bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Michelle Obama, the Media Circus, and America’s Racial Obsession
Authors: Kachun Mitch
Published: May 2017

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.
Private Femininity, Public Femininity
Authors: Matin Samiha
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the contemporary costume film's unique interrelationship of femininity and privacy by focusing on how the historical constraints of privacy force the post-feminist heroine to make herself anew as a feminine subject. It uses the two poles of privacy and publicness to organize relationships between gender, feeling, time, aesthetics, and identity, worked through and re-envisioned by costume films for present-day viewers. By these means, the values of privacy and publicness are recalibrated to accommodate a mutable femininity that uses aesthetics and feeling as creative methods of adaptation. The heroine's process of identity construction consists of tests, experiments, and play with self-presentation to find and utilize the sanctioned meanings and covert privileges afforded by femininity. In reassembling elements of gender and galvanizing their force to new ends, spaces for covert resistance and pressure-release emerge. This course is one of “tactical aesthetics,” or the deployment of style to access power which makes use of gendered acts, expressions, dress, and etiquette to design new advantages. To explore this concept, the chapter analyzes two films, Elizabeth (1997) and Marie Antoinette (2006), as divergent visions of femininity.
It’s a Mann’s World?
Authors: Segal Adam
Published: May 2017

This chapter shows how there can be no easily assumed relationship between genres and gendered audiences, for as socially circulating gender assumptions change, they bring with them consequent shifts in audience address. It analyzes Hollywood masculinity in the early to mid-1990s and how this is reflected in the film, Heat (1995). Heat is a unique entry in the police procedural/crime genre in that it attempts to illuminate for its viewers the emotional toll that crime work takes on the police and thieves while also revealing the toll it takes on the spouses and loved ones who are left at home to wonder when the men will be coming home. It is argued that male and female spectator relations in regard to traditionally masculine film genres cannot be viewed in essentialist terms. Heat exemplifies the ways in which conventional gender roles in masculine genres can be detached from traditional representations as socially circulating gender assumptions change.
Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film
Authors: Model Katie
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Stanley Kubrick's film, The Shining (1980), based on Stephen King's eponymous novel (1977). Applying the Freudian concept of the “uncanny” to Jack Nicholson's performance the film, it suggests how genre and star performance generate horror in the aporias of cultural gender. Rather than the ambivalence of the fantastic premised on difference, the chapter emphasizes the uncanniness of hyperbole grounded in repetition. Thus, The Shining draws out from Nicholson's self-parodying performance a hyperbolic rendition of masculinity: a doubling that makes the gender norm itself a source of a horror, doubled again through haptic star-audience contact.
Woman, Generic Aesthetics, and the Vernacular
Authors: Chen Xiangyang
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the hybrid origins of Hong Kong's Huangmei opera film. It shows how the Chinese Communist Party's demand for a cinema showcasing the national cultural past paradoxically facilitated the cross-border circulation of an indigenous, vernacular operatic tradition—featuring feisty rural women, female voice-over chanting, and frequent cross-dressing—into the modernizing idioms of Hong Kong's film industry. Under colonial suppression of local nationalist objectives, the resulting hybridized genre carried a vital female imaginary in nostalgic Chinese wrappings. In contrast to Indian cinema's culture of emotion, female performativity contests Chinese conventions of restraint, opening up imaginary female power. This is supported by the impact of the female voice on point-of-view shooting, spatial organization, and narrative structure, foregrounding, against Western feminism's focus on the male gaze, a female counter-gaze within a patriarchal drama of conflicting desires.
“The Gay Cowboy Movie”
Authors: Cohan Steven
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the “gay cowboy movie” tag condensed the slippages in thinking required to sustain this dualism, which structured accounts of the reception to Brokeback Mountain (2005). Because the tag's indelible attachment to the film carried with it implications of mockery and scorn, the tag became the banner cry of those most offended by the film's supposed repudiation of John Wayne and the Marlboro Man. Likewise, the tag was indirectly referenced by assertions from the other side of the gender divide that, as a universal love story, Brokeback Mountain was much more than a gay movie. Nevertheless, the tag's omnipresence in the public discourse about Brokeback interrupted this dominant account of its reception by refocusing attention on the film's homoerotic specificity, which is, after all, what audiences were responding to in one way or another. It is in this context, that Brokeback Mountain worked most effectively as a “gay cowboy movie.”
Introduction
Authors: Gledhill Christine
Published: May 2017

Two key areas of Film Studies—genre and gender representation—have generated challenging theories and debate. However, these concepts rarely intersect. Studies of gender representation and sexed spectatorship largely subsume genre into narrative and visual organization. This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to open up questions about the complex interaction of aesthetics, cultural meanings, and affect in mass-mediated cinematic fictions. For too long, represented gender has been taken as a means of ideologically assessing films. The challenge, then, is to open a perspective from the side of genre: to explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of gender as a tool of genre, and to explore what genre returns to the cultural sphere. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
The Fire This Time
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on comparisons between minstrelsy and constructions of black masculinity in hip-hop music and culture, particularly the context of hard and hardcore styles of rap performance. Since minstrelsy, blackness has been one of America's primary cultural exports. Furthermore, hip-hop music and culture have been integral in the construction of a new cultural complex of racial perceptions about black masculinity and the black male body. In addition, the chapter shows how black masculinity can be relocated and transposed not simply to other geographical locations, but onto other kinds of bodies in representations that reproduce and perpetuate pejorative understandings of black subjectivities.
Real Niggas
Authors: White Miles
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the performance of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop performance, the trope of the bad nigger and the notion of the hard man, and how African American performers have engaged the sign of blackness in both pejorative and empowering ways. For young males—blacks, whites, indeed of many racial and ethnic stripes—hardcore rap transformed black males from the 'hood into totemic performers of a powerful masculine authenticity and identity at a time in which there appeared to be few real men left. The chapter also discusses the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and how the intrusion of gang and drug cultures contributed to the transformation of hip-hop culture, the performance of masculinity within that culture, and the influence of a number of seminal artists including Run-DMC, N.W.A., Public Enemy, and Jay-Z.
The African American Experience in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Klein Herbert S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the comparative differences and similarities between slave regimes in the Americas and how those differences influenced the post-manumission integration of Africans. In particular, it considers some of the methods and questions that animated the comparative slavery school as well as the implications of junking the comparative model. The chapter first highlights the social, economic, and political consequences of differences among slave regimes in the Americas for African Americans before proposing a research agenda for fourth-wave scholars that expands the scope of analysis of Afro-Latin America beyond the frame of slavery to include fuller explications of free black life. Several areas worth investigating are discussed, including the economic role of slaves and the human capital they accumulated under slavery; the rate and importance of manumission as well as the legal and effective support given to it by the slave-owning elite; the role of the free colored class well before final slave emancipation; and the attitude of elite toward slavery, slaves, and free blacks.
Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.
Is This What You Mean by Color TV?
Authors: Bodroghkozy Aniko
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed color-blind equality through an analysis of NBC's Julia, considered the most significant entertainment show of the civil rights years. Created by writer-director Hal Kanter and starring Diahann Carroll, Julia presented viewers with whites only as supporting characters. However, the image Julia provided could only clash uncomfortably with dominant news imagery of exploding ghettos, Black Panthers and other non-nonviolent militants, as well as the generalized chaos and upheaval characterizing the period. This chapter argues that Julia was a fictional vision of the “black and white together” utopia promised in the networks' March on Washington coverage. It also considers how black and white audiences as well as mainstream press critics all made sense of the show in notably different and, at times, contradictory ways. Finally, it discusses the concerns of black viewers and some white critics about Julia, including its depiction of the black family.
Sumatra’s Performing Arts, Groups, and Subgroups
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This book examines the traditional musical arts of Sumatra, with particular emphasis on the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of the performing arts that contain music as well as some of the changes in their style, content, and reception from 1971 when the author began her field travels. The musical arts, or performing arts containing music, include the vocal, instrumental, and body percussive music, the dance and other body movement, the art of self-defense, the bardic arts, and the musical theater performed at domestic ceremonies. The book considers the musico-lingual groups and subgroups of Sumatra—population groups and subgroups that are primarily distinguished from one another on the basis of the lingual attributes of their vocal-musical genres (including songs, ritual/religious chanting, song-dances, and intoned theatrical monologues or exchanges). This chapter provides an overview of some of the major themes that recur throughout the book—identity, rituals and ceremonies, religion, the impact of foreign contact on the performing arts, the musical instruments and pitch variability, the dances and music-dance relationships, social class, gender issues, and arts education.
The Minangkabau South Coast
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the traditional pre-Muslim music, dance, and legend of the Minangkabau south coast, where descendants of local royalty claim descent from the luhak nan tiga heartland. Yet the style of their key songs and dances is quite different, based on locally told legends such as the pan-Sumatran west-coastal Sikambang legend about a mermaid (Sikambang) and the Earth Goddess Legend. The chapter first describes the music-related history of the former palaces and the common people on the south coast before discussing the shamanic rituals and dances; the bardic art of kaba (epic) performance. It then considers the songs and song-dances attached to three main legends: “Sikambang,” Bundo Kanduang (Earth Goddess), and the Seven Angels/Sisters legend. It also examines some other dances as well as the south coast's main musical instruments and ensembles.
South Sumatra
Authors: Kartomi Margaret
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the historical distribution of two musico-lingual groups living in South Sumatra: the Besemah in Tanjungsakti and Kayuagung, and the Ogan-Komering Ilir (OKI) people in Burai. South Sumatra's network of rivers and tributaries—known as the Batang Hari Sembilan—has governed its peoples' travels, worldviews, adat, legends, and musical arts for well over 2,000 years. This chapter explores how South Sumatra's environment and associated cosmology, adat customs, and the history of religion and foreign contact have shaped its musico-lingual groups and music, dance, and theater more generally. It first considers the Besemah's bardic legends and their classical and social dances and ensemble music, vocal music, and solo instrumental music before turning to the Anak Dalem people. It also describes the Ogan-Komering Ilir (OKI) river basins, the dance called tari tanggai, Palembang, and musical arts with a Muslim theme or flavor in the uplands and lowlands.
Career Crescendos
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Mancini's continued success. Mancini's success with Blake Edwards, his bestselling albums, and the growing shelf of his awards meant that now other directors, even famous classic veteran directors, the past kings of the cinema, were starting to take notice of his music, trying to get him on the phone to talk about the musical possibilities of their next pictures. Again, he was writing traditionally satisfying music that they could understand, yet it had a modern slant toward the younger audiences they wanted to court. The great Howard Hawks was one of those directors. Hawks was searching for a workable composer for his own new, overlong, under-structured John Wayne adventure film set in Africa about a group of wild game hunters who collect specimens for zoos and circuses around the world, to be called Hatari! Two more veteran director kings from cinema's aristocracy also sought scores from Mancini for their very different romantic tales during this period: Mervyn LeRoy for Moment to Moment (1966) and Delbert Mann for Dear Heart (1964).
The Break with Blake
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Mancini's continued musical evolution and his break with Blake Edwards. In was in the 1970s, as Mancini was juggling concert work, pop recordings, and his truer ambition to move on to more narrative movie scoring, that a personal dilemma cropped up to complicate things even more: a rift between him and the chief proponent of his initial success, Blake Edwards—or, rather, between Blake Edwards and the rest of the world. In just a few months' time, Edwards would break all ties with Mancini, renounce Hollywood altogether, and move to the other side of the globe, leaving Mancini a free agent on all fronts, unsure where his next film opportunities might be found and facing the unknown.
Maturity, the Second Cadence
Authors: Caps John
Published: May 2017

This chapter details Mancini's musical evolution in the late 1970s. It may seem odd to associate “maturity” with the music of Mancini at this stage in his career, when clearly all of his most influential work was already past, having been produced between, say, 1958 and 1969. Maturity in this case does not mean a permanent evolution away from jazz-pop and toward exclusively large-scale formal symphonic scoring. Maturity now means that Mancini had learned to deal with all kinds of music: to be able to write, in the same year as those resolute songs for the film 10, an anti-thematic orchestral score for a thriller film set in the American Southwest that mixes Indian tribal lore, modern political intrigue, and the spooky science of vampire bats—and to “mean” them both.
Illinois in the War of 1812
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. The new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. By 1812 pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation. Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, which ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Until and even after the War was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois. This new history, published upon the War's bicentennial, underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences.
Peace?
Authors: Ferguson Gillum
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers a treaty of peace at Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814 by American and British commissioners. Initially, the British had insisted on creation of a permanent and semi-independent Indian buffer state north of the line drawn by the Treaty of Greenville, within which the United States would be forever barred from demanding further cessions of land. The American commissioners absolutely refused to consider such a proposal, and the British, weary of war after twenty years fighting against the power of Napoleonic France, yielded. Instead, they were able to obtain only a face-saving provision, Article IX of the treaty, which guaranteed their Indian allies all the possessions, rights, and privileges they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to, in 1811, provided they ceased hostilities against the United States.
Squeeze This!
Authors: Jacobson Marion
Published: May 2017

No other instrument has witnessed such a dramatic rise to popularity—and precipitous decline—as the accordion. This book is the first history of the piano accordion and the first book-length study of the accordion as a uniquely American musical and cultural phenomenon. The book traces the changing idea of the accordion in the United States and its cultural significance over the course of the twentieth century. It focuses on key moments of transition, from the introduction of elaborately decorated European models imported onto the American vaudeville stage and the instrument's celebration by ethnic musical communities and mainstream audiences alike, to the accordion-infused pop parodies by “Weird Al” Yankovic as well as a recent revival within contemporary cabaret acts and pop groups such as They Might Be Giants. Loaded with dozens of images of gorgeous instruments and enthusiastic performers and fans, this book represents the accordion in a wide range of popular and traditional musical styles, revealing the richness and diversity of accordion culture in America.
Introduction
Authors: Jacobson Marion
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the cultural and historical significance of the accordion as an instrument and as a musical movement. It considers how accordionists and bands with accordions symbolized an appealing and popular manifestation of alternative musical cultures in the postpunk area. Here, the chapter delves into the author's own experiences with the accordion movement, before turning to a brief historical analysis of the history and documentation of musical instruments as tools for making culture. In addition, the chapter provides an overview of the particular instrument under study—the piano accordion. It is a chromatic, bellows-driven, free-reed instrument that produces multiple chord tones with buttons on the left side manual and a piano keyboard on the right.
Advent of the Piano Accordion
Authors: Jacobson Marion
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the piano accordion and explains its modern evolution from earlier free-reed instruments. It explores the development of the modern piano accordion through a look at its European roots, then provides a discussion of its evolution as a uniquely American instrument, setting the stage for discussions of the accordion's emerging social capital—its capacity to express social status and power, and what accounted for its increasingly visible role in popular culture. Finally, this chapter sheds light on vaudeville star Guido Deiro's (1886–1951) pioneering role as a popular culture figure and his significant role in cementing a place for the accordion in American musical culture.
Squeezebox Rock
Authors: Jacobson Marion
Published: May 2017

This chapter pays tribute to the instrument's ethnic American roots. It discusses the accordion's ongoing importance in particular regions of the country—particularly the Upper Midwest—and in several ethnic styles of music: Slovenian and “Dutchman” style polka in the Midwest and Upper Peninsula and Valtaro musette in Manhattan's Italian neighborhoods. These communities generated many accomplished accordionists, a few of whom became popular “crossover” entertainers with international careers. These worlds predated and coexisted alongside the “accordion industrial complex,” described in the previous chapter, but few eminent accordion teachers valued or drew on any of these folk traditions. The chapter also sets the stage for an examination on the later revival of the accordion through a discussion of conflict and continuity between the accordion's role in “folk communities” and the accordion industrial complex.
Crossover Accordionists
Authors: Jacobson Marion
Published: May 2017

This chapter resumes the accordion's history at around the year 1963, after the accordion had reached the height of its popularity and America's youth were beginning to embrace new music and new instruments. Looking at the accordion in the context of the rock 'n' roll invasion and the rise of youth culture, this chapter examines the accordion industrial complex's efforts to extend its popularity—focusing on a trickle of new models equipped with features for rock accordionists. Yet the chapter also shows how this new sense of excitement about the future of the accordion subsided and how playing the accordion became, for all intents and purposes, geeky and uncool.
Introduction
Authors: Manning Susan , Ruprecht Lucia
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to offer fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance. It then sketches the intellectual and artistic trends over the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German Dance Studies. It follows the broadly chronological organization of the volume as a whole: opening essays on theater dance before 1900; then research clusters on Weimar dance, dance in the German Democratic Republic, and conceptual dance; and a closing reflection on the circulation of dance in an era of globalization. Throughout it emphasizes the complex interplay between dance-making and dance writing, as well as interrelations between dance practice and research and artistic and intellectual trends in German culture at large.
Pina Bausch, Mary Wigman, and the Aesthetic of “Being Moved”
Authors: Huschka Sabine
Published: May 2017

This chapter rethinks the relationship between Mary Wigman and Pina Bausch from a viewpoint informed by recent philosophical approaches to dance history. Dance research often draws a genealogy that connects Wigman's approach to that of Bausch, the central representative of German Tanztheater as it emerged in the 1970s. However, it is argued Bausch took a fundamentally different position compared to the one propagated by her predecessor: turning her attention away from absolute truth and toward the truthfulness of any given physical movement on stage, while retaining the appeal to feeling, she sought to develop emotionally determined forms of movement and to create a shared space of human experience beyond any essentialism. But what about the choreographed body in these theatrical spaces of experience? How do movements and gestures function to reveal a perspective on the human being? Which choreographic or theatrical means are used, at the discretion of the individual body, to produce an impression of unmediated immediacy? The radical difference between Wigman and Bausch can be detected in their aesthetics of representation, in the way in which they choreograph emotion.
Communication in the Lives of the Globe
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

This book examines the history of the role of communication as a tool for bringing development and social change. Drawing on the author's own experience accumulated over the past almost fifty years of professional interest in communication for development (c4d), the book investigates how both theory and practice evolved along with the technologies. In particular, it considers what is done for and to people by large outside institutions that provide funding and what people find to do for themselves. It also evaluates where we are today in the long-term struggle to bring development and social change through information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as interpersonal communication. Furthermore, it discusses four paradigms that have arisen in the social change and development arena over the past two decades: modernization-diffusion paradigm, critical or dependency paradigm, participation paradigm, and social entrepreneurship. The book concludes by tackling the question about how the c4d field might improve.
Saving the World
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the beginnings of the field of communication for development (c4d), from the very early years of development aid with Harry S. Truman's “Four Points” speech to Congress in 1949 through the 1960s and the early definition of the modernization-diffusion paradigm that set the direction of c4d for at least two decades. It also examines the three founding texts of c4d: Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), Everett Rogers's Diffusion of Innovations (the 1962 first edition), and Wilbur Schramm's Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in Developing Countries (1964). Finally, the chapter looks at the major histories of the general field of communication study to better understand how the beginnings of the c4d field grew organically from the first period of mass communication studies in the United States. It concludes that c4d is intimately tied to the emerging mass communication field in the context of the cold war and national and international institutions providing funding for development and communication projects.
Communication for Development
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

This chapter tackles the issue of how success was defined and measured in the modernization-diffusion paradigm by focusing on three early projects for using the technology of television for teaching purposes, along with their distinct outcomes. It asks how communication as well as information and communication technologies (ICTs) achieve their goals of social change and how we can demonstrate their success. It also explores the working assumptions of educational technology within the general communication for development (c4d) discourse before discussing the three educational television initiatives in more detail, all of them implemented by Stanford University's Institute for Communication Research and involving Wilbur Schramm: the first in American Samoa, the second in El Salvador, and the third in Mexico. These projects illustrate some of the common problems with many c4d projects.
Paradigm for a New Millennium
Authors: McAnany Emile G.
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes a fourth paradigm that has arisen in the social change and development arena over the past two decades: social entrepreneurship (SE). It begins with an overview of disagreements over the definition of SE, along with the origins of the concept. It then considers what is new about the SE paradigm and how it might be incorporated into the field of communication for development (c4d). It also evaluates four projects that highlight innovations to serve people and the kinds of social entrepreneurship that they have incorporated: Indonesia's Radio 68H; Grameen Foundation's village phone initiative in Uganda; the Barefoot College of Tilonia in Rajastan, India; Witness, a human rights advocacy group founded by musician Peter Gabriel. Drawing on the case of SE, the chapter concludes by asking how paradigms in communication work.
Poetry’s Opening Door
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. This chapter looks at how Monroe and others forged Poetry's identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” transforming it into a pioneering endeavor in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-gardism. It also considers Poetry's feud with The Dial, which still saw poetry as an instrument of moral uplift that was now menaced by what it called “Futurism.” Finally, it discusses Poetry's advocacy of institutional support for contemporary poets, and especially how it reformulated central concepts of literary value—genius, masterpiece, tradition, form, audience—into a forceful poetics of avant-garde progressivism. The chapter argues that Poetry's avant-garde experiments have a transformative impact upon American poetry, and literary culture more generally.
Gutter and Skyline
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the little magazines' shift to a poetry of modern life between 1910 and 1925 by discarding long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter in favor of themes dealing with the industrialized metropolis. Soon after 1910, many poets such as T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, and Carl Sandburg began to write verses about life in the modern city. This turn toward urban subject matter marked a decisive change in American poetry's relationship to modernity and an epochal departure from national traditions. This chapter considers the integral connection between verse and the visual arts as many American poets focused on investigating urban modernity as a subject. It also discusses the different ways that these poets learned to represent the machine-age metropolis after 1910 and challenged the aesthetic and ideological verities of class, ethnicity, and gender underlying their romantic-genteel inheritance; acts of observation in American cityscape verse that operate at both microscopic and panoramic levels; and poems of gutters, street pavements, and skylines that are complementary within an emerging poetics of urban materiality.
Footprints of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Newcomb John Timberman
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how modern American poetry dealt with skyscrapers as a theme during the 1910s. The most potent icons of modernity in the early twentieth-century city were great buildings, structures of unprecedented scale and grandeur that punctuated the skyline and symbolized the metropolitan ethos. Carrying a wide range of symbolic meanings, skyscrapers and other great buildings, such as Manhattan's Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, drew strong interest from anyone seeking to represent urban modernity, from painters and sculptors to photographers, commercial artists, and the many Americans who began writing city poems in the early 1910s, including Sara Teasdale, Harriet Monroe, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter discusses the American poet's fascination with the skyscraper, which commands attention not only for its enormous degree of visual prominence but also for its tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, signifying power.
A Game of Their Own
Authors: Nathanson Mitchell
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how baseball and America have been, in a symbolic sense, virtually synonymous. Very quickly, it felt natural to speak of baseball and America interchangeably, using one as a metaphor for the other, ascribing values to the game and the men who played and administered it that seemingly rang true on the larger canvas of the expanding nation as well. Baseball achieved this status on behalf of a group of status-conscious Americans who attempted to emulate the small-town values of the Protestant (WASP) establishment of the early and mid-nineteenth century, in an effort to increase their societal standing. For these men, who would eventually be known as baseball club owners, the goal was acculturation into the closed world of the respected WASP elites, a club they otherwise could never hope to join merely through accumulation of wealth alone.
Tearing Down the Walls
Authors: Nathanson Mitchell
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how the baseball club owners finally ceded much of the status and glory they had worked so hard to achieve. The civil rights movement on the left provided perhaps the most obvious test of the owners' status and independence. On the right, the owners were increasingly pressured as well, as challengers from all over the political spectrum wanted in on America's game and were less content than ever to sit on the sidelines and be dictated to by the self-appointed gatekeepers of American values. Although the official date of death on the “owners-as-manor lords” tombstone is open to debate—a likely candidate is July 12, 1976, the date of the first collective bargaining agreement granting the players free agency—the seeds of the owners' demise in status were in fact planted years earlier.
The City
Authors: Jentz John B. , Schneirov Richard
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago in the three decades from the 1850s through the 1870s. A capitalist economy based in wage labor became predominant in Chicago during and after the Civil War, and a new bourgeoisie organized it to produce capital accumulation, reinvesting profits in transforming the production process as well as the nature of work. This system required a permanent wage-earning working class, and the mere existence of this class posed a challenge for men of Abraham Lincoln's social vision. The working class was also a social issue for those who found permanent wage earning to be legitimate, for their justification of it presupposed a standard of living that could support a dignified family life and considerable choice in purchasing products in the market.
The Eight-Hour Day and the Legitimacy of Wage Labor
Authors: Jentz John B. , Schneirov Richard
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the eight-hour movement. National in scope, the movement for an eight-hour workday prompted the first public recognition of how capitalism—commonly called the “wages system” after its most obvious aspect—was affecting American social life. This public recognition came amid a generation-long national debate about slavery, free labor, and the roles of both in defining the social and economic order desired by Americans. The chapter then addresses the question of “whether time was a property that could be alienated from the self.” Those who answered “Yes” accepted the legitimacy of the labor market, at least to the point of trying to organize institutions and social life within it. People who answered “No” rejected the legitimacy of the labor market, even if they struggled to survive within it until they established an alternative to it.
Combat in the Streets
Authors: Jentz John B. , Schneirov Richard
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the great railroad strike of 1877. In the summer of 1877, the United States experienced its first national strike, an unorganized, spontaneous rebellion of working people in cities from Baltimore and Pittsburgh to St. Louis and Chicago. The Great Strike produced a fundamental change in public awareness. Beforehand, according to Socialist and labor leader George Schilling, “the labor question was of little or no importance to the average citizen.” After the strike, no one could deny that there was a “labor question” or a working class that did not feel on an “equal footing” with the rest of society. In the new climate of opinion, the Socialists prospered because they had answers to the new labor question, whereas others had denied its existence.
Regime Change
Authors: Jentz John B. , Schneirov Richard
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter studies how Democratic Mayor Carter Harrison's leadership created a new regime—a set of formal and informal governing institutions linking state and civil society—that endured into the Progressive Era. Harrison brought coordination and centralization to the disparate governments of the city and county, not through altering their formal structures, but through a disciplined political party. Meanwhile, his Democrats represented on the local level an updating of the antebellum party state, or “patronage democracy.” Arising to full prominence in the 1840s, patronage democracy witnessed the rise of a new elite of professional politicians—not local notables prominent for their wealth or family status—who manned both the party apparatus and public administration within an electoral democracy and an industrializing economy.
Philip Kaufman
Authors: Insdorf Annette
Published: May 2017

American director Philip Kaufman is hard to pin down: a visual stylist who is truly literate, a San Franciscan who often makes European films, he is an accessible storyteller with a sophisticated touch. Celebrated for his vigorous, sexy, and reflective cinema, Kaufman is best known for his masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the astronaut saga The Right Stuff. His latest film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. This book argues that the stylistic and philosophical richness of Kaufman's cinema makes him a versatile auteur. It demonstrates Kaufman's skill at adaptation, how he finds the precise cinematic device for a story drawn from seemingly unadaptable sources, and how his eye translates the authorial voice from books that serve as inspiration for his films. Closely analyzing his movies to date (including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wanderers, and Quills) the book links them by exploring the recurring and resonant themes of sensuality, artistic creation, codes of honor, and freedom from manipulation. While there is no overarching label or bold signature that can be applied to his oeuvre, the book illustrates the consistency of themes, techniques, images, and concerns that permeates all of Kaufman's works.
New York Liberalism and the Fight against Homelessness
Authors: Howard Ella
Published: May 2017

This chapter uses the city of New York as a case study of the challenges facing liberals as they struggled to tailor their social policies to a political culture often hostile to public aid to the indigent. It traces the interaction of liberal policy making and the fortunes of those on the margins of society over the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter examines efforts to reform the behavior of the homeless as well as campaigns to renovate the areas in which they lived. New York liberalism shaped the development of urban renewal programs, substance abuse treatment programs, and mental health reform, and studying homelessness through that lens lends insight into an understanding of both liberal compassion and its limits.
Ora Dell Graham
Authors: Wade Stephen
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the recordings of Ora Dell Graham. In the fall of 1940, the year she turned twelve, Ora Dell stood before her classmates in her school auditorium. As John A. Lomax operated a disc recorder, she performed a handful of songs that she animated with dance steps, hand clapping, and vocal effects. Three of these numbers, along with the earliest published recordings of Muddy Waters, subsequently appeared on an album of African American blues and game songs issued by the Library of Congress. This news came as a surprise to her nephew, Sonny Milton. He then asked why anyone would care about a little black girl from Mississippi. The reason is that in November 1940, just three weeks after Ora Dell made her recordings, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish summarized the Library's acquisition policy in the “Canons of Selection,”: “The Library of Congress should possess all books and other materials ... which express and record the life and achievements of the people of the United States.” The Library's canon embraced the entire nation, welcoming not only the papers of a president but the poetry of a schoolyard child. The recordings she made gave tangible evidence of this policy of inclusion.
The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II
Authors: Flood Dawn Rae
Published: May 2017

This chapter reveals how African American men and their attorneys challenged assumptions about black criminality and forced urban authorities to confront these assumptions during the postwar years, when the civil rights movement expanded nationally. By World War II, instances of lynch mob violence had decreased significantly, but the specter of interracial sexual violence continued to govern trial proceedings, even outside the Jim Crow South. Many Americans continued to believe that black men were sexual predators and likely perpetrators of rape if accused, especially but not exclusively, by white women. Thus, these men specifically asserted that the trial system they faced in Chicago mirrored a Southern system of (in)justice that had not yet fully abandoned lynch-mob violence. Although they were not successful in gaining acquittals, their efforts expand current understandings of racial discrimination and re-imagine the geographic boundaries of the criminalized black male body.
Black Victims and Postwar Trial Strategies
Authors: Flood Dawn Rae
Published: May 2017

This chapter refocuses attention on the treatment of rape victims during the 1950s exclusively, when African American women began regularly appearing in court, challenging the idea that they did not trust the system, or that the State did not consider theirs to be winnable cases. Although these women did not do so without difficulties, their voices came to be a part of an expanded culture of rights in which numerous groups and individuals challenged inequality in modern American society. Moreover, despite the State's efforts to portray black rape victims as deserving of protection and justice, defense attorneys maintained racist and sexist stereotypes in court, causing an evolution of the rape trial into the hostile territory that contemporary rape victims face and feminists continue to reform.
Institutionalizing Orphans
Authors: Ramey Jessie B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how almost every historical account of the founding of the United Presbyterian Orphan's Home (UPOH) begins by paying homage to Rev. James Fulton, the young pastor of the Fourth United Presbyterian Church of Allegheny. While Fulton was a central figure in the founding of the United Presbyterian Women's Association of North America (UPWANA), he was not alone; dozens of women set to work establishing the orphanage. Similarly, founding stories often credit Rev. Fulton with inspiring another group of religious women, the Women's Christian Association (WCA), with starting the Home for Colored Children (HCC) in 1880. Nevertheless, it was women who played the crucial role in founding and managing these “sister” orphanages. The women's religious and social motivations shaped the institutions as they developed during their first fifty years.
Segregating Orphans
Authors: Ramey Jessie B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter talks about how the story of Nellie Grant and the founding of the Home for Colored Children (HCC) highlights many of the salient threads of the institution's history. Over its first fifty years, the HCC both reinforced and resisted racial segregation and discrimination. This tension was particularly apparent in the educational opportunities provided by the orphanage. It also saw moments of interracial cooperation through its partially integrated board of managers, raising questions about racial attitudes and the motivations of both the white and black women who served in its early years. The orphanage had complicated relationships with both whites and with African Americans. Yet the orphanage manager's initial resistance toward, and eventual shift to, racial integration was set in motion through the persistent efforts of progressive reformers and African American leaders.
Slave Violence
Authors: Rivers Larry Eugene
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how acts of physical violence remained the ultimate demonstration of discontent with the institution of slavery. Violence could result in the destruction of human lives but might simply entail destroying property. Large-scale rebellion certainly constituted the ultimate in violence against whites; yet, not unlike the southern experience generally, individual acts of violence perpetrated by slaves against whites represented the typical and most frequent such action in Florida. Acts of physical violence perpetrated on whites by captive laborers may have been seen less frequently than nonviolent forms of resistance in Florida, but the possibility of slave-perpetrated violence persistently sent chills through and often wreaked panic in Florida′s white community during the territorial and early statehood periods.