type Culture Collection, the multinational coordinated Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Research Project, the Jackson Laboratory, the Washington Regional Primate Research Center, the Macromolecular Crystallography Resource at the Cornell High-Energy Synchrotron Source, and the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The book also identifies common strengths and problems faced in the six cases, and presents a series of recommendations aimed at facilitating resource sharing in biomedical research.
Download or read book The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture written by Heike Schaefer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection explores the cultural functions the printed book performs in the digital age. It examines how the use of and attitude toward the book form have changed in light of the digital transformation of American media culture. Situated at the crossroads of American studies, literary studies, book studies, and media studies, these essays show that a sustained focus on the medial and material formats of literary communication significantly expands our accustomed ways of doing cultural studies. Addressing the changing roles of authors, publishers, and readers while covering multiple bookish formats such as artists’ books, bestselling novels, experimental fiction, and zines, this interdisciplinary volume introduces readers to current transatlantic conversations on the history and future of the printed book.
Download or read book Chicano Soul written by Ruben Molina and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it concentrates on Chicano soul music in San Antonio and the Los Angeles area, this book also covers the music scene in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Dallas, El Paso, and other locations.
Download or read book Perspectives on American Book History written by Scott E. Casper and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CD-ROM contains: Digital image archive of books, magazines, manuscripts, technologies, and readers to accompany text.
Download or read book Cemeteries and Gravemarkers written by Richard E. Meyer and published by Umi Research Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture written by Robert Gregg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a meeting point for world cultures, the USA is characterized by its breadth and diversity. Acknowledging that diversity is the fundamental feature of American culture, this volume is organized around a keen awareness of race, gender, class and space and with over 1,200 alphabetically-arranged entries - spanning 'the American century' from the end of World War II to the present day - the Encyclopedia provides a one-stop source for insightful and stimulating coverage of all aspects of that culture. Entries range from short definitions to longer overview essays and with full cross-referencing, extensive indexing, and a thematic contents list, this volume provides an essential cultural context for both teachers and students of American studies, as well as providing fascinating insights into American culture for the general reader. The suggestions for further reading, which follows most entries, are also invaluable guides to more specialized sources.
Download or read book African American Culture and Heritage in Higher Education Research and Practice written by Kassie Freeman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1998-11-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading African American scholars examine the often neglected cultural context in research and policy development in African American higher education in this collection of essays. Past research has most often been conducted by individuals unfamiliar with the historical and cultural considerations of specific ethnic groups. Therefore, the outcomes of research and the development of programs have been based on deficit models, that is, what is wrong with African Americans, or what they cannot achieve. The book examines the questions; what is the relationship between African Americans' culture and experiences, and how should their culture be integrated into research and practice? How do African Americans' intra- and interrelations differ in higher education? How does understanding African American culture as it relates to higher education research enhance policy-making and practice? What role do HBUCs play in African Americans' participation in higher education? What are the policy and practice implications of past and current research? Scholars and practitioners of education, culture, and race relations will find this collection informative and interesting.
Download or read book Approaches to American Cultural Studies written by Antje Dallmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaches to American Cultural Studies provides an accessible yet comprehensive overview of the diverse range of subjects encompassed within American Studies, familiarising students with the history and shape of American Studies as an academic subject as well as its key theories, methods, and concepts. Written and edited by an international team of authors based primarily in Europe, the book is divided into four thematically-organised sections. The first part delineates the evolution of American Studies over the course of the twentieth century, the second elaborates on how American Studies as a field is positioned within the wider humanities, and the third inspects and deconstructs popular tropes such as myths of the West, the self-made man, Manifest Destiny, and representations of the President of the United States. The fourth part introduces theories of society such as structuralism and deconstruction, queer and transgender theories, border and hemispheric studies, and critical race theory that are particularly influential within American Studies. This book is supplemented by a companion website offering further material for study (www.routledge.com/cw/dallmann). Specifically designed for use on courses across Europe, it is a clear and engaging introductory text for students of American culture.
