bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Afterword
Authors: Rivers Larry Eugene
Published: May 2017

Slave resistance in nineteenth-century Florida, while reflecting many similarities with respect to experiences reported for bondpeople in other southern states, nonetheless differed significantly. But what made Florida bondservants and their experiences unusual? The fact was that Florida’s history, geography, and topography combined to set a unique stage for its rebels and runaways. Unlike other southern states, Florida boasted a matchless history as a runaway slave haven, the reality of which changed little over time, at least until the final countdown to the Civil War. Freedom-seeking bondpeople knew about and had sought refuge in its numerous runaway settlements and vast, virtually unpopulated expanses dating back centuries to the opening of the Spanish era. Maroon communities eventually dotted the peninsula, their existence making resistance possible and revolts more likely to succeed. In these settlements, black runaways and their descendants could live free lives while providing for their families as they persisted in a commitment to defend loved ones, if necessary, unto death....
Richard Linklater
Authors: Johnson David T.
Published: May 2017

Richard Linklater's filmmaking choices seem to defy basic patterns of authorship. From his debut with the inventive independent narrative Slacker, the Austin-based director's divergent films have included the sci-fi noir A Scanner Darkly, the socially conscious Fast Food Nation, the kid-friendly The School of Rock, the teen ensemble Dazed and Confused, and the twin romances Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Yet throughout his varied career spanning two decades, Linklater has maintained a sense of integrity while working within a broad range of budgets, genres, and subject matters. Identifying a critical commonality among so much variation, the book analyzes Linklater's preoccupation with the concept of time in many of his films, focusing on its many forms and aspects: the subjective experience of time and the often explicit, self-aware ways that characters discuss that experience; time and memory, and the ways that characters negotiate memory in the present; the moments of adolescence and early adulthood as crucial moments in time; the relationship between time and narrative in film; and how cinema, itself, may be becoming antiquated. Crucially filling a gap in critical studies of this American director, the volume concludes with an interview with Linklater discussing his career.
Wrapped in Plastic
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a commentary on David Lynch's film career. It focuses on how plastic is the prime matter of his filmmaking, essential to his understanding of cinema. It takes up plasticity's capacity for infinite transformation as an architectural and design dynamic, a feature of mise-enscène, and a mode of fashioning and psychologizing cinematic space. It then explores the emotional registers of plasticity, attempting to explain a key affective paradox in Lynch's work: the way it seems both so manifestly insincere and so emotionally powerful, so impersonal and so intense. Finally, it considers Lynch's persistent tendency to think of forms of media and forms of life as related species. Here, plastic is useful for conceptualizing his picture of the human organism as malleable and heterogeneous. The films examined in this chapter include Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), and Lost Highway (1997).
Poetry and Truth of the Far West
Authors: de Beauvoir Simone
Published: May 2017

I think that for a Frenchman the Far West represents, after New York, the most fascinating area of North America. Thanks to the old Westerns many of us have discovered this art—the cinema—which has taken on such importance in today’s civilization. The landscapes of The Gold Rush...
Introduction
Authors: Gallagher Julie A.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter outlines the political achievements and contributions made by black women in the United States between the 1910s and the 1970s. In addition, the chapter focuses on New York City as a setting—given that it was a central hub of progressive politics in the United States as well as the fact that the demographic shifts the city experienced in the first two decades of the twentieth century created significant political and cultural opportunities for African Americans. New York City was fertile ground for stimulating one's mind and sharpening one's political skills. Thus, starting in the 1910s and for the next sixty years, politically active black women not only built networks that sustained them and their communities, but they helped transform the city's and the nation's political parties, its laws, and its legislative bodies.
Fighting for Rights in the 1910s and 1920s
Authors: Gallagher Julie A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter covers the dynamic period of the 1910s and 1920s in New York City. During these years black women from various backgrounds, native New Yorkers and new arrivals alike, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Irene Moorman Blackstone, and Ruth Whitehead Whaley, stepped into the public sphere to fight for economic, social, and political rights. The chapter explores how these and other African American women viewed and tried to use the various branches of government in their grassroots and their formal political efforts, and the implications of their work on their communities, on New York's political machinery, on black women's collective struggles for equality, and on themselves.
Pushing Through the Doors of Resistance in the 1950s
Authors: Gallagher Julie A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows a number of African American women in the postwar period further into party politics and into city government, and it charts the efforts of local renegades to launch political insurgencies that sought to bring down entrenched Democratic bosses and improve African Americans' and women's access to political power. Despite the challenges they faced, African American women who were committed to creating a more just society through formal politics were extremely busy in the 1950s and 1960s. They introduced new issues into the political discourse as elected officials and government administrators, they pressured political leaders through protests, and they effectively used the courts. Through their examples of leadership and methods of organizing, they also encouraged historically disempowered people, especially black women, to engage in politics and to demand change from various state actors, including politicians, judges, police chiefs, school administrators, and municipal and state bureaucrats.
Then Sings My Soul
Authors: Harrison Douglas
Published: May 2017

This ambitious book on southern gospel music reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeing the music as a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, the book presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences. The book explores how listeners and consumers of southern gospel integrate its lyrics and music into their own religious experience, building up individual—and potentially subversive—meanings beneath a surface of evangelical consensus. The book traces an alternative history of southern gospel in the twentieth century, one that emphasizes the music's interaction with broader shifts in American life beyond the narrow confines of southern gospel's borders. The book's discussion includes the “gay–gospel paradox”—the experience of non-heterosexuals in gospel music—as emblematic of fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world.
Nostalgia, Modernity, and the Reconstruction Roots of Southern Gospel
Authors: Harrison Douglas
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the emergence of modern southern gospel forward from its Reconstruction roots. It pays attention to the abiding influence of the songbook publisher, songwriter, romantic poet, and melancholic Civil War veteran Aldine S. Kieffer. As the more creative half of the Ruebush–Kieffer songbook publishing empire, Kieffer played an inimitable role in the industrialization of southern gospel at a pivotal moment when shape-note music education was transitioning from a paraprofessional recreation to a commercialized economy based on songbooks and increasingly professionalized music teachers and singers. In the process, this chapter makes the first comprehensive case in extant scholarship for Kieffer as the most important originator of modern southern gospel discourse, an archetypal figure whose work in early southern gospel infuses the music with a lasting concern for tensions between the self and society that arise from sociocultural upheaval in the postbellum South.
Southern Gospel in the Key of Queer
Authors: Harrison Douglas
Published: May 2017

This chapter brings together the different facets of southern gospel's surreptitious modernity as developed in the book, consolidating them in the experience of nonheterosexuals in gospel music. For at least a generation, the fact of queer contributions to the music at all levels has operated as an open secret in southern gospel. Fundamentalism's absolute prohibition on homosexuality makes acceptance of their contributions impossible, of course. Nevertheless, the psychodynamic structure of the music invites nonconformists to identify with southern gospel's emphasis on the sojourning soul's solitary struggle to find spiritual peace in this dry and barren land. This chapter examines the gaygospel paradox as a microcosm of fundamentalism's conflict with the postmodern world. Moreover, using a personal voice informed by the author's own complicated queer identification with the music and its culture, this chapter attempts a redemption of the southern gospel sissy.
Epilogue
Authors: Harrison Douglas
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter contains reflections on scholarly investigations into religion and American culture, arguing that southern gospel as a field of religious thought, action, and feeling asks us to reimagine the concept of “organized religion” as a phenomenon—in this case, a popular music culture—that exists alongside, within, and beyond the church. It envisions a relational dynamic in which evangelical habits of mind and feeling and the expression of feelings shift along lines of individual and collective needs and desires. Furthermore, the chapter briefly delves into and defends the notion of gospel music as a meaningful language for postmodern transcendence.
The Political Body
Authors: Weiner Marli F. , Hough Mazie
Published: May 2017

This book investigates how slaves experienced illness and the practice of medicine, as well as the ways in which physicians sought to understand race and sex, in the antebellum South. It shows that doctors who tried to define health and sickness for men and women, black and white, also had to contend with the realities of a slaveholding society. Slaveholders often defined slaves as healthy enough to work when the slaves considered themselves to be sick. At the same time, slaveholders wanted to protect their financial investment in the bodies of slaves and so had incentive to provide medical care for them. Slaves had their own beliefs about bodily differences and the causes of sickness as well as how to cure them, but their beliefs were seldom validated or their practices respected by slaveholders and doctors. In order to elucidate medical and lay perspectives on the political body in the antebellum old South, the book draws on evidence from a variety of sources, including medical journals and texts, physicians' diaries, and slave narratives and folklore for slaves.
Constructing Race
Authors: Weiner Marli F. , Hough Mazie
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how Southern physicians of the antebellum period defined the meanings of black and white bodies. In the mid-nineteenth century, the origins of race were of more than theoretical or political interest for those who were concerned with caring for the sick. Diseases did not present the same symptoms or follow the same trajectory from person to person or even in individuals of the same race, sex, or body type. This chapter begins with a discussion of how physicians concerned with the bodily consequences of racial differences typically grounded their thinking in observation. It then considers how physicians addressed the relative susceptibility of blacks and whites to disease as they debated the fundamental differences between black and white bodies. It also examines the role of physicians in the debate about race and slavery and concludes by assessing slaves' explanations for the meanings of raced bodies.
Constructing Sex
Authors: Weiner Marli F. , Hough Mazie
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how southern physicians constructed the meanings of male and female bodies. Believing that reproductive processes were inherently dangerous to women's health, doctors throughout the nation sought to extend their authority by proclaiming that menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause often required medical attention. In the South, these vulnerabilities had to be ascribed to white women's bodies at the same time that doctors rejected them for black women. However, doctors eager to expand their practice and willing to acknowledge black women's suffering could not reject them too vehemently. This chapter considers how physicians defined white women's bodies as well as the ways in which they addressed the contradictions in their explanations of racial and sexual differences. It shows that physicians utilized the familiar trope of the dangers of modern civilized life and sympathy theory to explain women's health, and especially white women's vulnerable bodies and reproductive suffering in contrast to the relative absence of such weakness in black women.
The Negro Renaissance
Authors: Floyd Samuel A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that the “Negro Renaissance” in Harlem and Chicago was spawned by Pan-Africanism, which suggests the belief that black people all over the world share an origin and a heritage, that the welfare of black people everywhere is inexorably linked, and that the cultural products of blacks everywhere should express their particular fundamental beliefs. The chapter describes the quandary of renaissance artists, intellectuals, and entertainers who drew inspiration from the vernacular yet professed allegiance to the styles and tone of high or modern culture. It also notes that the black arts manifesto of poet Hughes' generational cohort exemplifies the refusal of these artists and intellectuals to accept the hierarchical oppositional distinction between high (middle class, northern, urban) and low (folk, spiritual, rural).
The Dialectics of Placelessness and Boundedness in Richard Wright’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Fictions
Authors: Schlabach Elizabeth
Published: May 2017

This chapter talks about how Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, perhaps the two most famous literary figures of the Black Chicago Renaissance, shared a common struggle to discern a new black consciousness in the physical and metaphoric spaces of Chicago's South Side streets. The chapter analyzes the photographic 12 Million Black Voices of Wright and Edwin Rosskam, as well as Wright's last novel, The Outsider, to show how he depicted the confining realities of the kitchenette apartment along with the segregated, overcrowded city pavement of black neighborhoods. It compares Wright's attempt to define and defy these urban realities to poet Gwendolyn Brooks' Street in Bronzeville and Maud Martha that similarly elucidated the intense material deprivation of African Americans.
From Race Relations to Community Relations
Authors: Austin Allan W.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the activities of the Race Relations Committee, which was established in 1943 and remained after World War II. The new committee created several integrated projects (including housing efforts and a work camp) as well as interracial projects such as minority hiring efforts and a university lectureship program. By 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had thus developed an indirect, Friendly approach to interracial relations that while still working to correct individual ignorance now saw the need to reform society as well. Understanding the details of that approach and how Quakers arrived at it provides important insights into Quakers and race in the first half of the twentieth century. It also helps to fill in the historiographical gap concerning the racial activism of Quakers between their nineteenth-century efforts at reform and their participation in the Civil Rights Movement that blossomed in the 1950s and beyond.
Dynamite
Authors: Messer-Kruse Timothy
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the practical and ideological uses of dynamite among the revolutionary anarchists. It first describes the connections between Chicago's anarchists and Irish revolutionaries, before moving on to an examination of the symbolisms of dynamite that resonated with Chicago's anarchists and may even have emboldened them to act with a rashness and recklessness they would not have otherwise pursued. The chapter then turns to the methods of funds and acquisition of bombs for these anarchists, as well as the ideological ferment which accompanied the use of these explosives. A new age was advancing upon an alchemy of ingredients: the rising unity of the social revolutionaries built on a deeper understanding of the importance of force and deeds, a working class awakening from its lethargy, and the invention of dynamite.
Epilogue
Authors: Messer-Kruse Timothy
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter discusses the aftermath of the Haymarket affair and the ironic twist to the legacies of the Haymarket bombers. The Haymarket bomb, the chapter argues, failed to ignite the popular insurrection that anarchists had dared to hope for, though its blast had snuffed out the very movement that had created it. The swift arrest and trial of eight anarchist activists for the murder of patrolman Mathias Degan shifted the priorities of Chicago's anarchist movement from ratcheting up class tensions to defending their imperiled leaders. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates in more detail how the legacies of these activists have since been twisted by various historical forces throughout the years, leaving behind the enduring memory of them as victims rather than soldiers for a cause.
Situations of Too Extreme Difficulty: 1951–1959
Authors: Hicks Michael , Asplund Christian
Published: May 2017

This chapter chronicles Wolff's compositional period from his entry into Harvard in 1951 to his inadvertent entry into military service in 1959. During this time, all but one of Wolff's surviving compositions were piano pieces—seven works in which he moved from Cageian gamuts and prepared piano to utterly new configurations of musical materials and composer–performer relationships, though still generally within Cageian overall forms. To write for piano—Wolff's own instrument—fostered innovation and evolution, since it relieved him of the need to manipulate instrumental timbres. At the same time, he had not only himself as a potential player, but also Cage and, more important, Cage's friend David Tudor, whose superb technical skills, severe discipline, and zeal for the newest and opaquest music had become the New York School's virtuoso ace in the hole.
Prologue
Authors: Greene Dana
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the life and work of Denise Levertov. Levertov is described as the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a heroic scale. She wanted the persistence of Cézanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. But she baffled herself and was baffling to others. Urbane and sophisticated, she was also childlike and irksome. She was exquisitely attentive and present, and paradoxically complex and elusive. Immigrating to America made all the difference in Levertov's life, but she insisted no country would define her. The evidences of Levertov as poet, prophet, and pilgrim are all there in the public record—the interviews, essays, and poetry. But what is obscure, only hinted at, is the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the historical times in which she lived. This underside of life influenced her prodigious creative work over her long career.
Introduction
Authors: Bezanson Randall P.
Published: May 2017

In 1994 Stanley Fish, a peripatetic and controversial scholar at Duke, published a book titled There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. It was the free part of free speech that he challenged. His claim was that, unbeknownst to defenders of speech freedom, speech occupies and is bounded by a realm of values and politics in which the speakable and unspeakable are defined and beyond which speech is unspeakable—and usually illegal. As speakers we are trapped by our politics and predispositions; what we say inside the safe realm cannot be called free. Speech that might rightly count as free—speech outside of the dominant domain at a point in time, like hate speech or obscene art or blasphemy—doesn’t count as speech. It is instead outside the domain of acceptable discourse, indeed often illegal. Thus, there is no such thing as free speech....
The Secret Ballot
Authors: Bezanson Randall P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the expansion of free speech to the largely mute act of voting in elections and to the protection of a person's affiliations and associations with others from public disclosure at the hands of the government. It does so through the recent Doe v. Reed case and a gay rights referendum in Washington State. It addresses the following questions: How should the freedom of speech be interpreted to protect such undeniably important acts as voting and joining with others—say, in a church or a charitable cause? Is it possible to read “freedom of speech” as protecting them without at the same time losing all pretense of restraint on the Supreme Court's power to interpret the Constitution? In addressing these larger questions, the chapter shows the parts of the First Amendment that were first pulled apart—speaker, speech, purpose—stitched back together in the form of constitutional doctrine. Is the resulting web of free speech doctrine and theory coherent or symmetrical, or is it just a tangled mess?
Advertising Navigates the Defense Economy
Authors: Stole Inger L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes industry strategies for “educating the public” to a view of advertising as socially and economically useful. More specifically, it shows the use of institutional advertising for this purpose and discusses how industry leaders worked behind the scenes to prepare a solid defense of advertising. The chapter explores the challenges faced by the advertising community in the period leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and immediately thereafter, including how the industry dealt with new forms of criticism and how it viewed its role in the war economy. The chapter concludes with the establishment of the Advertising Council, Inc., an organization that would come to define the advertising industry’s public relations efforts during World War II and beyond.
The Increasing Role of the War Advertising Council
Authors: Stole Inger L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the Council’s activities throughout 1944. It studies how individual advertisers were coached to stay on course, sacrificing money, resources, and some of their creative independence to streamline the government’s campaigns and make the Council a success. Most of the government’s requests were for help with noncontroversial campaigns, which meant there was little chance that participating advertisers might arouse public resentment. But this was not always easy, especially when commercial concerns clashed with patriotic goals—a fact driven home by a highly controversial anti-venereal disease campaign. With this campaign, the Council found itself awkwardly in the middle of its obligations to the Office of War Information and the need to protect individual advertisers’ self-interest.
Peace and the Reconversion of the Advertising Council
Authors: Stole Inger L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows the Council through the last months of the war and into the reconversion period, when it worked diligently with leaders of the advertising industry, business, and government to determine its role in postwar America. It discusses the nature of these deliberations and analyzes the newly elevated role of advertising as a public relations tool for the business community at large. No longer satisfied with taking directives from the government, the postwar council—once again called the Advertising Council—assumed a more independent role in regard to campaign selections. Its campaigns over the next few years included programs that were more explicitly designed to educate the public about the superiority of the American system of free enterprise and the virtues of corporate capitalism.
The Merger and Its Aftermath (1948–51)
Authors: Surdam David George
Published: May 2017

This chapter chronicles the 1949 merger between the BAA and the NBL and its aftermath. The BAA owners' decision to absorb the most attractive NBL teams obviously looms large in the league's development, although the move and subsequent merger ultimately could not save several BAA franchises. By ghettoizing the later NBL refugees, BAA owners may have ensured the demise of those teams. Fortunately, there were not too many people paying attention to the league's upheavals. The league's integration did not initially create much excitement either. Yet the streamlined NBA still struggled to entice fans—in many ways the professional players' experience and savvy led to brutal, foul-plagued games that alienated fans. The chapter also looks at how league owners struggled with racial integration.
Aboriginal Women and Work across the 49th Parallel
Authors: Sangster Joan
Published: May 2017

This chapter selectively reviews debates across the 49th Parallel, thus steadying the reader in the fertile discursive terrain introduced by recent secondary literature. It argues the despite the transnational trends and shared perspectives in Aboriginal women's history that cross the 49th parallel, we also need to identify how and why national and regional histories and interpretations diverge. One transnational commonality highlighted in this chapter is the close connection between politics and research, between the present and the past: the questions posed by scholars have been stimulated and inspired by Aboriginal thought and organizing, and Aboriginal politics have benefited from scholarly research. Although research may still be difficult and contested terrain in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations, there is hope that scholarly dialogue might contribute productively to decolonization.
Making a Living
Authors: Littlefield Alice
Published: May 2017

This chapter records Michigan Anishinaabe women's long history of occupational mobility and creative adaptation against the impositions of federal policies, from women's earliest involvement in the global fur trade of the seventeenth century to waged and entrepreneurial service in tourism of the Upper Peninsula. Enriched by interviews conducted in the early 1990s with women of the Saginaw Chippewa, the chapter focuses on the postwar-era generations of women and their efforts to gain entry to postsecondary education and subsequently to white-collar and professional labor. It shows how they secured opportunities unavailable to their mothers but only because foremothers were so resourceful and persevering.
The Contours of Agency
Authors: Mar Tracey Banivanua
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines photographs of Pacific Island women laboring in fields in Queensland in the late 1890s, arguing that colonial photography can be a critical means of filling archival silences. It reflects on how we may read this photography in layers, both as a candid snapshot of the physical world of the past, as well as a more subtle register of that world's ideological composition. This is significant in the context of colonial histories in the western Pacific and Australia where indigenous and colonized women's labor, and their contribution to colonial and colonized societies, has been subjected to the violence of a structural amnesia. Photography offers not only visual evidence of a barely told history of Pacific Islander women's labor as told through the agency of their physical presentation. In addition, the medium itself, the photograph and its visual language, points in interesting ways to the discursive contours that shaped indigenous and colonized women's agency.
“Assaulting the Ears of Government”
Authors: Harris Aroha , McCallum Mary Jane Logan
Published: May 2017

In the summer of 1945, Indian Homemakers' Clubs from southern Ontario congregated in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory for their first annual convention. The gathering marked eight years of the Clubs' existence in Canada and signaled a significant era of First Nations women's cultural and political activity. Six years later in September 1951, some 300 Maori women gathered in Wellington, New Zealand, to attend the inaugural conference of the Maori Women's Welfare League. Focusing on the formative years of the Clubs and the League (the late 1930s to the 1960s), this chapter explores some of the key activities of the two organizations. In addition to local activities, each organization coordinated efforts on a broader scale, including developing their constitutions and hosting regional conventions in Canada and national conferences in New Zealand. At all levels, members organized activities and discussion that reflected the priorities of the groups themselves including their concerns about the state. The analysis of the constitutions and meetings shows that indigenous women were active participants in workable (though often strained) relationships with the Departments of Indian and Maori Affairs.
Politically Purposeful Work
Authors: Child Brenda J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes as its starting point an oral history project with a number of inspirational Minnesota Ojibwe women who lived and worked in Minneapolis, among them Gertrude Howard Buckanaga, Pat Bellanger, Rose Robinson, and Vikki Howard, who shared stories about their own mentors in the Indian community. It shows how for these activists personal networks with other Indian people were essential to city survival, and their efforts were an expression of indigenous values, and cultural capital, that resulted in the emergence of distinctive urban Indian communities. Women's networks and their invention of unique community formations generated unanticipated opportunities leading to professionalization and higher education not only for themselves.
Beading Lesson
Authors: Piatote Beth H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a short fictional story, “Beading Lesson” by Beth Piatote, which features an aunt's tutorial. The story helps reinforce the theoretical threads about the legibility, or illegibility, of indigenous women's lives and history shot through the present collection.
Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments and Hommage à R. Sch.
Authors: Kinderman William
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines two of Kurtág's compositions. It first considers the compositional genesis of Kafka Fragments and charts the deliberations over what pieces to include in the work and in what order. The chapter demonstrates how the sketches and drafts for “Du bist die Aufgabe” illustrate characteristic features of Kurtág's working procedure. This leads in turn to a consideration of the important links connecting the Kafka Fragments to another of Kurtág's major compositions, the Hommage à R. Sch. Finally, this chapter examines selected songs of the cycle in detail, giving special attention to “Der wahre Weg,” which forms the whole of part II of Kafka Fragments.
“Spreading the Gospel of Basketball”
Authors: Thomas Damion L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Harlem Globetrotters as Cold Warriors between 1947 and 1954. This is an important moment because prior to the passage of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the State Department was in the unenviable position of trying to defend segregation while stressing racial progress. Moreover, the politics of symbolism associated with the Globetrotters' tours was designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society by stressing “progress” during the early Cold War era, despite the social, political, and legal barriers that hindered African American advancement. The symbol of the successful yet segregated athlete allowed the government to argue that segregation was not an impediment to the advancement of individual African Americans.
Oral Tradition and the Internet
Authors: Foley John Miles
Published: May 2017

The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet. Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes, not on “What?” but on “How do I get there?” In contrast to the fixed spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways—not things—that matter. To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a “morphing book:” a collection of linked nodes that can be read in innumerable different ways. Challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that they entail, this “brick-and-mortar” book exists as an extension of The Pathways Project: an open-access online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology.
Disclaimer
Authors: Foley John Miles
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues against reductive claims that oral tradition and internet technology are the same. It emphasizes that, while the Pathways Project is devoted to exploring the homology between oral tradition and internet technology, homology itself describes a relationship of similarity, but not of identity. Related to this argument is the fact that the oral tradition–internet technology homology at the basis of the Pathways Project resists reductionism and makes room for the innate complexity of media-worlds—the oAgora and eAgora are hardly identical or superimposable, in other words. Hence the chapter argues that the variation between the limits of these two media are the ultimate source of their strength and their staying power.
Prime Suspect and Women in Policing
Authors: Cavender Gray , Jurik Nancy C.
Published: May 2017

The early absence of women police protagonists from novels and television programs was an accurate reflection of social reality. Women were largely excluded from the majority of police patrol and crime investigation jobs until the 1970s. Despite their integration into a wider range of police duties, women continued to struggle to remain and advance in their positions and often were relegated to police work that was behind the scenes of street patrol and investigation. This chapter begins with a discussion of the experiences of real-world women working in policing after the 1970s integration period. It then elaborates the ways in which Prime Suspect 1 brought the feminist genre to the television police procedural form, a subgenre that has been especially resistant to women in lead roles. The final section reflects on how the portrayal of women police officers in the Prime Suspect series comports with the lived experiences of actual policewomen, in particular, those who occupy high ranks in police organizations.
Accordion Jokes
Authors: March Richard
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents accordion jokes and considers the reasons why accordions and accordion players are mocked. It suggests that sociological factors must have played the dominant role in assigning the accordion to the realm of despised instruments. Indeed, from its invention in the nineteenth century, the accordion never attained the respect of the elite class. It was a clever mechanical musical gadget. The accordion fad was in tune with the later nineteenth century's fascination with mechanization. Lacking a venerable pedigree, the accordion caught on among the less well-heeled part of the emerging middle class and the more plebeian working classes, and the instrument certainly was never accepted as a peer of the established classical orchestral instruments.
The Klezmer Accordion
Authors: Horowitz Joshua
Published: May 2017

This chapter takes a closer look at the role of the accordion in klezmer music. Like the pioneering Italian American virtuoso accordionists, Jewish musicians felt equally at home playing classical and folk music. The select analysis of early accordion playing styles and stylistic characteristics sheds light on the interaction and interplay of klezmer musicians with their surrounding worlds—Old and New. A distinctive feature of the early “klezmer sound” was the accordion's imitation of the human voice heard in liturgical, paraliturgical, and Yiddish song. By the late 1930s, the accordion was often used for chordal accompaniment (rather than as a solo instrument). It was an integral element of the popular Hasidic bands of the 1960s and the “klezmer ensembles” that embraced the new Israeli music as well as earlier “Palestinian” music. Although it was often deemed “an outsider,” for the revivalists of the 1980s and beyond, the accordion has been characteristic of the klezmer style.
Between the Folds of Luiz Gonzaga’s Sanfona
Authors: Loveless Megwen
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the fascinating life story of the Brazilian accordionist Luiz Gonzaga, while examining Brazil's national musical and political context that allowed this extraordinary musician to come forth as the creator of a new accordion-driven music and dance genre called forró. With his “unwieldy” instrument in his hands, the bohemian Gonzaga shaped a quintessentially Brazilian music—one that, unlike the urban samba and the cosmopolitan bossa nova, stands for the rural roots of the nation. Part of Gonzaga's success was due to his ability to create a credible onstage persona, to portray a “country bumpkin” identity with a unique performance style and musical accent—the accordion undoubtedly underlined his hinterlandishness. His creativity and originality made him into one of Brazil's most successful recording artists.
Akiko Fujii
Authors: Arisawa Shino
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Japanese singer Akiko Fujii. She was born into a prestigious musical family in the 1960s, having both a mother and grandmother who were renowned singers of jiuta, an inherited male-dominated vocal tradition. When Akiko was in her forties, her brother became the head of their mother's music school, forcing her towards major life decisions—including a career as a professional jiuta performer, rather than a teacher. Following a path of independence, passion, and inspiration, Akiko chose to break new ground by adapting her performance style to draw in audiences and create intimacy, resisting criticism of an older generation and risking disapproval of her mother. Within a traditional context of profound family pressure, Akiko has created a singing career for herself through perseverance and determination.
Lexine Solomon
Authors: Barney Katelyn
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the life and career of Lexine Solomon. She released her first solo album in 2002 when in her mid-forties, celebrating her own identity as an Indigenous Torres Strait Islander woman living in mainland Australia. She engages her singing voice and her lyrics to articulate and express agency, empowerment, and celebration. With a combination of newly self-composed songs and covers, Solomon is specifically involved with reclaiming and documenting the women in her family, and with encouraging and enabling women in positions of marginality, particularly Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal women. As singer, facilitator, manager, and producer, her multifaceted vocal career involves touring nationally and internationally to perform and run workshops.
Anti-Communism and Catholicism in Cold-War Detroit
Authors: Doody Colleen
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the roots of Catholic conservatism, which developed out of fears that the United States was becoming Godless. The great transformation wrought by the New Deal challenged organized religion in profound ways. During the economic collapse of the 1930s, government stepped in to solve the problems that religious charities could not. From the perspective of numerous workers, the New Deal had saved the nation. The men and women who built the New Deal were secular liberals, socialists, and even Communists. They advocated policies that looked a great deal like Socialism to many Americans. This created tension in places like Detroit, which, like other northern industrial cities, had a large and devout Catholic community. While the New Deal was not hostile to religion, it did in effect encourage Americans to look to government rather than organized religion to solve the nation's problems. The New Deal also provided openings for radicals to influence major public and private organizations. As a result, many Catholics worried that the increased popularity of secular organizations and ideas endangered the nation and the Western world. Catholics challenged the primacy of secularism and sought to reassert traditional, hierarchical Catholic values even as they worked in modern corporations and lived in modern suburbs.
Business, Anti-Communism, and the Welfare State, 1945–1958
Authors: Doody Colleen
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Detroit business community's opposition to the growth of the government. These men made little distinction between the New Deal, Socialism, and Communism. The former, they argued, would ultimately lead to the latter. As a result, Detroit businessmen during the late 1940s and 1950s carried out a campaign to check state power. They targeted labor, particularly the United Automobile Workers (UAW), in this fight because they saw the union as one of the greatest advocates of an expanded welfare state. Like other conservatives, these men were anti-Communists. Their hostility to Communism was inextricably linked to their perception that free enterprise, as they understood it, was threatened by an expanding welfare state. Corporate managers discussed such issues as social security, unemployment insurance, and peacetime price controls—all measures they saw as part of the “march toward socialism or collectivism” and that labor-liberals believed were key to creating a modern welfare state.
Creating A Game for Gamblers
Authors: Figone Albert J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces how basketball grew in popularity since its invention in 1891, and how this popularity eventually made college basketball an ideal hotbed for gambling operations. As basketball's popularity increased, colleges began to view the sport as a source of income. Large gymnasiums and field houses appeared on campuses, and with more spectators and more money, more gambling appeared. The chapter looks at how a combination of factors—including the addition of new rules in college basketball, a decline in the American economy, the introduction of new technology in the form of radio broadcasts, among others—came together to facilitate gambling in college basketball games.
Mojo Workin'
Authors: Hazzard-Donald Katrina
Published: May 2017

This book explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, the book argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions it calls “regional Hoodoo clusters” and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, this book lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Throughout, the book distinguishes between “Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo” and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.
Prescript
Authors: Hazzard-Donald Katrina
Published: May 2017

This book examines the sociocultural movement of Hoodoo in terms of its continuities with African religion. Hoodoo is the indigenous, herbal, healing, and supernatural-controlling spiritual folk tradition of the African American in the United States. Essentially, Hoodoo, for African Americans, is embodied historical memory linking them back through time to previous generations and ultimately to their African past. It is also a paradigm for approaching both the world and all areas of social life. This book offers a fresh perspective on Hoodoo development and a reinterpretative glimpse at contemporary as well as preexisting Hoodoo practice. It both asserts and assumes that the old Hoodoo religion was the African American “sacred canopy” and that certain aspects of black culture were once part of the old African American Hoodoo system. In this prescript, the author explains the process of his research that became the basis for the book.
The Black Mafia
Authors: Lombardo Robert M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the historical role of African Americans in organized crime in Chicago. It begins with a brief overview of black migration and settlement in Chicago in order to elucidate the relationship between the city's black community and the larger political, economic, and social organization. It then traces the history of the ethnic vice industry that flourished in Chicago's African American community during the first half of the twentieth century. It also considers how policy gambling—a lottery gambling system in which players wagered a small sum of money on a combination of three numbers—became the most important form of vice activity in Chicago's black South Side, citing the role played by three men: Patsy King, King Foo, and Sam Young. The chapter argues that sophisticated African American organized crime groups existed in Chicago independent of white organized crime largely because of the segregated nature of American society. African American organized crime did not follow Italian organized crime but existed alongside Irish and Italian groups from the first days of syndicated vice.
The Outfit
Authors: Lombardo Robert M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the activities of organized crime in Chicago after 1950, with particular emphasis on the Chicago Outfit. It begins with a discussion of the Outfit's takeover of all illegal gambling in Chicago as well as its connection with Chicago mayor Ed Kelly and the political protection given to vice activities in Chicago. It then considers the often confusing relationship between the Outfit and narcotic trafficking, along with the role that African Americans played in Outfit activities, including policy gambling and the distribution of heroin in the black community. It also reviews the history of the West Side Bloc, a group of elected public officials who supported the efforts of organized crime in Chicago, and how it contributed to the rise of racket subcultures in Chicago's “street crew” neighborhoods. The chapter concludes with an assessment of government efforts against organized crime, noting that one of the reasons for the existence of organized crime was the failure of local municipalities and the national government to take effective enforcement action against it.