bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Formidable Arena
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the history of the Philadelphia Orchestra, considered one of the greatest orchestras in the world. Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra was led during its early years by two German-speaking conductors, Fritz Scheel (1900–1907) and Carl Pohlig (1907—12). Maestro Scheel made a good start on developing an organization of distinction, but he succumbed to an untimely illness in 1907. Unfortunately, the man who succeeded him deflated many of his predecessor's gains, and the orchestra became a competent but stiff ensemble that inspired strained admiration from its own audiences and little respect from other cities. However, its place in the world of music underwent a dramatic change when the thirty-year-old Leopold Stokowski became the orchestra's leader at the beginning of the 1912—13 season. The chapter also describes Edna Phillips' audition on January 7, 1930.
“Answer Yes or No”
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter details events following the end of Edna Phillips' first season with the Philadelphia Orchestra. These include her attendance of Salzedo's Harp Colony in Camden, Maine; Stokowski's decision to treat Philadelphia audiences to a mini-festival of music by living composers; Stokowski's attempt to arrange a tryst with Phillips; guest conductors who took over the podium during Stokowski's prolonged breaks to travel and pursue what he called his “researches” into native music and instruments around the world; and the request of the orchestra's board of directors that the maestro to reel in his musical experiments due to concerns about the loss of revenue from the effects of the Depression.
Honor among Women
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter details events following the start of the 1935–36 season. During the season, Stokowski took another important step in eliminating the gender barrier that still stood firm in the orchestral world: he hired Elsa Hilger, a young woman from Austria, on the fourth desk of the cello section. The Philadelphia Orchestra now had two women on its roster in addition to Marjorie Tyre, the second harpist who played often with the orchestra but was not listed as a full-time player. One might have thought that Hilger and Phillips would bond as happy companions in the struggle for female acceptance in the orchestral world, but they did not, especially after Hilger began describing herself as the first woman, “other than an occasional harpist,” to join a major orchestra. That made Phillips furious.
A Silent Exit
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Stoki's All-American Youth Orchestra. As the war began to overtake Europe in 1939, and German and Italian influence threatened to take hold in South America, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and performers from La Scala made tours through South America, winning friends for their respective countries. Alarmed, the Roosevelt administration wanted to counter those successes by sending U.S. cultural emissaries to Latin America. However, little government money was available to finance such projects. Stokowski stepped up to offer one solution to the dilemma. What better way to challenge the cultural impact that the Berlin Philharmonic and La Scala made on South America and counter the propaganda then circulating about the Hitler Youth Movement than by forming an orchestra of fresh-faced and highly talented young Americans as goodwill emissaries? To do this, he proposed to form an orchestra of young people from all over the United States. It would forge cultural ties with South Americans through the universal language of music and the charm of youth. Stoki also chose thirteen players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and set them strategically within his new ensemble to provide a backbone of expertise for the final product so that it could be brought together quickly. One of them was harpist Edna Phillips.
“And the Winner—Television!”
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces boxing's crooked path to respectability in order to gain an understanding the incredible success of TV boxing in the middle of the twentieth century. Boxing was born in the late 1800s, when the adoption of the Queensberry rules ended the old bare-knuckle days of limitless rounds, neck choking, no weight classifications, and muddy deaths. The new rules imposed uniformly sized rings, three-minute rounds, standardized judging, weight categories, and padded leather boxing gloves. The new structure fit in well with Progressive Era concerns regarding social regulation and masculine regeneration. America was changing dramatically in the decades between the end of the Civil War and start of the First World War. Millions of non-English speaking New Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe poured into America's ports. By the 1940s, a single Mafia family managed to dominate the fight racket, led by a hit man named Frankie Carbo. When boxing came to television, the mob did not leave. In fact, it skimmed more money than ever. Home audiences were unaware that Gillette and the mob brought them the Friday Night Fights.
The Secret Government
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Gaspar's encounter with the hidden side of the world of professional boxing in October 1958. On the day of his fight with Don “Geronimo” Jordan, Gaspar was visited by an Italian mystery man who asked him to go down in the fourth round in exchange for $10,000. Gaspar refused and declared his intention to win. It never entered Gaspar's mind to be afraid of the mob. He had known about crooked fights in Mexico. There, a rigged match usually meant that the guy taking the dive would be paid by the winner in a deal worked out beforehand. Nothing more organized than that. When Gaspar told Nick Corby about the mysterious Italian, he looked right at Gaspar and said, “Tonight you must fight the hardest fight of your life. The only way you're losing is if you collapse and die.” The remainder of the chapter discusses the mob's involvement in the fight business.
The Ship Goes Down
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter details events following Gaspar Ortega's loss to Emile Griffith. Dismantling the Indian placed Griffith firmly in the uppermost reaches of boxing royalty. He made fifty thousand dollars from the match and was named “boxer of the month” by the National Boxing Association. For Gaspar, the title battle with Griffith was not just a loss. He had let down his family, his country. Nick Corby called Gaspar on the phone one day while he was recovering from the Griffith fight. The loss had been physically ruinous and emotionally devastating. Now Corby proposed a new game plan: a tour. They would travel throughout Mexamerica, picking up every single fight they could find. Short on options and with nothing else to fall back on, Gaspar agreed.
The Black and White of Newspapers
Authors: Mellinger Gwyneth
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter delves into the history of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and its Goal 2000 initiative in order to examine why ASNE members had hesitated to implement civil rights reforms in their newsroom hiring practices despite passionate advocacy by a series of ASNE leaders and the expenditure of unprecedented industry resources. It traces the ASNE's reckoning with inequality from the 1950s into the twenty-first century by first exploring the ASNE's construction of a professional norm that marginalized journalists and editors who were not white, not male, and not heterosexual; and then traces the organization's subsequent attempts to democratize newsroom hiring.
Seeking Justice in a Climate of Irony
Authors: Mellinger Gwyneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the ASNE's response to civil rights reforms and women's liberation and begins a discussion of how the ASNE's responses to the concerns of nonwhites and white women, which the organization treated as separate matters, exacerbated the division between race and gender, producing tension between the marginalized constituencies and a disparity in the resources accorded to each. It reflects on a time of transition, when the idea of integrating newsrooms and the ASNE had appeared on the horizon and many editors had begun contemplating its distant inevitability. This was not, however, a time of concrete change in the membership's collective thinking about race and gender.
“A Sensitive and Difficult Task”
Authors: Mellinger Gwyneth
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the hiring initiative as a historically, politically, and socially contingent event; and covers the period of greatest racial instability within ASNE, roughly 1977 through the 1980s. During the 1970s, public consciousness about lingering discrimination was heightened, as were a sense of racial and ethnic pride among nonwhites, and feminism among women. But the rising momentum of pro-equality efforts was checked by political cross-current. Many white Americans of the late 1970s, even if they believed opportunities for nonwhites were unjustly unequal, objected to the use of quotas to enforce equality, and the frequency of the term “reverse discrimination,” which referred to the denial of opportunities for whites to compensate nonwhites for past injustice, attested to the growth of an anti-affirmative action backlash.
Closing a Chapter of Newspaper History
Authors: Mellinger Gwyneth
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes the failures of the ASNE to deliver on its promise of newsroom diversity since the inception of its new hiring initiative. It reflects on the highlights, shortcomings, and ultimately the denouement of this chapter of ASNE (and newspaper) history as it charts the decline of the diversity project. At the same time, the chapter also takes a look at the declining newspaper industry which, while not wholly at fault for the failure of the diversity project, had contributed to it in part. The chapter looks into many other reasons for the failure as well, and concludes with hope for future possibilities even in a world where technological advances have begun to push newsprint culture to the margins in favor of a more globalized media culture.
A Rambling Funny Streak
Authors: Comentale Edward P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter uses the songs of Woody Guthrie to track a wider shift from regional song to national culture and, ultimately, pop idealism. It begins with Guthrie's own accounts of Oklahoma modernism—the whirlwind cycles of boom and bust that marked life in the Southwest during his early years. Guthrie's early experiences provided him with a typically modernist sense of cultural drift and discontinuity and attuned him to the growing rift between material reality and its public expression. These sensibilities informed Guthrie's most radical work with the Popular Front; his songwriting of this period, rather than a straightforward expression of folk ideology or class warfare, explores a new economy of sound for an increasingly migrant public. However, Guthrie later turned away from the fatalism of the socialist line to explore a certain “comic” mode, one that, in its own sonic rambling, upends the discursive categories of modern public life.
Indian Accents
Authors: Davé Shilpa S.
Published: May 2017

Amid immigrant narratives of assimilation, this book focuses on the representations and stereotypes of South Asian characters in American film and television. Exploring key examples in popular culture ranging from Peter Sellers' portrayal of Hrundi Bakshi in the 1968 film The Party to contemporary representations such as Apu from The Simpsons and characters in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the book develops the ideas of “accent,” “brownface,” and “brown voice” as new ways to explore the racialization of South Asians beyond visual appearance. The book relates these examples to earlier scholarship on blackface, race, and performance to introduce “accent” as a means of representing racial difference, national origin, and belonging, as well as distinctions of class and privilege. While focusing on racial impersonations in mainstream film and television, the book also amplifies the work of South Asian American actors who push back against brown-voice performances, showing how strategic use of accent can expand and challenge such narrow stereotypes.
Introduction
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter talks about the legacy of Arthur Judson, a monumental figure in American concert music, whose career has largely evaded scholarly inquiry. His name appears in numerous conductor biographies, and most historical accounts of the American symphony orchestra include some description of his contributions. But his long career and legacy have remained relatively unexamined. In part, this silence reflects the nature of his profession. Music management is a nebulous field that encompasses virtually every detail necessary to present music to the public. Deciphering the mundane from the musically significant can prove a formidable challenge, a problem compounded by the fact that music management is a subset of both the legal and the business worlds, which operate under necessary shrouds of secrecy.
Fertile Ground in Philadelphia, 1915–1921
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows Judson's journey to Philadelphia in July 1915, and how he immediately immersed himself in the orchestra's ongoing projects. His principal partner in these endeavors was Stokowski, and the two men corresponded regularly that summer and into the fall. Stokowski was the public face of the orchestra and probably its most important asset, but he was not a dictator. The premiere of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 during Judson's first year in Philadelphia illustrates this point. Stokowski and Judson crafted a plan for promoting the Schoenberg piece. As they worked on this project, it appears that both rethought the idea of proclaiming the Chamber Symphony bad music. Rather than focus on the value judgment, Stokowski and Judson opted instead for a publicity campaign designed to prepare the audience for the Schoenberg experience.
Conclusion
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explains how Arthur Judson was a towering figure in American concert music in the twentieth century. He managed the leading orchestras and artists of his time, built the most successful music management company in American history, and pioneered ideas that still inform the music industry today. James Buswell characterized it best, calling Judson “an elephant.” No manager before or since acquired the portfolio or the power that Judson amassed during his sixty-year career. Judson's successes were intertwined with, and fed by, an expanding audience for classical concert music in early-twentieth-century America. Although that audience would eventually shrink, Judson's development as a manager was fueled by the sense that America was brimming with classical music listeners.
Lynching in Late-Nineteenth-Century Michigan
Authors: Pfeifer Michael J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the contexts and discourse surrounding the seven lynchings that occurred in Michigan in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The relative infrequency of lynching in Michigan was due to the Wolverine State's somewhat earlier white settlement in the 1820s and 1830s, slightly before a prolonged culture conflict between “rough justice” and “due process” sentiments flared across extensive parts of the Midwest, West, and South. The comparative paucity of collective killing in Michigan also stemmed from its preponderance of Yankee settlers, and from its smaller proportion of emigrants from the Upland South. Sporadic lynchings in Michigan drew meaning from varied contexts that included the highly racialized discourse that accompanied the social and political alterations of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“They Lynched Jim Cullen”
Authors: Winslow Dena Lynn
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at the oral history that developed around the Northern Maine lynching. In spring 1873 James Cullen, possibly the only lynching victim in New England's history, swung into eternity at the hands of a mob in Mapleton, Maine. Cullen's lynching and the subsequent oral tradition of life and death on the Maine frontier provide a window into the cultural identity of the northeast borderland region. Northern Maine, like western states where vigilante justice was frequent, was a frontier region, and one theory of nonracial lynchings suggests that this was a recourse where legal systems were weak. But Maine's judicial system was firmly in place, and although Maine later abolished the death sentence, capital punishment was a legal option in Maine at the time of James Cullen's lynching.
Suffragists Win the New York State Campaign, 1915–1917
Authors: Goodier Susan
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the second campaign for woman suffrage in New York State. Following the advent of the Great War, Alice Hill Chittenden, although continuing to serve as president of the state anti-suffrage association, focused her reform energy on war preparedness and the American Red Cross more than on suffrage. Historians have long posited that women won the right to vote as a reward for their war efforts. However, anti-suffragists, individually and as a group, committed their resources earlier and far more fully to the war effort than did suffragists. The Great War so distracted the anti-suffragists that they essentially dropped out of the battle, allowing the suffragists to win sooner than they otherwise would have. This subtle but important detail has been overshadowed by Tammany's famous reversal on the question in 1917. Once women won suffrage in New York State, the federal amendment would soon enfranchise all women in the United States.
Antis Adjust to Enfranchisement, 1917–1932
Authors: Goodier Susan
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers an alternative—but far more logical–end to the story of anti-suffrage. In the process of preventing their enfranchisement, many former anti-suffrage women came to see the value of political involvement and power. This represents the experience of most New York anti-suffrage leaders and their supporters after enfranchisement. Quite a few former anti-suffragists, including, in particular, Alice Hill Chittenden, appeared to welcome the new political role for women and became involved in party politics with the specific goal of educating women to make good use of the franchise. The chapter discusses the politicization of former anti-suffragists and the ways they chose to play their role as enfranchised members of the polity. Many of these women became active members of the Republican Party, carrying on their political activity in much the same way as they had for anti-suffragism, this time voting and loyal to a political party.
Weavers of Dreams, Unite!
Authors: Holmes Sean P.
Published: May 2017

Published to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Actors' Equity Association in 1913, this book explores the history of actors' unionism in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival resources in New York and Los Angeles, the book documents how American stage actors used trade unionism to construct for themselves an occupational identity that foregrounded both their artistry and their respectability. In the process, the book paints a vivid picture of life on the theatrical shop floor in an era in which economic, cultural, and technological changes were transforming the nature of acting as work. An engaging study that stands at a scholarly intersection where a number of disciplines converge, this book offers important insights into the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century, the role of class in the construction of cultural hierarchy, and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry.
The Sock and Buskin or the Artisan’s Biretta
Authors: Holmes Sean P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the problems that organizing in defense of their collective interests posed for the men and women of the American stage and, indeed, for many other occupational groups on the margins of the American middle class. Beginning with an analysis of the work culture of actors, it argues that while the shared experiences of a life on the boards generated a powerful sense of group identity, individual ambition, the fuel that powered the star system, proved difficult to reconcile with the principles of collective action. It goes on to highlight how actors' leaders deployed the vocabulary of high culture and the larger language of class of which it was a part not simply to define their position in relation to the major theatrical employers but also to draw a line between those performers they deemed worthy of the label artist and those they did not. It concludes with a detailed analysis of the debate that raged within the ranks of the Actors' Equity Association over the question of affiliation with the organized labor movement. Paying careful attention to the language that the competing parties employed to articulate their respective positions, it documents the development of a schism within the theatrical community that sprang from two markedly different ways of conceptualizing the process of cultural production.
Epilogue
Authors: Holmes Sean P.
Published: May 2017

This epilogue traces the collapse of the old theatrical economy after the onset of the Great Depression and assesses its impact on the men and women of the American stage. Highlighting the huge decline in employment opportunities in a perennially overcrowded labor market in the wake of the Great Crash, it argues that the brand of occupational unionism that had underpinned the activities of the Actors' Equity Association (AEA) in the 1920s ceased to meet the needs of the theatrical rank and file. In the highly politicized environment of the 1930s, traditional patterns of deference within the acting community broke down, and a new generation of actors, largely unschooled in the genteel tradition in American culture, began to question the wisdom of building an occupational identity around the twin ideals of workplace discipline and respectability. In 1935 a group of militants set out to seize control of the AEA and to guide it in a more radical direction. Though their insurgency failed, it had profound implications for actors' unionism in the American theater industry. It prompted a reorientation of the AEA toward the bread-and-butter needs of its constituents and a frank acknowledgment on the part of its leaders that actors are workers as well as artists—and that the first role is indivisible from the second.
Songs of Our Fathers
Authors: Paul David C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's advocacy of Charles E. Ives and his music between the years 1927 and 1947. Cowell's ideas about Ives can be grouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940. This chapter first considers Cowell's portrait of Ives as a New England musical ethnographer before discussing the views of anthropologists, folklorists, and musical modernists about folk music. It then examines how Cowell became interested in folk music, along with his influence on Ives. It also looks at the notion of a usable past, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” in which he called for a rewriting of the history of American literature. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's “Concord” Sonata and Ives's commitment to freedom (in the sense of refusing to impose a fixed final form on his works).
Musicology Makes Its Mark
Authors: Paul David C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the impact of musicology on Charles E. Ives's reception by focusing on the contributions made by musicologists to discourse about the composer during the period 1965–1985. It considers how musicologists portrayed Ives through their disciplinary practices and perceptions and shows that their image of Ives was deeply rooted in European music history. The chapter also explores how Ives became the subject of style history by looking at the work of William W. Austin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Robert Morgan. Finally, it discusses J. Peter Burkholder's discovery that Ives's commitment to transcendentalism was not so deep nor did it extend quite so far back as had previously been assumed.
Postscript
Authors: Paul David C.
Published: May 2017

In this postscript, the author offers some thoughts about what Charles E. Ives has meant to him, and more specifically, why he decided to write a book about his reception. In particular, he reflects on the question “So what do you think about Ives?” that was first asked by an attendee at a meeting of the Pacific-Southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society. He also talks about how Ives left a strong impression on him while he was a student at the University of British Columbia, where he wrote a dissertation titled “Converging Paths to the Canon: Charles Ives, Gustav Mahler, and American Culture.” Furthermore, he explains how the narratives and methodologies of intellectual history can illuminate, and be illuminated by, Ives's reception history. The author concludes by citing Stanley Fish's concept of “interpretive communities” and suggesting that the scholarly community of musicologists is suffering from a dwindling constituency.
Conclusion
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

The chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The aim of this book was to analyze the parodied racial identities—“whites,” “blacks,” and “Indians”—performed in the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings. The fundamental theoretical premise has been that festivities are nonstatic texts that are always embedded in ever-changing or evolving sociocultural, economic, and political realities. It illustrated and emphasized that basic fact, valid for any festive reality, by looking at the Festival as it has been performed in two different contexts within one single cultural area (the province of Esmeraldas): the villages of La Tola and Santo Domingo de Ónzole. The book proposed to re-locate the Festival's “texts” within the webs of social relations and social practices that constitute its “contexts.” In doing so, it underscored the importance of “place” and “space” for the study of festivities in general, and of carnivalesque festivities in particular.
Macroanalysis
Authors: Jockers Matthew L.
Published: May 2017

This book introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis—a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture. Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the “close-reading” of individual works, the book describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.
Nationality
Authors: Jockers Matthew L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the potential influences or entailments of nationality on authorial style. Nations have distinct linguistic habits of style. For example, the British have the propensity to drop the word the in front of certain nouns for which American speakers and writers always deploy the article. This explains why the mean relative frequency of the word the is lower in British and Irish novels than in American novels. In this chapter, an analysis of a corpus of 3,346 nineteenth-century American and British novels reveals that British authors use the word the at a rate of 5 percent, compared to 6 percent for their American counterparts. Thus, the word the is a strong indicator of author nationality, at least when trying to differentiate between British and American texts. This chapter discusses the results of author nationality analyses, along with word usage analyses, for British, American, and Irish novels. It demonstrates what stylistic or linguistic feature analyses can provide in terms of separating writers by nationality.
Glass and Light: “Veneers” and Curtain Walls, 1889–1904
Authors: Leslie Thomas
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes major structures built from 1889 to 1904, many of which used skins of lightweight terra-cotta and glass that exploited new wind-bracing techniques and depressed glass prices to achieve unprecedented transparency. The flourishing of lightweight skins supported by rigid steel frames was uniquely permitted by Chicago's codes, which minimized the required thickness of masonry walls. Chicago's code helped architects and engineers solve the problems that continued to plague tall buildings on its poor soil. At 90 pounds per cubic foot for hollow brick and up to 140 pounds for pressed, the reduction of masonry envelopes from deep structural walls to thin veneers had immediate benefits. For instance, the six-foot walls of the Monadnock's first story weighed nearly a ton per running foot. Replacing this with a twelve-inch-thick wall of nonstructural hollow tile would have eliminated some 95 percent of the first-floor walls' dead weight.
Power and Height: The Electric Skyscraper, 1920–1934
Authors: Leslie Thomas
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes major structures built from 1920 to 1934, which were dominated by towers that resulted from an explosive real estate market that challenged code restrictions on height and that took fuller advantage of powered construction and circulation. The height restrictions imposed by the 1893 Code foreclosed any serious attempt to build higher than 180 or, later, 260 feet. But after World War I, a loophole in Chicago's ordinance that permitted “Spires, Towers, and Domes” sparked a controversy and then a race for new heights. The sudden appearance of the 556-foot Chicago Temple in the center of the Loop agitated property owners, architects, and engineers into a new quest for height—at first within the limits of the spire and tower loophole and then to the relaxed requirements of a new zoning ordinance that was tailor-made for a new, powered skyscraper era.
The Web of Consequences
Authors: Lorence James J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how Jencks' experiences after being cut loose from Mine-Mill only confirmed the worldview that had shaped his career as a social activist since his college years. Now, although he no longer had ties with the institutional party, he never gave up his commitment to the goal of creating a Socialist society in the United States. Even after he and Virginia were shaken by the brutality of the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Jencks looked to the future. However, his optimism suffered another blow in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he continued to face job discrimination rooted in his personal history of labor militancy and resistance to governmental pressures.
Street Vendors Claiming Respect and Dignity in the Neoliberal City
Authors: Quiroz-Becerra M. Victoria
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines grassroots organizing around street vending in New York City since 2003, with particular emphasis on the debates surrounding vending in the city and the ways in which the issue has been framed by both activists and government officials. It begins with a discussion of the claims of street vendors within the context of neoliberal forms of urban governance and their contestation, asking how they work within and contest neoliberal forms of governance. It then considers two main issues faced by street vendors in New York City, one related to enforcement of street-vending rules and regulations, the other related to licensing and permits. It takes a look at one organization, Esperanza del Barrio, to find out how it uses ideas of respect, dignity, and rights to frame its advocacy of street vendors. The chapter shows that grassroots activists and their supporters have framed the demands of street vendors by appealing to ideas of free enterprise and individualism.
Reinventing Dirty Work
Authors: Fisher Lucy T. , Kang Miliann
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how immigrant women accommodate themselves to the various demands of low-wage, low-status service jobs by engaging in “boundary making,” processes that circumscribe and redefine the performance of “dirty work.” Boundary making refers to material and symbolic processes in which providers of low-wage work impose limitations on its performance while redefining the work as skillful and important. Dirty work is defined as physical labor that involves cleaning and caring for the human body, its products, and its environs. The chapter first provides an overview of certified nursing assistants (CNAs) who provide elder care in the United States before exploring how immigrants working as CNAs make meaning of work that is often construed as dirty work. Using data from fieldwork in three California nursing homes, the chapter shows how CNAs try to bring some measure of dignity to a low-wage, low-status job, and shape their identity formation as workers and immigrants within constraining institutional contexts.
Immigrant Women Workers at the Center of Social Change
Authors: Chun Jennifer Jihye , Lipsitz George , Shin Young
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role that grassroots organizing and leadership development play in tackling social and economic inequalities along multiple axes of difference, including race, gender, immigration status, and language ability. It locates immigrant women workers at the center of social change by focusing on Asian Immigrant Women Advocates's (AIWA) self-reflexive organizing approach. AIWA is a grassroots community-based organization whose mission is to improve the living and working conditions of Asian immigrant women employed in low-paid and socially devalued jobs. AIWA's English-language dominance workshop embodies many of its core principles and organizing philosophy. The chapter analyzes AIWA's theory and method of change as well as its intersectional organizing approach, with particular emphasis on its English-language classes, workplace literacy classes, and Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS). It shows that AIWA produces new kinds of politics, polities, and personalities by placing immigrant women workers at the center of the struggle.
Transfronteriza
Authors: Téllez Michelle
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how women border dwellers are responding to transnational processes and the effects of neoliberal policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), by focusing on woman-centered activism projects as well as innovative forms of political organizing and community formation at the U.S./Mexico border. Building on the idea of transfronterismo, or transborderness, the chapter suggests that the actual border should be seen not just as a site of passage but also as a site for gendered transformation where a politicized transfronteriza identity can emerge. It looks specifically at the transborder space of the twin cities of Tijuana and San Diego and the work of the La Colectiva Feminista Binacional (Binational Feminist Collective, CFB). It probes the lives and experiences of the men and women of the maquiladora industry and shows that the construction of a politicized transfronteriza identity is determined by three factors: a shared geographical space, a collective consciousness based on mutual experiences and solidarity, and a feminist politics that looks at women's rights as fundamental to challenging the system.
“It’s Not All Greek to Me”
Authors: Fuentecilla Jose V.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Steven Elias Psinakis, one of the most frequently pictured members of the U.S.-based opposition in both Philippine and American media throughout the martial law years. On July 6, 1987, he was charged with conspiracy and interstate transportation of explosive materials. He had landed at the San Francisco International Airport after a flight from Manila and was arrested upon arrival. At the arraignment, he pleaded not guilty and was returned to jail pending a bail hearing. He hadn't “the slightest clue why they would move against me on a case this old,” he was quoted as saying in the San Francisco Examiner. The case was indeed five years old, but the indictment had been unsealed in secret only in December 1986, days before the statute of limitations would have run out. In 1981, said the indictment, bomb paraphernalia had been found in some garbage bags at his San Francisco home. Questions arose as soon as the indictment was unsealed. Why the five-year delay? And why at the very moment when a new democratic government was now in place? To arrive at some answers, it is necessary to go back to the years before martial law was declared and Psinakis became involved with the U.S. exile groups.
Epilogue
Authors: Fuentecilla Jose V.
Published: May 2017

This epilogue addresses the question of where the Philippines stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century, twenty-five years after the bloodless People Power transition to democracy. There are bright spots: in school enrollment and life expectancy, the country compares favorably with its closest Asian neighbors, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. It lags behind them in per capita income, however, and indicators for income distribution and poverty are dismal. The rebuilt institutions—the press, the legislature, the courts—are not perfect, but after a quarter of a century, they have taken root where before they had withered. Unlike other developing countries that suddenly transitioned to democracy but lacked the institutions to sustain it, the Philippines was fortunate that before martial law, it possessed the institutional scaffolding needed to rebuild. There was also a unifying force or leader—Corazon Aquino and the memory of her martyred husband, who led the restoration.
Awakenings
Authors: Lambert Philip
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter explores Alec Wilder's musical experiences through the early 1930s. Wilder's decision to pursue a career in music came in 1925 or early 1926, following a passion that had been growing for some time. During one recent summer vacation, he had taken up the banjo and had learned to play well enough to be hired for dances and welcomed into local bar bands at the Jersey Shore. He had also begun teaching himself to play the piano and read staff notation. Eventually, he had amassed a collection of popular sheet music and had made a few attempts at writing songs of his own. These were the musical experiences he brought with him when he decided to return to Rochester in 1926, seeking enlightenment in the elegant halls of a relatively new institute for serious musical study.
Strange Natures
Authors: Seymour Nicole
Published: May 2017

This book investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, this book examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of “natural” categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. The book's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, the book delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.
Eating Together
Authors: Julier Alice P.
Published: May 2017

An insightful map of the landscape of social meals, this book argues that the ways in which Americans eat together play a central role in social life in the United States. Delving into a wide range of research, the author analyzes etiquette and entertaining books from the past century and conducts interviews and observations of dozens of African American and non-ethnic white hosts and guests at dinner parties, potlucks, and buffets. It finds that when people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to share meals within their households, social inequalities involving race, economics, and gender reveal themselves in interesting ways: relationships are defined, boundaries of intimacy or distance are set, and people find themselves either excluded or included. The book focuses on one particular type of sociable activity, the shared meal—and more narrowly, the shared meal that occurs in households and includes non-kin. It explores some of the moral discourses and texts that shape our understanding of food and social life in the United States.
Feeding Friends and Others
Authors: Julier Alice P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book offers a partial and preliminary map of the landscape of social meals. It focuses on one particular type of sociable activity, the shared meal—and more narrowly, the shared meal that occurs in households and includes non-kin. It explores some of the moral discourses and texts that shape the understanding of food and social life in the United States. The majority of this narrative is organized around stories told by a small sample of people who held dinner parties, potlucks, brunches, buffets, and other uncategorizable social meals. The meals and relationships they describe are tied up in particular understandings of difference and inequality, understandings that emerge from the historical and contemporary configuration of gender, race, and class.
Anarchist Alliances, Government Repression
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how some anarchists aligned themselves with the emerging freethinkers' movement centered in the southern city of Ponce to address educational issues on the island. The Puerto Rican Left had been founding CESs since the end of the nineteenth century, which gave workers a source of radicalized education. While the freethinkers were mostly middle-class professionals, they shared with anarchists a fervent belief in free expression and freedom of speech. In addition, both anarchists and freethinkers condemned what they saw as the influence of religion on society, especially in education. As a result, both called for rationalist education modeled after the ideals and Modern Schools in Spain developed by Francisco Ferrer y Guardia.
Conclusion and Epilogue
Authors: Shaffer Kirwin R.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explores the legacy of anarchism in Puerto Rico. While anarchist agitation and organizing came to an end in the early 1920s, individual anarchists continued to write to anarchist publications in New York and Havana. In addition, the global economic recession that began in 2008, coupled with efforts by the Puerto Rican government and the Universidad de Puerto Rico to impose new fees on university students in 2010, gave birth to new interest in anarchism on the island as anarchist groups took to the internet, the cafés, and the university grounds. They began working with other groups in cross-sectarian alliances, offering classes on anarchism, reviving anarchist theatre, and drawing attention to the ravages of joint state–corporate attempts to seize private lands. In short, these new Black Flag Boricuas were resurrecting in the present the very history of anarchist agitation and antiauthoritarianism developed a century earlier.
Citizens in the Present
Authors: Torres Maria de los Angeles , Rizzini Irene , Del Rio Norma
Published: May 2017

Although media coverage often portrays young people in urban areas as politically apathetic or disruptive, this book provides an antidote to such views through narratives of dedicated youth civic engagement and leadership in Chicago, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. This innovative comparative study provides nuanced accounts of the personal experiences of young people who care deeply about their communities and are actively engaged in a variety of public issues. Drawing from extensive interviews and personal narratives from the youth activists themselves, this book provides a vibrant portrait of a new, politically involved generation. The book examines youth civic engagement in Chicago, with particular emphasis on young people's attitudes regarding democracy. It considers the context of young people's civic engagement in Brazil, and the demographics of youth activists in Rio, the activities and organizations they are involved in, and their motivations for engagement. It also examines new paradigms of civic participation among Mexico City's youth.
Emerging Political Identities, Practices, and Temporalities
Authors: Torres Maria de los Angeles , Rizzini Irene , Del Río Norma
Published: May 2017

This book has explored the trajectories, practices, and ideas of civically engaged youth in Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, and Mexico City. The youth activists' civic engagement may provide fresh insights about the place of young people in their political communities as well as the processes underlying political activism. This final chapter compares and contrasts the ways in which the youth in all three cities became involved, what issues were important to them, how they acted upon those issues, and how they envisioned themselves in their political communities. It discusses the early influences that paved the young people's paths to civic engagement, including institutions outside the family; their self-awareness, social awareness, and political awareness; and their social identities. It also considers various concerns, practices, and localities affecting youth civic engagement, along with young people's political ideas and their role in democratic processes.
On Removing Migrant Labor in a Right-to-Work State
Authors: Allegro Linda
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the anti-immigrant bill known as The Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (HB 1804), which sought to criminalize undocumented labor after a decade-long corporate recruitment strategy that solicited migrant labor under the premise of right-to-work. Of particular interest is the emphasis on the weak policy controls the legislation placed on employers while disproportionately penalizing migrants and their families. In this way it disentangles the inconsistent position of the “anti-illegals” narrative that espouses draconian measures penalizing undocumented migrants but has an unenforceable strategy for controlling the workplace, arguably the greatest draw of migrant labor. Such selective application of the rule of law demonstrates the veiled racism of the anti-illegals narrative and the dishonest nature of the professed goal of holding all parties responsible for the increase in undocumented immigration. Resulting from these paradoxes has been an increase in local law enforcement disciplining migrant bodies and lives in public spaces.