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 Researching Diversity and American Culture written by Diane Biddle and published by . This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Researching Diversity and American Culture is an English composition and research textbook that takes students through the research process, teaches information literacy and ethical documentation skills, and shows students how to use analysis, make judgments, and create an argument centered on cultural diversity in the Unites States."--Introduction.

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 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 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 Material Culture Studies in America written by Thomas J. Schlereth and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 1999 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The country's leading authority on use of artifactual evidence in historical research collects twenty-five classic essays and gives his overview of the field of material culture.

Download or read book Television and American Culture written by Jason Mittell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring television at once as a technological medium, an economic system, a facet of democracy, and a part of everyday life, this landmark text uses numerous sidebars and case studies to demonstrate the past, immediate, and far-reaching effects of American culture on television--and television's influence on American culture. Arranged topically, the book provides a broad historical overview of television while also honing in on such finer points as the formal attributes of its various genres and its role in gender and racial identity formation.

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 Crosscurrents in American Culture written by Bruce Dorsey and published by Wadsworth Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative reader is the first to introduce students to cultural history through primary sources and guided pedagogy. Crosscurrents combines a diverse collection of sources with cutting-edge scholarship for a dramatic overview of politics, economics, and religion. The voices of women and people of color are integrated throughout, presenting a truly inclusive view of the American past.Each source or source grouping is preceded by an introduction, which helps to contextualize the document(s). Throughout each chapter, Problems to Consider prompt students to think analytically about sources.

Download or read book American Culture American Tastes written by Michael Kammen and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them. Professor Kammen shows how the post-traditional popular culture that flourished after the 1880s became full-blown mass culture after World War II, in an era of unprecedented affluence and travel. He charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass-marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the gradual repudiation of the genteel tradition; and the commercialization of organized entertainment. He stresses the significance of television in the shaping of mass culture, and of consumerism in its reconfiguration over the past two decades. Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion. An important commentary on the often conflicting ways Americans have understood, defined, and talked about their changing culture in the twentieth century.

Download or read book Mormon Visual Culture and the American West written by Nathan Rees and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the place of art in Latter-day Saint society during the first 50 years of the Utah settlement, beginning in 1847. Nathan Rees uncovers the critical role that images played in nineteenth-century Mormon religion, politics, and social practice. These artists not only represented, but actively participated in debates about theology, politics, race, gender, and sexuality at a time when Latter-day Saints were grappling with evolving doctrine, conflict with Native Americans, and political turmoil resulting from their practice of polygamy. The book makes an important contribution to art history, Mormon studies, American studies, and religious studies.

Download or read book Research Opportunities in American Cultural History written by John Francis McDermott and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Culture in the 1970s written by Will Kaufman and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s was one of the most culturally vibrant periods in American history. This book discusses the dominant cultural forms of the 1970s - fiction and poetry; television and drama; film and visual culture; popular music and style; public space and spectacle - and the decade's most influential practitioners and texts: from Toni Morrison to All in the Family, from Diane Arbus to Bruce Springsteen, from M.A.S.H. to Taxi Driver and from disco divas to Vietnam protesters. In response to those who consider the seventies the time of disco, polyester and narcissism, this book rewrites the critical engagement with one of America's most misunderstood decades.Key Features*Focused case studies featuring key texts and influential writers, artists, directors and musicians*Chronology of 1970s American Culture*Bibliographies for each chapter and a general bibliography on 1970s Culture*14 black-and-white illustrations

Download or read book Research Opportunities in American Cultural History written by John Francis McDermott and published by . This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 American Culture in the 1930s written by David Eldridge and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an insightful overview of the major cultural forms of 1930s America: literature and drama, music and radio, film and photography, art and design, and a chapter on the role of the federal government in the development of the arts. The intellectual context of 1930s American culture is a strong feature, whilst case studies of influential texts and practitioners of the decade - from War of the Worlds to The Grapes of Wrath and from Edward Hopper to the Rockefeller Centre - help to explain the cultural impulses of radicalism, nationalism and escapism that characterize the United States in the 1930s.