Download or read book The Construction of Race and Nation in Martin Scorsese s Gangs of New York written by Boris Kirfel and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-03-21 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,3 (B), University of Cologne (Institute for the English Language and its Didactic), course: Seminar: The Cultural Analysis of Contemporary American Films, language: English, abstract: „I believe in America. America has made my fortune.“ These are the very first two sentences in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather from 1972 - exactly the same year when director Martin Scorsese decided to film Herbert Asbury’s non-fiction book The Gangs of New York. “Asbury (1891-1963) was a journalist and a pioneer historian of low life, whose Gangs of New York originally appeared in 1928, subtitled an informal history of the underworld.” (Christie 2003, p. 250) At the beginning of The Godfather: Part II, a film which is about the life of an Italian who immigrates to the United States in the 1920s, the film depicts the arrival of Italian immigrants at the New York harbor. All the passengers of the ship are full of expectation. They are looking at the famous Statue of Liberty, which welcomes America’s new citizens. “Bring us your homeless and your poor”, is written in a poem by Emma Lazarus that is graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the statue stands. (Cf. Christie 2003, p. 253) This sequence portrays the fulfilment of the American Dream. In 2002, after nearly 30 years of preparation, Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York which is also set in New York one century before the action of The Godfather takes place, finally was released in the United States. Scorsese’s film covers a period of New York City's history, from the 1840's through to the bloody Draft Riots of 1863, when graft and corruption permeated every level of government including the police department. The Statue of Liberty had not been built at the time in which Gangs of New York is set (Cf. Metzger 2000, p. 23), and there aren’t any Italians in the film. The movie concentrates on the struggle between the so called Native Americans and a huge number of Irish immigrants who arrive with ships every day. The picture describes America’s birth from violence and the development of the country into the state which is presented in Coppola’s The Godfather and former pictures by Martin Scorsese like Goodfellas or Casino. Gangs of New York is in a way the foundation of which all the other movies by Scorsese are based on.
Download or read book Gangs of New York written by Martin Scorsese and published by . This book was released on 2003-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangs of New York is the film Martin Scorcese has been wanting to make since the 1970s and is the natural follow-on to his other films about New York gangland: Mean Streets and Goodfellas. Set in the period 1840 to 1863, it is the story of the gang members, outlaws, crooked cops and corrupt politicians that flourished in New York's underworld. The Dead Rabbits and the Native Americans are the two gangs at the heart of the film. Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio), the son of the Rabbits' murdered leader, vows vengeance on the man who killed him, Bill The Butcher Poole (Daniel Day-Lewis).
Download or read book The Gangs of New York written by Herbert Asbury and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Martin Scorsese and the American Dream written by Jim Cullen and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed. This book is the first study of Scorsese’s profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.
Download or read book The Gangs of New York written by Martin Scorsese and published by Miramax Books. This book was released on 2002-12-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated companion to acclaimed director Martin Scorsese's new film, this book includes the complete screenplay, interviews, and color stills from the set.
Download or read book Making and Breaking Settler Space written by Adam J. Barker and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five hundred years. A vast geography. Making and Breaking Settler Space explores how settler spaces have developed and diversified from contact to the present. Adam Barker traces the trajectory of settler colonialism, drawing out details of its operation that are embedded not only in imperialism but also in contemporary contexts that include problematic activist practices by would-be settler allies. Unflinchingly engaging with the systemic weaknesses of this process, he proposes an innovative, unified spatial theory of settler colonization in Canada and the United States that offers a framework within which settlers can pursue decolonial actions in solidarity with Indigenous communities.
Download or read book Film Nation written by Robert Burgoyne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores contemporary American films that challenge official history. Our movies have started talking back to us, and Film Nation takes a close look at what they have to say. In movies like JFK and Forrest Gump, Robert Burgoyne sees a filmic extension of the debates that exercise us as a nation -- debates about race and culture and national identity, about the nature and makeup of American history. In analyses of five films that challenge the traditional myths of the nation-state -- Glory, Thunderheart, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Forrest Gump -- Burgoyne explores the reshaping of our collective imaginary in relation to our history. These movies, exploring the meaning of "nation" from below, highlight issues of power that underlie the narrative construction of nationhood. Film Nation exposes the fault lines between national myths and the historical experience of people typically excluded from those myths. Throughout, Burgoyne demonstrates that these films, in their formal design, also preserve relics of the imaginary past they contest. Here we see how the "genre memory" of the western, the war film, and the melodrama shapes these films, creating a complex exchange between old concepts of history and the alternative narratives of historical experience that contemporary texts propose. The first book to apply theories of nationalism and national identity to contemporary American films, Film Nation reveals the cinematic rewriting of history now taking place as a powerful attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define America as a nation.
Download or read book Writing History with Lightning written by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett’s doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer’s fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and industrialization that saw Old World lifestyles and customs dissolve amid rapidly changing environments. Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation’s past. In these twenty-six essays—divided by the editors into sections on topics like frontiers, slavery, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the West—notable historians engage with films and the historical events they ostensibly depict. Instead of just separating fact from fiction, the essays contemplate the extent to which movies generate and promulgate collective memories of American history. Along with new takes on familiar classics like Young Mr. Lincoln and They Died with Their Boots On, the volume covers several films released in recent years, including The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, Free State of Jones, and The Hateful Eight. The authors address Hollywood epics like The Alamo and Amistad, arguing that these movies flatten the historical record to promote nationalist visions. The contributors also examine overlooked films like Hester Street and Daughters of the Dust, considering their portraits of marginalized communities as transformative perspectives on American culture. By surveying films about nineteenth-century America, Writing History with Lightning analyzes how movies create popular understandings of American history and why those interpretations change over time.
Download or read book Five Points written by Tyler Anbinder and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century NYC’s most dynamic and dangerous neighborhood comes vividly to life in this “careful, intelligent, and sympathetic history” (The New York Times Book Review). Located in today’s Chinatown, Five Points was home to poor immigrants and other marginalized communities. It witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters, dance halls, and boxing matches. It was also the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America’s immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. A New York Times Notable Book
Download or read book Martin Scorsese Woody Allen Spike Lee written by James F. Scott and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Directors Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Spike Lee emerged as filmmakers toward the end of the 1960s, when the breakdown of the studio system paved the way for new production partnerships and gave more creative authority to directors, actors, and writers. In what has come to be called the “Indie” movement, these directors were able to explore ethno-racial themes with more frankness than previously allowed. From the perspectives of their own minority communities, Scorsese, Allen, and Lee dramatized and critiqued the challenges this restless, ethno-racial underclass posed to the “White Republic” imagined by the Founding Fathers. The three directors whose work is at the heart of this book explore the question of how identity formation is a process of negotiation, particularly among America’s ethno-racial minorities. They emphasize the stresses related to the double burden in the assimilative process of patterning oneself after the majoritarian culture, while acknowledging in complex ways the culture of the community of origin. Annie Hall tells Alvie Singer, “you’re a real Jew.” Buggin’ Out instructs his homeboy friend, “Stay Black, Mookie!” What implications do these phrases carry? Will Alvie have a chance to modify his identity? Should he? Will Mookie honor his friend’s admonition? Is “black” also susceptible to a cultural makeover? Is identity a personal choice? This book highlights how various films by these three directors explore the ways in which “cultural capital” (musical, artistic, intellectual, athletic, etc.) is used to erase “ethno-racial taint” (skin tones, supposed biological “traits,” offensive cultural habits). The formula ordains that assimilation and interculturation will be asymmetrical, favoring those groups or individuals who bring with them the most cultural capital.
Download or read book The Real Gangs of New York written by Wallace Edwards and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of a classic history by Herbert Asbury and an Academy Award nominated film by Martin Scorsese, the gangs of The Five Points in New York have become the stuff of legend. But how much is legend and how much is fact? In this short book we examine the original gangs of the Five Points in New York and see how accurate the film was (spoiler alert: not very) and what Asbury may have gotten wrong in his original research on this era. From the Bowery Boys to the Dead Rabbits, we look at the gangs that operated not just in the Five Points, but also those who wanted a piece of the action there and engaged in gang wars that would leave even modern thugs quivering in their boots!
Download or read book The New York City Draft Riots written by Iver Bernstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-10-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For five days in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War, New York City was under siege. Angry rioters burned draft offices, closed factories, destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and hunted policemen and soldiers. Before long, the rioters turned their murderous wrath against the black community. In the end, at least 105 people were killed, making the draft riots the most violent insurrection in American history. In this vividly written book, Iver Bernstein tells the compelling story of the New York City draft riots. He details how what began as a demonstration against the first federal draft soon expanded into a sweeping assault against the local institutions and personnel of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party as well as a grotesque race riot. Bernstein identifies participants, dynamics, causes and consequences, and demonstrates that the "winners" and "losers" of the July 1863 crisis were anything but clear, even after five regiments rushed north from Gettysburg restored order. In a tour de force of historical detection, Bernstein shows that to evaluate the significance of the riots we must enter the minds and experiences of a cast of characters--Irish and German immigrant workers, Wall Street businessmen who frantically debated whether to declare martial law, nervous politicians in Washington and at City Hall. Along the way, he offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics: Civil War society and politics, patterns of race, ethnic and class relations, the rise of organized labor, styles of leadership, philanthropy and reform, strains of individualism, and the rise of machine politics in Boss Tweed's Tammany regime. An in-depth study of one of the most troubling and least understood crises in American history, The New York City Draft Riots is the first book to reveal the broader political and historical context--the complex of social, cultural and political relations--that made the bloody events of July 1863 possible.
Download or read book The Lost City of Z written by David Grann and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction that unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century—the story of the legendary British explorer who ventured into the Amazon jungle in search of a fabled civilization and never returned. “Suspenseful…rollicking.” —The New York Times In 1925, Percy Fawcett went into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called “The Lost City of Z.” In this masterpiece, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett’s quest for “Z” and his own journey into the deadly jungle. Look for David Grann’s new book, The Wager, coming in April 2023!
Download or read book Film Nation Hollywood Looks at U S History Revised Edition written by Robert Burgoyne and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country's origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups. This book analyses films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11 - one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state.
Download or read book Mongrel Nation written by Ashley Dawson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mongrel Nation surveys the history of the United Kingdom’s African, Asian, and Caribbean populations from 1948 to the present, working at the juncture of cultural studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial theory. Ashley Dawson argues that during the past fifty years Asian and black intellectuals from Sam Selvon to Zadie Smith have continually challenged the United Kingdom’s exclusionary definitions of citizenship, using innovative forms of cultural expression to reconfigure definitions of belonging in the postcolonial age. By examining popular culture and exploring topics such as the nexus of race and gender, the growth of transnational politics, and the clash between first- and second-generation immigrants, Dawson broadens and enlivens the field of postcolonial studies. Mongrel Nation gives readers a broad landscape from which to view the shifting currents of politics, literature, and culture in postcolonial Britain. At a time when the contradictions of expansionist braggadocio again dominate the world stage, Mongrel Nation usefully illuminates the legacy of imperialism and suggests that creative voices of resistance can never be silenced.Dawson “Elegant, eloquent, and full of imaginative insight, Mongrel Nation is a refreshing, engaged, and informative addition to post-colonial and diasporic literary scholarship.” —Hazel V. Carby, Yale University “Eloquent and strong, insightful and historically precise, lively and engaging, Mongrel Nation is an expansive history of twentieth-century internationalist encounters that provides a broader landscape from which to understand currents, shifts, and historical junctures that shaped the international postcolonial imagination.” —May Joseph, Pratt Institute Ashley Dawson is Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island. He is coeditor of the forthcoming Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism.
Download or read book Teaching What Really Happened written by James W. Loewen and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country.”— Howard Zinn James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled "Truth" that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery. Book Features: An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education. Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography. Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened. Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in today’s schools.
Download or read book Delta v written by Daniel Suarez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Daemon returns with a near-future technological thriller, in which a charismatic billionaire recruits a team of adventurers to launch the first deep space mining operation--a mission that could alter the trajectory of human civilization. When itinerant cave diver James Tighe receives an invitation to billionaire Nathan Joyce's private island, he thinks it must be a mistake. But Tighe's unique skill set makes him a prime candidate for Joyce's high-risk venture to mine a near-earth asteroid--with the goal of kick-starting an entire off-world economy. The potential rewards and personal risks are staggering, but the competition is fierce and the stakes couldn't be higher. Isolated and pushed beyond their breaking points, Tighe and his fellow twenty-first century adventurers--ex-soldiers, former astronauts, BASE jumpers, and mountain climbers--must rely on each other to survive not only the dangers of a multi-year expedition but the harsh realities of business in space. They're determined to transform humanity from an Earth-bound species to a space-faring one--or die trying.
