bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Guzmán Will
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter looks at the social and political contexts behind the intertwined histories of Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon and the American West. As a Black man in the United States, Lawrence Nixon was exposed to constant cultural conflict merely for being who he was: “unapologetically Black,” which in the minds of some was the antithesis of being an American. The chapter first shows how Nixon's life in El Paso, Texas, illustrates both the Black West's regional distinctiveness and its continuity with the legacy of African American history in the rest of the nation. Nixon's life is also an example of the diversity of the Black past and the existence of multiple African American historical traditions. Next, the chapter places Nixon's contributions to the civil rights movement in a broader context and demonstrates how it paved the way for future resistance.
Coda
Authors: Guzmán Will
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter chronicles the latter part of Nixon's life and retirement from advocacy work, as well as his legacy among African American medical professionals and the locals of El Paso. Between 1948 and his death in 1966, Nixon had lived a relatively quiet life, devoting himself primarily to his medical practice and his family. Less than three years after his retirement, however, Nixon was involved in a car accident, dying five days later in the hospital on March 6, 1966, surrounded by friends and family. During his lifetime and the years afterward the chapter describes how Nixon's legacy has continued to shape history today. At the same time, however, the chapter laments on the neglect which still plagues Nixon's legacy, and concludes with some final reflections on Nixon's remarkable life and work and his impact on the lives of countless people within and beyond the borderlands.
The Subject of Mars
Authors: Seed David
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Ray Bradbury's writings on Mars, with a particular focus on The Martian Chronicles (1950). It covers his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fiction at the age of ten; his early Mars stories; his composition of The Martian Chronicles; his efforts to move away from clichéd images of extraterrestrials; his emphasis on a seepage between the consciousnesses of his Earthlings and Martians; how the Martians in his stories emerge as projections or distorted mirror images of the human settlers; his emphasis of the importance of dwellings in The Martian Chronicles; and his later Mars publications. The final section of the chapter discusses how the Martian story “Usher II” engages most directly with the enforcement of literary censorship.
Aims and Approaches
Authors: Sunardi Christina
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the main aims and analytical approaches underpinning this book's research. It draws theoretical and methodological approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, gender studies, dance studies, Southeast Asian studies, and other disciplines—combining interpretive ethnography, textual analysis, and analysis of performance—in order to present a brief overview of each major theme tackled in this work: power, gender and sex, tradition, and Islam. All of these are analyzed in the context of east Javanese presentational dance and music in order to examine the perseverance of “female power” in the face of a variety of cultural pressures that work to contain, control, and suppress it.
Maintaining Female Power through Male Style Dance
Authors: Sunardi Christina
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores some of the ways female dancers, as well as the mostly male musicians who accompany them, are maintaining and making cultural space for the expression of women's magnetic female power through women's performance of male style dance. It first establishes that for centuries, women in Java have expressed and embodied a magnetic power that is connected to their femaleness and that they have done so in myriad ways, and moreover that a certain ambivalence in the Javanese imagination has surrounded these expressions of female power. The chapter argues that, by performing male style dance, female dancers and (mostly) male musicians negotiated boundaries of gender and sex visually and sonically, maintaining and making cultural space for women's expression of female power despite pressures from state and society to control and subdue it.
Constructing Gender and Tradition through Senses of History
Authors: Sunardi Christina
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how performers constructed senses of gender—including boundaries of femaleness and maleness—as they established what comprised tradition through their senses of history. It emphasizes that the ways performers connected femaleness, the female style dance Beskalan Putri, the past, spiritual power, and Malang indicates ways of thinking that in effect maintain cultural space for the magnetic power of femaleness and connect female power to Malangan identity. The senses of femaleness and its power that performers associated with Beskalan Putri were so strong that they shaped the ways performers understood and talked about the histories of other dances discussed in this chapter, including Ngremo Lanang, Ngremo Putri, and Beskalan Lanang, as well as the expression of gender in these dances. These perceptions also provide deeper insight into what has concerned performers about the performance of Ngremo Tayub and Ngremo Putri since the 1990s.
Writing the Nation
Authors: Rosario Vanessa Pérez
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the development of Burgos's social, political, and creative consciousness during the 1930s. It focuses on her first poetry collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938), where she creates images of routes, travel, and water as a way to escape containment. In Poema en veinte surcos, Burgos experimented with various styles of writing prevalent among Puerto Rican writers of the time, including telurismo and neocriollismo, the negrista poetry of Luis Palés Matos, and the eroticism of Luis Lloréns Torres. Her nomadic subject championing freedom and justice fundamentally and ideologically distinguishes her work and aligns her with the vanguardias. Eventually, the nomadic subject becomes a “form of political resistance to hegemonic, fixed, unitary, and exclusionary views of subjectivity.”
Más allá del mar
Authors: Rosario Vanessa Pérez
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the significance of New York's Spanish-language press—specifically the weekly newspaper, Pueblos Hispanos: Semanario Progresista (Hispanic Peoples: Progressive Weekly, 1943–44)—exploring how Puerto Ricans employed journalism as a form of cultural and political transnational practice. Pueblos Hispanos promoted pan-Hispanism, the integration of Latin American countries, and socialist causes throughout the world, with a focus on Latin American countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Mexico. The paper offered detailed coverage of the politics of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican colonia while encouraging solidarity in the struggle for freedom and justice in countries across Latin America. In sharing news from Latin America and specifically Puerto Rico, the paper kept Spanish-speaking residents of New York City informed, establishing transnational connections as they tried to influence local politics.
Multiple Legacies
Authors: Rosario Vanessa Pérez
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies the work of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban writers in the diaspora who inherited and extended Burgos's legacy in the contemporary public imaginary. Her legacy among queer, feminist, and diaspora writers highlights the challenge to the Puerto Rican literary canon, the cult of patriarchy, and the foundational myth of la gran familia in Puerto Rican literature, which began to decline in the 1970s. For groups traditionally omitted from the national imaginary, claiming Burgos offered a way to tap into the island's nationalistic impulses, shared history, and social memory. Moreover, in a cosmopolitan city such as New York, Burgos became a transnational Latina/o cultural icon. Reinventing, reimagining, and riffing off Burgos becomes a way for artists to voice their struggles for recognition and self-determination in New York, echoing the themes developed in her writing.
Remembering Julia de Burgos
Authors: Rosario Vanessa Pérez
Published: May 2017

This chapter highlights the multiple ways in which Burgos's legacy extends into visual culture and El Barrio neighborhood in East Harlem. In the act of remembering Julia de Burgos, visual artists are less concerned with finding the “true” Julia; rather, they create sites of memory that are at once collective and individual. As Burgos emerged as an icon specific to New York Latino/a culture, remembering her became one of the memory circuits mapping the migratory routes of New York Latino/a cosmopolitan networks. The chapter then charts the course of Burgos's iconography, mapping the migratory trajectories and circulation of her influence from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and consequently offering insight into New York Latino/a cultural production.
St. Louis Rising
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

The standard story of St. Louis's founding tells of fur traders Pierre Laclède Liguest and Auguste Chouteau hacking a city out of wilderness. This book overturns such gauzy myths with the contrarian thesis that French government officials and institutions shaped and structured early city society. Of the former, none did more than Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. His commitment to the Bourbon monarchy and to civil tranquility made him the prime mover as St. Louis emerged during the tumult following the French and Indian War. Drawing on new source materials, the book delves into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, the role of women, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. The alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities—as personified by St. Ange—that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years War.
Logs and Stones: Early St. Louis Buildings
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role played by woodcutters, carpenters, cabinetmakers, and stonemasons in St. Louis during its earliest years, 1766–1770. Charles E. Peterson, one of the founding fathers of preservation architecture in the United States, wrote three seminal pieces about colonial architecture in the middle Mississippi Valley. Since Peterson, however, there has been no comprehensive study on Illinois Country architecture. Drawing largely on extant manuscripts in the archives of the Missouri History Museum, this chapter compares St. Louis's early buildings with those in other Illinois Country communities (Kaskaskia and Ste. Genevieve), those on the Gulf Coast, and those in French Canada. It also looks at a number of prominent woodworkers in early St. Louis, including Jacques Denis and Pierre Lupien dit Baron. Finally, it considers some of the features of Illinois Country houses and the materials used in their construction, primarily timber.
The Coutume de Paris Rules
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the Coutume de Paris (customary law of Paris) influenced nineteenth-century domestic affairs, especially inheritance practices, in a large swath of northern France, as well as in French colonies such as Missouri. Beginning in the 1720s, the Coutume was regularly cited in Illinois Country legal documents, with Charles-Joseph Labuxière, acting as the strict custodian of French law and legal traditions in St. Louis. French Canadians who settled early at Cahokia and Kaskaskia adhered loosely to many provisions of traditional French customary law, but it took a while for the Coutume to be fully institutionalized in the Illinois Country. This chapter analyzes the human dimensions of the Coutume as it was implemented in St. Louis by presenting case histories about marriages and marriage contracts, buying and selling property, and making arrangements for old age and death. These case histories illuminate how the law helped guide village families in the management of their mortal affairs.
Foundations of the St. Louis Fur Trade
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the obscure men who initiated the fur trade that emanated from St. Louis, among them Pierre Laclède Liguest, Jean-Louis Lambert dit Lafleur, and Louis Perrault. In his classic study, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Hiram Martin Chittenden portrayed Laclède and Auguste Chouteau as the founders of the St. Louis fur trade. However, the most important sources for understanding the early St. Louis fur trade are manuscripts housed at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Drawing on these heretofore neglected sources, the chapter brings to center stage an entirely new cast of characters that animated the early St. Louis fur trade: négociants, commerçants, and voyageurs. It considers the origins of fur trade in early St. Louis and the traders' competitions with the British, along with the Indians' involvement in the trade.
Abad de Santillán and the Anarchist Revolution in Spain
Authors: Baer James A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the significance of returning immigrants and the importance of the Argentine anarchist movement during the Second Spanish Republic and in the anarchist revolution that transformed Catalonia in 1936. Abad de Santillán's After the Revolution (1936) gave a detailed account of the organization of an anarchist society. In July 1936, workers in Barcelona armed themselves and defeated the military in that city before beginning a social revolution that implemented many of the ideas expressed in Abad de Santillán's book. The anarchist-inspired revolution established a libertarian society based on anarchist principles of voluntary association without the coercive power of the state.
Introduction
Authors: Fallaize Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

“Problèmes de la littérature féminine” (Problems for women’s literature) and “Femmes de lettres” (Women of letters) constitute the two halves of a substantial article on French women writers that Beauvoir wrote and published during her lecture tour of America, in the spring of 1947. The article, which has come to light only in the course of the preparation of this volume, throws light on Beauvoir’s thinking on the subject of women writers at an early stage of her work on ...
The Condition of Women
Authors: de Beauvoir Simone
Published: May 2017

The conclusion that strikes the reader at the end of this study is that in France, things are not going well for women.1 They are not going well for adolescents either, or the elderly, or children, or male adults. The country is sick and all its members bear witness to this infirmity. It is impossible to heal any of them by amending the law, however considerably [...
Introduction
Authors: Simons Margaret A.
Published: May 2017

In her 2011 introduction to Beauvoir’s foreword to the 1977 American edition of Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel reprinted in our 2011 volume of Beauvoir’s literary writings, Eleanore Holveck criticizes Beauvoir for failing to appreciate Morante’s achievement in “one of the finest novels to come out of World War II.”...
Interlude
Authors: Bosse Joanna
Published: May 2017

In this interlude, the author reflects on her experience of dancing the last waltz of the evening with Leo, a retired physician who also happens to be her neighbor. She describes Leo as one of her favorite partners in ballroom dance. He has a somewhat unique, syncretic salsa dance style. As he and the author were dancing the last waltz of the night, David played a vocal number. She sang along, and Leo didn't seem to mind. The author claims that while dancing with Leo, she experienced a pleasurable moment of just disappearing, as is often the case when she smooth dances with him. She was awakened by the closing refrains of the song. As she moved toward him and they were poised together, they turned as one entity. They continued to turn together as the final cadence of the song sounded.
Difference
Authors: Ehrlich Matthew C. , Saltzman Joe
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how popular culture portrays journalists as being different from everyone else and how it treats differences among journalists themselves. Journalists have been criticized for seeing themselves as being different from everyone else—as somehow standing above and beyond the rest of the citizenry. At the same time, the struggles of journalists who are not male, white, or heterosexual have been well documented, as have the difficulties of the mainstream press in covering gender, race, and sexual orientation. In pop culture, journalism has been portrayed as a particularly difficult career choice for women, who are caught between culture's “gendered” expectations of them as being caring and nurturing and the gendered expectations of journalists as being tough and independent. The difficulties of ethnic minority and LGBT journalists have also been depicted, with some of the most interesting portrayals having been produced by minority and/or gay or lesbian authors or directors.
Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South
Authors: Fones-Wolf Elizabeth , Fones-Wolf Ken
Published: May 2017

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. This book explores the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The book's nuanced look at working-class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the book shows, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, the book provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.
The Wages of the “Problem South”
Authors: Fones-Wolf Elizabeth , Fones-Wolf Ken
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the social and economic conditions that earned the South its label, “the problem South.” By 1938, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt had identified the “colonial economy” of the South as the nation's number one economic problem. In The Report on Economic Conditions of the South, key southern liberals, under the auspices of the administration's National Emergency Council, identified the paradox of the South—a region “blessed by Nature with immense wealth” whose “people as a whole are the poorest in the country.” The report described the poverty of the region and highlighted the need to embark on a program of economic development to bring the South's economy into convergence with the nation's, but changes were already in the works. Between the issuing of the report and the end of World War II, the South made great strides forward, positioning the region for economic growth at a rate that would surpass that of the nation.
Unrest in Zion
Authors: Fones-Wolf Elizabeth , Fones-Wolf Ken
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how southern religious institutions responded to economic collapse, social unrest, and a horrific world war. During the 1930s, church membership declined throughout the South as congregations, ministers, and church fellowships struggled with the hard times and the ensuing migrations. Those declines were not uniform; some Protestant churches responded to the material and psychological needs of its members better than others. Meanwhile, within and across denominations and church groups, debates raged about modernity, threats from an expanding government, and signs of the end times. Across the board, however, the experiences of hundreds of thousands of southern white Protestants forced the region's sacred institutions to reevaluate what they offered to the region's working people.
Ministering in Communities of Struggle
Authors: Fones-Wolf Elizabeth , Fones-Wolf Ken
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how ministers understood their responsibility and conveyed that to their congregations. For hundreds of southern preachers, a choice had to be made when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) arrived. Some had no difficulty. Most, however, struggled with their consciences and religious values, used their own life experiences, read their denominational newspapers, took the pulse of their congregations, and weighed the relative merits of arguments they heard from factory and union representatives. They also thought about the consequences their pronouncements might have on their communities, their flocks, their families, and themselves, but they did not contemplate what was morally right in a neutral environment. One side had an enormous advantage in resources that they could, and would, bring to bear on southern ministers. Ultimately, the decisions ministers made and the influence they had cannot be reduced to a formula.
“No One Sings as Convincingly as the Darkies Do”
Authors: Gough Peter , Seeger Peggy
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines diversity in the Federal Music Project (FMP) programs. Throughout much of the country, the FMP engaged African American musicians to perform spirituals and other traditional songs; by nearly all accounts, these concerts were met with much appreciation and usually played to multiracial audiences. In the West—primarily in California, Oregon, and Washington—Federal Music also funded “all Negro” operas, musical plays, and other performances. However, despite these considerable achievements, African Americans and Hispanics encountered both stereotyping and discrimination throughout the duration of the project. Press accounts, supervisory reports, and personal correspondences all reveal instances of ethnic prejudice in the form of depreciating media descriptions of events, as well as procedural and administrative inequities.
“The Folk of the Nation”
Authors: Gough Peter , Seeger Peggy
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a definition of folk music. Precise definition of the term folk music has long confounded scholars and been the source of endless debate and controversy; general agreements, either popular or academic are rare, and misunderstandings abound. Folk music in the United States reflects the complex history and diverse ethnic composition of American society. Indeed, academic recognition of these native musical forms preceded the development of the Federal Music Project (FMP); in 1882, Theodore Baker published a scholarly study of American folk music, and in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a preface for John Lomax's groundbreaking Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads publication. Meanwhile, some scholars argue that if a song has a known author, it cannot be classified as folksong “because the original meaning of folk music was something ancient and anonymous.”
Becoming Warriors
Authors: High Casey
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Waorani youth talk about and perform past violence in ways that contradict the “victim's point of view” often expressed in stories told by elders. It considers how colonial imagination of Amazonian “warriorhood” has in certain contexts come to define Waorani relations with kowori people. The chapter also shows how the warrior performances of Waorani youth in local school events and state-sponsored folklore festivals reveal the generational and embodied dimensions of memory in urban intercultural encounters. The imagery of violence and “wildness” can be seen in the social categories and processes of historical “ethnogenesis” that emerged in the first centuries of colonialism. This chapter explains how the aucas (“wild Indians”) are portrayed in the colonial imagination in relation to other indigenous peoples of Amazonia.
Skating on the Continent
Authors: Hines James R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the development of skating in the Continent. Skating on bladed skates, as practiced in the Netherlands and England, arrived in France sometime in the eighteenth century. When figure skating did arrive it became a popular winter activity spurred at least in part by acceptance at the court of Louis XVI, who reigned from 1774 to 1792. As in England, an aristocratic society had the financial means and free time to participate in skating at a sophisticated and artistic level. However, the larger French populace was surely sliding on the ice or skating on bone skates as they did in England, and probably had been doing so for centuries. For the French aristocracy, skating became a fashionable pastime, but unlike their English counterparts who put emphasis on methodical technique and precision, the French stressed grace and elegance.
New Disciplines
Authors: Hines James R.
Published: May 2017

Since the 1960s, televised World and Olympic competition brought figure skating into the homes of millions who discovered and enjoyed the perfect balance between artistry and athleticism that the sport offered. This developed an increasingly enthusiastic audience for the sport and led inevitably to a participatory role as converts filled ice rinks. Those new to skating discovered a recreational activity that persons of all ages could enjoy and that entire families could do together. Many, young and old, took lessons, and some became highly proficient. Not surprisingly, new competitive opportunities followed, which are the focus of this chapter. Adult skating is the most recent and fastest-growing area of competitive figure skating; collegiate and intercollegiate skating has become an available part of the college experience; and synchronized skating has evolved from an unpretentious beginning into a World championship sport that may become an Olympic sport.
Epilogue
Authors: Hines James R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses figure skating in the twenty-first century. The popularity of figure skating grew steadily for more than half a century when the attack on Nancy Kerrigan and the unprecedented media coverage that followed thrust the sport into the limelight, if only briefly. However, by century's end, television ratings had declined substantially, and except for major competitions, most televised events had disappeared. Most touring shows disappeared as well. The two well-established companies, Champions on Ice and Stars on Ice, still tour in the United States, although their attendance has declined from that of the mid-1990s. Holiday on Ice still tours in Europe. The balance of athleticism and artistry that defines figure skating has been retained as the sport has entered the twenty-first century, although there has been some eroding of artistry since the mid-1980s, a result of the ever-increasing emphasis on athleticism, especially jumping.
Variations on a Theme
Authors: Henricks Thomas S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers some of the issues that make it difficult to establish a working definition of play—and in consequence conducting research on the topic. Play scholars and advocates offer accounts of play that correspond to their distinctive circumstances and interests. Arguably, this diversity of viewpoint should be taken as a challenge to play scholars to explain why the different play theories have developed each in their own way. The chapter first cites some examples of behavior that most people might consider play or “almost play.” It then examines six different ways of thinking about play: play as action, play as interaction, play as activity, play as disposition, play as experience, and play as context. It also reviews several contemporary definitions of play, followed by a discussion of Brian Sutton-Smith's seven rhetorics of play: “play as progress” rhetoric; play as a confrontation with fate; power; community identity; rhetoric of the imaginary; rhetoric of self; and frivolity.
Play and the Physical Environment
Authors: Henricks Thomas S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the intersection between human capability and the physical environment, and more specifically between active play and material forms. It begins by discussing the evolution of human capability from an anthropological perspective and describes some distinguishing characteristics of the human species, including its persistent immaturity. It then considers different patterns of physical play that emerge during the life course, along with outdoor play and object play. It also explores the relationship between environments—both natural and artificial—and playful expression and concludes with an analysis of the character and consequences of physical play. The chapter argues that vigorous activity is not a hallmark of play and instead emphasizes the importance of physical play as a way of thinking concretely about the world.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Authors: Hicks Michael
Published: May 2017

A first-of-its-kind history, this book tells the epic story of how an all-volunteer group founded by persecuted religious outcasts grew into a multimedia powerhouse synonymous with the mainstream and with Mormonism itself. Drawing on decades of work observing and researching the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the book examines the personalities, decisions, and controversies that shaped “America's choir.” Here is the miraculous story behind the Tabernacle's world-famous acoustics, the anti-Mormonism that greeted early tours, the clashes with Church leaders over repertoire and presentation, the radio-driven boom in popularity, the competing visions of rival conductors, and the Choir's aspiration to be accepted within classical music even as Mormons sought acceptance within American culture at large. Everything from Billboard hits to TV appearances to White House performances paved the way for Mormonism's crossover triumph. Yet, as the book shows, such success raised fundamental concerns regarding the Choir's mission, functions, and image.
“My Tabernacle ‘Mormon’ Choir”
Authors: Hicks Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the activities of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of its conductor, Evan Stephens. In 1890 Mormons outgrew two fads, one doctrinal, the other musical. First was the idea that the world would end between December 1890 and December 1891. This commonplace belief, which helped nurture Mormon ferocity in the face of anti-polygamy legislation, derived from a statement Joseph Smith had made in 1835. In musical terms, entering the mainstream meant full commitment to standard musical notation and a letting-go of the musical fad of the Tonic sol-fa method. In 1891, William D. Davies, Welsh cultural ambassador from the New York newspaper Y Drych, toured Utah, heard Stephens's Choir and pronounced it the best choir in the world. This chapter considers the controversies faced by the Choir during Stephens's term as well as its concerts, domestic tours, and the competitions it joined. It also examines how the Choir continued its mission of public visibility without even leaving Salt Lake City.
A Cultural Necessity
Authors: Hicks Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the activities of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under Richard Condie's conductorship. On August 20, 1957, the First Presidency met to discuss who should replace Spencer Cornwall. They chose Newell Weight, a choral conductor at Brigham Young University, but he was on a two-year leave doing graduate work at the University of Southern California. Condie was appointed initially on a “limited” basis, but ended up directing the Choir for sixteen years. Not long after, Condie was accused of dropping old Choir members and installing in their places his University of Utah students. He was turning the Tabernacle Choir into “a university chorus.” This chapter considers Condie's rehearsal methods for the Choir, the Choir's recordings and its television appearances, domestic tours, and success in the areas of popular music and classical music. It also describes the Choir's identification with conservative Americanism as well as its dwindling reputation.
The Price of Independence
Authors: Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann Anna D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the American Polonia and its press, and situates Ameryka-Echo within its context, as Paryski struggles to defend his independence among various political and ideological interests and clashes with the Roman Catholic Church. It argues that the desire to keep his newspaper independent during the period of polarization and internal strife with American Polonia was never the sole reason for Paryski's anti-clerical stance. Paryski also rooted his independent belief in the Polish Positivist ideology, which remained close to his heart throughout his life, and manifested itself in his sympathy toward the populist ideology of the Polish National Catholic Church. Moreover, choices in his personal life permanently put him outside the Roman Catholic church, with no option for return. As a consequence, Ameryka-Echo became a beacon of anti-clericalism as well as religious tolerance, forming an open forum for a chorus of diverse voices from among American Polonia.
Ameryka-Echo in Changing Times
Authors: Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann Anna D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows the Paryski Publishing company and Ameryka-Echo through the inter-war decades and Paryski's death in 1935, and then into the postwar period, when the newspaper was sold and fought for survival. The new immigrant generations and new immigrant waves of political exiles entered the Polonia scene, carrying with them different ideas and expectations, and yet the close relationships between editors and readers survived, as they challenged each other on the pages of the “Corner.” The decline and demise of Ameryka-Echo in the 1960s was symptomatic of the developments in both Polish American and all ethnic press in this period.
A City Called Heaven
Authors: Marovich Robert M.
Published: May 2017

In this book, the author, a gospel announcer and music historian, shines a light on the humble origins of a majestic genre and its indispensable bond to the city where it found its voice: Chicago. The book follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago. In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city's mainline black Protestant churches. In addition to drawing on print media and ephemera, the book utilizes hours of interviews with artists, ministers, and historians—as well as discussions with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers—to recover many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders. The book also examines how a lack of economic opportunity bred an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled gospel music's rise to popularity and granted social mobility to a number of its practitioners. As the book shows, gospel music expressed a yearning for freedom from earthly pains, racial prejudice, and life's hardships. In the end, it proved to be a sound too mighty and too joyous for even church walls to hold.
The Information-Industrial Complex
Authors: Powers Shawn M. , Jablonski Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the emergence of an Information-Industrial Complex in the United States, tracking the rise of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the modern knowledge economy. It first outlines the origins and history of Information-Industrial Complex's antecedent, the Military-Industrial Complex, before turning to the beginnings of the Information-Industrial Complex itself. It then considers how the U.S. government has cultivated a close and codependent relationship with companies involved in information production, storage, processing, and distribution, referred to as the “information industries.” It also looks at In-Q-Tel, a corporation that would “ensure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) remains at the cutting edge of information technology advances and capabilities,” along with the rise of information assurance after 9/11. The chapter concludes by highlighting the commodification of digital information in the post-9/11 environment through its securitization.
Toward Information Sovereignty
Authors: Powers Shawn M. , Jablonski Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how state actors assert authority over the physical nature of transnational data flows in order to maintain domestic stability and expand influence abroad. Information sovereignty refers to a state's attempt to control information flows within its territory. Control is asserted in a variety of ways, including filtering, monitoring, and structuring industry–government relations in order to maximize state preferences in privately operated communications systems The chapter explores the relationship between sovereignty, the nation-state, and connective technologies in the context of absolute freedom of expression and total information control. It considers how the governments of China, Egypt, Iran, and the United States control access to a singular internet while developing more malleable intranets capable of creating a balance between freedom and control. It shows that a state's capacity to adapt is crucial to its survival, but that information control is also in increasingly effective means of reasserting state sovereignty. The chapter argues that, despite any promises that governments would fail at taming the Internet, they have achieved an impressive level of success thus far.
A Brief History of Professional Team Sports
Authors: Surdam David George
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the history of professional team sports in order to place the issues covered in the Congressional hearings in the proper context. It first considers the rise of baseball as America's national pastime and Major League Baseball (MLB)'s decision to maintain two separate leagues, the American League and the National League. It then discusses the dispute between MLB and the rival Federal League, along with the emergence of other sports that achieved Big League status, namely, football and basketball. It also examines the prosperity of the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the appearance of new challengers to their dominance after World War II. Finally, it looks at the Flood v. Kuhn, a Supreme Court case that challenged baseball's reserve clause, along with the rise of free agency.
Professional Sports Team Community Protection Acts 1982 and 1984–1985
Authors: Surdam David George
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Congressional hearings conducted in 1982 and 1984–1985 to address the issue of franchise relocation. It first considers the so-called community protection acts that were introduced during the early 1980s in the wake of franchise relocations in the National Football League (NFL) and the lingering ill-will triggered by the expansion Washington Senators' move to Texas. It then looks at the legal wrangling between the NFL and Al Davis over his relocation of the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, along with legislators' push for franchise expansion and their doubts about revenue sharing in the NFL and Major League Baseball (MLB). It also examines the United States Football League's (USFL) antitrust suit against the NFL accusing it of being an illegal monopoly and using predatory tactics to thwart the USFL.
Introduction
Authors: Surdam David George
Published: May 2017

This book examines the economics of the antitrust aspects of the three professional sports leagues—Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA)—based on the information presented at the hearings conducted by Congress during the 1950s. In the late 1800s, Americans worried about the growing concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations and big trusts such as oil, railroads, steel, meat packing, and tobacco. In response, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. While owners of professional sports teams may not have resembled industrialists, they labored under the same antitrust statutes. This book explores some of the major issues tackled in the Congressional hearings, including mergers between rival football and basketball leagues, player rights, general antitrust exemptions, territorial rights, franchise relocation and sales, franchise expansion, and television policies.
Sensing Chicago
Authors: Mack Adam
Published: May 2017

A hundred years and more ago, a walk down a Chicago street invited an assault on the senses. Untiring hawkers shouted from every corner. The manure from thousands of horses lay on streets pooled with molasses and puddled with kitchen grease. Odors from a river gelatinous and lumpy with all manner of foulness mingled with the all-pervading stench of the stockyard slaughterhouses. This book lets fresh air into the sensory history of Chicago in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining five case studies: the Chicago River, the Great Fire, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and the rise and fall of the White City amusement park. The book's vivid recounting of the smells, sound and noise, and tactile miseries of city life reveals how input from the five human senses influenced the history of class, race, and ethnicity in the city. At the same time, it transports readers to an era before modern refrigeration and sanitation, when to step outside was to be overwhelmed by the odor and roar of a great city in progress.
Introducing LSD, 1953–1956
Authors: Siff Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental states considered to have significant scholarly and academic importance. Scholarly interest gave journalists license to describe drug states that previously had been considered inappropriate for public view. Reports in mainstream media outlets were followed quickly by even more sensational coverage in more marginal publications.
Aural Flânerie
Authors: Boutin Aimée
Published: May 2017

This chapter establishes that scholarly approaches to flâneurs have downplayed the broader impact of the urban experience on the senses and underappreciated their aural acuity. From the type's early formulations by Honoré de Balzac, Auguste de Lacroix, and Victor Fournel, the flâneur is attuned to city sounds, and flâneur-writing arranges them to portray the city as concert. The art of flânerie consists of transforming the empirical confusion of city sounds into a unified musical composition. As the clamor of the streets promoted selective hearing, street musicians were targeted as major contributors to the city as concert. Close readings of verbal and visual sketches by Delphine de Girardin, Maria d'Anspach, Bertall, and Old Nick show that class-biased ideas about concert music influenced their often humorous reactions to street noise; nevertheless, the neurasthenic bourgeois ear was often less than receptive to the intrusive noise of foreign street performers. In contrast, Victor Fournel waxed enthusiastic about the people's love of music. A close reading of his Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris makes sense of his distinctive appreciation for street music.
The Diversity of Dvořák’s String Quartet Audiences
Authors: Lott Marie Sumner
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter analyzes how the diversity of Antonín Dvořák's audiences affected his string quartets. The strain of satisfying the disparate expectations of diverse audiences while attempting to establish himself as a composer of “universal” music in the tradition of German Classicism is most evident in Dvořák's string quartets. These works demonstrate his shrewdness in reading the musical climate and responding to it with appropriate stylistic choices that address not only the desire for exotic signifiers or their absence but also the types of engagement that listeners and performers would enjoy in different performance settings. The chapter then illuminates the features of Dvořák's earlier string quartets that indicate the composer's engagement with pervasive nineteenth-century string quartet traditions and his successful navigation of the rapidly changing chamber music culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Fostering on the Farm
Authors: Birk Megan
Published: May 2017

From 1870 until after World War I, reformers led an effort to place children from orphanages, asylums, and children's homes with farming families. The farmers received free labor in return for providing room and board. Reformers, meanwhile, believed children learned lessons in family life, citizenry, and work habits that institutions simply could not provide. Drawing on institution records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, this book scrutinizes how the farm system developed—and how the children involved may have become some of America's last indentured laborers. Between 1850 and 1900, up to one-third of farm homes contained children from outside the family. The book reveals how the nostalgia attached to misplaced perceptions about healthy, family-based labor masked the realities of abuse, overwork, and loveless upbringings endemic in the system. It also considers how rural people cared for their own children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. Finally, the book traces how the ills associated with rural placement eventually forced reformers to transition to a system of paid foster care, adoptions, and family preservation.
Introduction
Authors: Caronan Faye
Published: May 2017

This book explores how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critiques are delegitimized and obscured by U.S. imperialism and global power. Drawing on Raymond Williams's dual definitions of culture as both the experience of everyday life within a society and the cultural productions that circulate within society, the book analyzes the ways that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans have been represented to affirm narratives of U.S. exceptionalism in the early twentieth century and today. It considers how recent Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions across multiple genres critique these justifications, and how the U.S. cultural market contains these critiques to reaffirm revised narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. This introduction provides an overview of the institutionalized narrative of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the politics and economics of Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural representation, and hegemonic narratives of racial stereotypes in the United States.