bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Home Front
Authors: Macleod Beth Abelson
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler's life against the backdrop of contemporary U.S. attitudes toward marriage, motherhood, and careers for women. Unlike most women musicians of her generation, who gave up their professions when they married or had children, Bloomfield-Zeisler resumed concertizing mere months after the births of each of her three sons. The chapter emphasizes Bloomfield-Zeisler's need to prove that she could “do it all,” and proceeds with a discussion of the image of women artists in literature during the period, with particular attention to Bert Leston Taylor's 1906 novel The Charlatans. The chapter also considers the increasingly vulnerable plight of German musicians in the United States during World War I; the effect of the war on Fannie and her husband, Sigmund Zeisler; the ways in which the Zeislers chose to manifest their patriotism; Bloomfield-Zeisler's last years, which were marked by a number of philanthropic involvements; and her death on August 20, 1927.
Compression
Authors: Sterne Jonathan
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a genealogy of media compression techniques and their relation to infrastructures that have historically been developed and scaled to carry or transmit certain loads or capacities. By examining compression—a process that accommodates signals to infrastructures—it is possible to rethink and rewrite media history toward a general history of compression. This historiographic intervention might turn further attention to experiences and aesthetics that emerge around media in limited definition. It might also facilitate an understanding of the ways that compression both renders representation adequate to infrastructure and exposes the limits of transmission. In the end, compression techniques also work upon infrastructures, making them adequate to the representational loads that pass through them.
“Where the Internet Lives”
Authors: Holt Jennifer , Vonderau Patrick
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how recent depictions of data-center visibility function both as a mode of claiming corporate territory and as an obfuscation of the less picturesque dimensions of cloud infrastructure. Analyzing media infrastructure industries, such as the companies that run cloud systems, presents particular challenges for researchers. The structural convergence and functional heterogeneity of media make it difficult to apply some of the tried and true concepts in media and communication studies, such as the distinction between public and private. Using the Swedish data center as an example, the chapter then deciphers the backend of Internet architecture and data-trafficking policies, and highlights the importance of a relational perspective in understanding data centers as dynamic infrastructure nodes.
Performing Body as Nature
Authors: East Alison
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author discusses the significance of the body as part of its natural environment, with particular emphasis on sensuous interfaces and somatic presence of the body as nature. The author, a dancer, educator, and ecologist, explores somatic presence in and as nature as she recounts some of her own somatic memories of place. More specifically, she traces her somatic memory of living, dancing, and teaching in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In the process she describes her ecological body as an expressive aspect of nature, as well as the ways that time spent in the natural environment has influenced her choreographic expression and danced improvisations within natural and constructed landscapes of earth and stage. Her emphasis is on the unification of self and world she experiences through dance performance.
Chinese in the Woods
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

Though recognized for their work in the mining and railroad industries, the Chinese also played a critical role in the nineteenth-century lumber trade. This book continues an examination of the impact of Chinese immigrants on the American West by bringing to life the tensions, towns, and lumber camps of the Sierra Nevada during a boom period of economic expansion. Chinese workers, like whites, labored as wood cutters and flume-herders, lumber jacks and loggers. Exploding the myth of the Chinese as a docile and cheap labor army, the book shows Chinese laborers earned wages similar to those of non-Asians. Men working as camp cooks, among other jobs, could even make more. At the same time, the book draws on archives and archaeology to reconstruct everyday existence, offering evocative portraits of camp living, small town life, personal and work relationships, and the production and technical aspects of a dangerous trade. The book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction.
Carson City and Truckee: Anti-Chinese Activities
Authors: Chung Sue Fawn
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines anti-Chinese activities in two towns: Carson City in Nevada and Truckee in California. Anti-Chinese movements emerged when it became clear to Euro-Americans that the Chinese posed threats to American jobs, economy, culture, and white supremacy. Between 1850 and 1908, a total of 153 violent anti-Chinese actions resulted in 143 deaths and the displacement of 10,525 from their homes and businesses. Anti-Chinese sentiment intensified in the 1870s in preparation for immigration restrictions that led to the enactment of federal Chinese exclusion laws between 1882 and 1892. This chapter discusses attempts to oust the Chinese immigrants from Carson and Truckee, both of which had prosperous Chinatowns with wealthy Chinese merchants who were involved in the lumber trade as contractors for laborers and merchandising. It also considers the role played by the media in anti-Chinese agitation and how the anti-Chinese hostility reduced the Chinese population in Carson and Truckee.
Conclusion
Authors: Martin Lou
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter examines how the rural-industrial working-class culture that emerged in Hancock County gradually disappeared in the late twentieth century. The ethic of making do traveled well from the farm to the factory town, but it began its decline in the late 1960s and 1970s as buying power increased and industrial workers focused more on vacations or socializing and less on making do. While many people in Hancock County still tend gardens, work on their houses, hunt, and fish, these activities no longer supplement family income the way they did in the 1950s. Moreover, the localism of their culture may have persisted in some ways to the present, but a localized system of negotiation that local manufacturers helped create disappeared along with many of those companies.
Grounds of Engagement
Authors: Robolin Stéphane
Published: May 2017

Part literary history, part cultural study, this book examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. The book argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, the book contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, it identifies key moments in this understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange, exposing how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.
Remapping the (Black) Nation
Authors: Robolin Stéphane
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the migration of a later South African exile, Keorapetse Kgositsile, who emigrated to the United States in 1962. It argues that Kgositsile labored to reconfigure how readers understood the world to be arranged, and his repeated, explicitly geographic references throughout his 1971 poetry collection My Name Is Afrika played a large role in this process. Guided by the principles of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement he engaged upon arriving in the United States, his poems sutured together South African and American sites of black revolutionary struggle. By insistently coupling South African and American places, his poetry militated against the segregationist logic encouraged by South African and U.S. states to keep liberation efforts on either shore separate. Kgositsile's approach was based in a dynamic cultural milieu, and occasional turns to his ideological foils and counterparts—from Nat Nakasa to Gil Scott-Heron—help to put his artistic project into relief.
Introduction
Authors: Bussel Robert
Published: May 2017

This book examines Teamsters Local 688's community stewards program, a nationally acclaimed initiative launched by Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway in St. Louis to advance their advocacy of working-class citizenship and total person unionism. Through the community stewards program, Gibbons and Calloway sought to develop new kinds of unionists whose workplace and civic lives were seamlessly integrated. In addressing the needs of the worker as a “total person,” the two men looked beyond the shop floor and attempted to influence political decisions “affect[ing] the common economic, social, and civic well-being” of the union member. Local 688's community stewards mounted a series of highly visible campaigns to improve the quality of life in St. Louis. These efforts included ballot initiatives, legal action, and direct worker engagement with city officials. This book explores how Gibbons and Calloway, despite their quite different personalities, forged a dynamic political alliance as they sought to claim the identity of “citizen” for themselves and the workers they represented.
“Kansas Has an Ample Supply of Darkies”
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This chapter surveys white response to the Kansas Exodus. In 1879 a group that came to be called the Exodusters began their much-publicized mass migration from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Although some relocated to Indiana as well, many acquired “Kansas fever.” They were on their way by February and arrived in “avalanchelike proportions” between March and May. Although the rate of arrivals later slowed, they continued their trek to Kansas until mid-1881. Moreover, unlike the more prosperous blacks who had settled the colonies during the late 1870s, the Exodusters were largely destitute. Because they arrived over such a short period, involved such large numbers, and required so much public assistance, they provoked widespread attention and instilled in white Kansans the fear that they would “certainly be swamped.”
Conclusion
Authors: Campney Brent M. S.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings laid out in the previous chapters and assesses their implications for the historiography of racist violence and race relations, for the debate about the duration of the long civil rights movement, and for the study of race relations in Kansas specifically and in the Midwest more generally. Once again, this chapter lays out the model used throughout this book, which addresses sensational, threatened, and routine violence in order to reveal a universe of black resistance not always evident from the use of singular surrogates for racist violence itself. And this model, the chapter shows, has led to one undeniable conclusion: blacks fought an unbroken struggle for their rights throughout the study period, and they did so vigorously and courageously despite daunting odds.
“Greetings to the Uzbek People!”
Authors: Merchant Tanya
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines estrada as it is played in from tape and CD vendors in the bazaars, sung karaoke-style by wedding musicians, and performed to sold-out audiences in the Bunyodkor Concert Hall (Creative Workers' Concert Hall, formerly known as the Friendship of Nations Concert Hall) located in the center of the city. It considers how women interact with popular music as performers and consumers, and analyze concert footage, recorded songs, and music videos by Rayhon G'anieva, Yulduz Usmanova, Sevara Nazarkhan, and Gulzoda Hudoinazarova. A large variety of these musical practices converge in wedding music. The chapter first provides an overview of estrada's development in Uzbekistan before defining and framing popular music in Central Asia. It then looks at the Uzbek State Conservatory's estrada department, along with the notion of talent and how it legitimizes one's art, an especially salient issue for women estrada singers. It also explores the importance of radio to girls in Uzbekistan and concludes with an assessment of the works of Usmanova, Nazarkhan, G'anieva, and Hudoinazarova.
Marrying Past, Present, and Future
Authors: Merchant Tanya
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the ways in which musicians cross the four musical genres in Uzbekistan: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Most of the women interviewed for this book interacted with all four genres at some point, and most have strong opinions about each type of practice. The diversity of styles of music present in events associated with Uzbek weddings and the ubiquity of weddings means that they act as unifiers for Tashkenters across disciplinary divides. The chapter first provides an overview of the importance of wedding music throughout Central Asia before discussing the significance of musical performance at weddings. It shows that wedding music is a vital part of the musical economy in Tashkent and is one that involves a wide range of musical styles, including most of those institutionalized in the Uzbek State Conservatory.
Occupation and Insurgency
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the four phases of the South African War of 1899–1902 in the Free State. The first two phases were characterized by conventional battles, with the Boers asserting themselves before the British, with the command passing to Lord Roberts, increasingly prevailed. The third period, following on the occupation of Bloemfontein, was characterized by irregular engagements and may, in turn, be subdivided into a period when the Boers still had the capacity to mount conventional operations and one when they were reduced to insurgency. From the Boers’ point of view, the war was one of increasing hopelessness. This chapter examines the British occupation of the Winburg district, the Boers’ withdrawal southward into the Brandwater Basin, and the surrender of the bulk of the Boer army in the field.
In Captivity
Authors: Boje John
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the life of Boers held captive by the British during the South African War, with particular emphasis on inmates’ grievances relating to water, meat, clothing, work, and lack of freedom. It first provides an overview of the captives’ lifestyle at the Winburg concentration camp as well as camp personnel and medical staff before discussing the issue of disease and death in the camp. It then considers the freedom that prisoners of war (POWs) had to make existential choices, with reference to the suborning of prisoners by the British and the prisoners’ efforts to maintain group solidarity. It also discusses defiance and compliance by the inmates and concludes with an assessment of daily life in the POW concentration camps.
Homecomings
Authors: Margaretten Emily
Published: May 2017

This chapter turns to the townships and rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal in order to understand the home situations of the Point Place youth. Through the stories of the children's kinsfolk, the chapter lays out the reasons of their departure. While acknowledging the material constraints of their homes, they also refer to infractions from the past, speaking of unsuitable marital alliances, inactive lineages, and unfulfilled filial obligations. In short, they refer to the estrangements of kin, which include not only the living but also the deceased—or the amadlozi. From these ties of kinship, the chapter analyzes the possibilities of reconciliation, of youth returning to their homes to appease the conflicts of the past and to extend the lifelines of their lineages.
Introduction
Authors: Singleton Jermaine
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the disavowed claims of the past on the present through a group of cultural productions—literature, drama, and film—focused on racialized subject-formations and cultural formations. Investigating the intersection of categories of social difference, nation making, and buried social memory, it uncovers a host of hidden dialogues for the purpose of dismantling the legacy effects of historical racial subjugation and inequality. The book brings psychoanalytic paradigms of mourning and melancholia and discussions of race and performance by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Julian Carter, Diana Taylor, and Kimberly Benton into conversation with literary work on post-Emancipation America's everyday life and ritual practice to challenge scholarship that calls for the clinical separation of ethnic studies and psychoanalysis as well as the divorce of psychoanalysis and socioeconomic history, and presumes that this disengagement is central to American nationhood's continued relationship with unresolved racial grievances. This study develops a theory of “cultural melancholy” that uncovers the ideological and psychical claims of the history of slavery and ongoing racial subjugation on contemporary racialized subject-formations and dominant American culture.
Sticks and Scones
Authors: Shaw Carolyn Martin
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Homecraft movement in colonial Zimbabwe and the ways it encouraged women to move beyond the confines of their homes, to join in common cause with non-kin, and to name their desires. Colonial white women who were members of the Federation of Women's Institutes of Southern Rhodesia (FWI) turned to political activism with the founding of Homecraft Clubs for black women. The FWI's systematization of knowledge about home economics was concomitant with the white women's heightened sense of Rhodesian nationalism. As white women taught domesticity and community service to black women, the latter began to assert themselves in the public sphere. The chapter also considers how events such as Kitchen Teas mobilize women's cultural knowledge about who should participate with whom on which occasions in order to bring women together for a celebratory event in honor of a bride. The chapter concludes by describing the decline of Homecraft and suggests that the movement was rife with cruel optimism.
The Way the Future Was, 1930–1951
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at Frederik Pohl's first foray into creating a science fictional world by focusing on his youthful adventures in science fiction (SF) fandom. Pohl discovered SF at age ten in 1930. At that time, SF as a defined category of fiction was only in its fifth year, although the genre itself had a much longer pedigree. Hugo Gernsback launched the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories, in April 1926. The first SF magazine Pohl read was the Summer 1930 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly. This chapter discusses Pohl's discovery of a collection of pulp magazines in 1931 at his uncle's farm in Pennsylvania; his interest in science fiction magazines; his initial attempts at writing his own stories; and his involvement with the group called Futurians. The chapter also describes Pohl's involvement in the literary agency business.
The Galaxy Years, 1952–1969
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Frederik Pohl's Galaxy years that began in 1952, when his novel entitled Gravy Planet was published in the June, July, and August issues of the magazine. The early 1950s were marred by the Cold War paranoia of McCarthyism, when intellectuals around the country were investigated, indicted, and otherwise harassed. Curiously, the science fiction community, by and large, was not brought before the McCarthyite witch hunters, even though they had been writing stories about atomic war, political oppression, and future power-politics and global political realignment for years. For instance, Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator-At-Law did not attract the forces of political oppression, particularly given Pohl's former dabbling in communist political circles. This chapter examines some of Pohl's works that were published in Galaxy between 1952 and 1969, including the novels The Reefs of Space, The Starchild Trilogy, The Age of the Pussyfoot, and A Plague of Pythons, as well as the short story “Day Million.”
The Boy Who Would Live Forever, 1988–2013
Authors: Page Michael R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Frederik Pohl's literary output during the period 1988–2013, including two novels that would mark a transition in his career: Chernobyl and The Annals of the Heechee. The books that follow Chernobyl and The Annals of the Heechee focus less on the Cold War and more on new, pressing issues facing the contemporary world, such as The Voices of Heaven (1994), Homegoing (1989), Outnumbering the Dead (1990), and Mining the Oort (1992). Another novel, Narabedla Ltd., was a work of lighthearted fun that demonstrated Pohl's love of music. But the work that caps Pohl's career as science fiction's most eminent Swiftian satirist was All the Lives He Led. While completing All the Lives He Led, Pohl began blogging in January 2009 on his Hugo Award–winning website The Way the Future Blogs. In celebration of his ninetieth birthday, his wife Betty prepared a Festschrift anthology, titled Gateways and published by Tor, which included new stories by old friends.
Hamlet
Authors: Duckett Victoria
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Sarah Bernhardt's appearance in the 1900 short film Hamlet. Part of Paul Decauville's program for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre at the Paris Exposition, Bernhardt's film featured the fencing scene of Hamlet. She had played (and toured) Hamlet successfully on the live stage the previous year. In this way, the film pointed backward just as it pointed forward, to a known theatrical show and to invention, to mechanical mediations that brought with them new ways of presenting and promoting theater. This chapter considers how live musicians, the phonograph, and hand-colored film contributed to Decauville's initiative and hence to Hamlet. It argues that Bernhardt's short film was a calculated response to the new media and to its possible future. Bernhardt did not just adapt her stage work for the screen; she was a savvy businesswoman aware that cinematized theater could attract new audiences to her.
Kriolu Interruptions of Luso
Authors: Pardue Derek
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the new challenges of identity politics that arose after 1974 with the official end of Portuguese colonialism and the implosion of the Salazar-Caetano fascist regime. More specifically, it considers the ways that Cape Verdean Kriolu's conflicted essence both reinforces and interrupts the national paradigm of Portuguese belonging and inclusion represented in a host of Luso categories and discourses. The chapter first argues for the importance of Creole by using history, theory, and ethnography. It then discusses the power of Lusotropicalism as an organizing ideology that continues to inform Portuguese notions of national identity. It also looks at Kriolu rappers and their challenges to lusotropicalism and other Luso discourses, such as Lusofonia. Finally, it highlights the manners in which Kriolu has become a vehicle for difference and discontent in the former metropole of Lisbon.
Introduction
Authors: Chudacoff Howard P.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to synthesize the narrative of college sports history since 1950 in order to convey a fuller understanding of how and why “game changers” have created today's intercollegiate athletic landscape. These game changers involve money, media, race, gender, and reform. The chapter also traces the development of American college sports, which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century from the efforts by male undergraduates to engage in out-of-the-classroom activity independent from the strict faculty control that governed their college lives. By the early twenty-first century, the reality of commercialism and professionalism within the idealistic realm of amateurism characterized college sports more than ever before. A brief overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Scandal, Reorganization, and the Devolution of the Student Athlete
Authors: Chudacoff Howard P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the NCAA's efforts to restore academic respectability to college sports. For decades, the college sports establishment promoted rules of fair play and a level playing field in public, while coaches and boosters surreptitiously sought ways to evade those rules. However, the alarming spate of cheating and fraud in the 1970s and 1980s stirred up efforts at reform. Those efforts, however, did not lead in the direction that might have been anticipated from the overt events. Though related to the scandals, the major turning points of the era had mixed consequences. Changes in the playbook of college sports between 1973 and 1991 were bounded by two major landmarks. The first, the 1973 NCAA legislation putting Division I athletic grants-in-aid (scholarships) on a one-year renewable basis, highlighted the transformation of the student-athletes into athlete-students, whose commercial value could sometimes prompt others to cheat in order to attract and retain them. The second, the 1991 Knight Foundation report, “Keeping Faith with the Student Athlete,” revealed how pervasive the need for ethics reform had become and, in its weak aftereffects, the power the athletic establishment could exert to contain reform and continue the quest for revenue in what had become a high-stakes business.
Team Chemistry
Authors: Corzine Nathan Michael
Published: May 2017

In 2007, the Mitchell Report shocked traditionalists who were appalled that drugs had corrupted the “pure” game of baseball. This book rescues the story of baseball's relationship with drugs from the tyranny of such myths. It reveals a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from the day the first pitch was thrown. Indeed, throughout the game's history, stars and scrubs alike partook of a pharmacopeia that helped them stay on the field and cope off of it: In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived “elixir” to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games. Sandy Koufax needed codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch through his late-career elbow woes. Players returning from World War II mainstreamed the use of the amphetamines they had used as servicemen. Vida Blue invited teammates to cocaine parties, Tim Raines used the drug to stay awake on the bench, and Will McEnaney snorted it between innings. The book also ventures outside the lines to show how authorities handled—or failed to handle—drug and alcohol problems, and how those problems both shaped and scarred the game. The result is an eye-opening look at what baseball's relationship with substances legal and otherwise tells us about culture, society, and masculinity in America.
Summers of the Long Ball Frauds
Authors: Corzine Nathan Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the congressional hearings conducted on March 17, 2005, to probe drug use in Major League Baseball (MLB). On March 17, 2005, the Steroid Era crisis hit critical mass as a handful of players sat before the House Government Reform Committee to answer questions about drug use in professional baseball, among them Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling, Jose Canseco, and Frank Thomas. Conspicuously absent was Barry Bonds, the man who had by then become the Steroid Era's public enemy number one. At the time, Bonds was the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO). The committee wanted to know if McGwire indeed used steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, who else in the league used them, and when the use of such drugs began. This chapter considers what the hearings accomplished and the drug scandal involving BALCO.
A Revolution in Ephemera
Authors: Beins Agatha
Published: May 2017

This chapter uses feminist periodicals to demonstrate the significance of the local, quotidian, and daily scale at which Women's Liberation occurred in the 1970s. Offering local interpretations of grander ideals, shifts in ideas and ideals through time, a variety of different texts and voices, and local specificity, periodicals temper and texture the political images that characterized feminism on a national scale. In their content and in their intertextuality, periodicals highlight how feminist ideals were manifested in different communities and how communities developed distinct practices to reach these ideals. To illustrate the complexity and provisionality of feminism during this time, the chapter focuses on four different facets of periodicals: spatial intertexuality, temporal intertextuality, the significance of location, and the way periodicals make feminism visible at a local, quotidian scale. It examines periodicals published in New Orleans, Louisiana (Distaff), Northampton, Massachusetts (Valley Women's Center Newsletter), Cambridge, Massachusetts (Female Liberation Newsletter), Iowa City, Iowa (Ain't I a Woman?), and Los Angeles, California (L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister).
“A Great Power Had Swept Over It”
Authors: Remes Jacob A. C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the debates that arose in Salem, Boston, and Washington over the state's response to the Salem fire. It first recounts the fire and its impact on residents before turning to the relief work directed at saving possessions. It then considers the disorder of desperate survivors and the role of soldiers in efforts to restore order. It also highlights the politics of disaster relief in Salem by discussing the battle between Irish mayor John Hurley and his Yankee opponents. Salem in 1914 was a city with an insecure elite, besieged politically by the likes of Hurley and demographically by the growing industrial workforce. The chapter shows how the Salem fire created a moment when the middle class and elite could unite to aid their social inferiors, even while commanding power in their streets. It also looks at the survivors' development of informal bonds of everyday solidarity.
Location
Authors: Risse Guenter B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the problems of pesthouse siting. For more than half a century, strong, collective feelings of fear, anger, and disgust drove the relentless opposition to the various sites suggested for San Francisco's pesthouse. San Franciscans continued to appeal to miasmatic theories of disease to justify threatening to burn down and destroy existing structures. Political decisions about “place making” for an institution housing “loathsome” bodies were always highly emotional, contentious, and bitterly fought. Eloquently expressed at neighborhood meetings and in lobbying efforts, these sentiments suggest the presence of an emotional climate that developed within the context of nineteenth-century dangers associated with urbanization and industrialization in San Francisco.
Modern Isolation
Authors: Risse Guenter B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes a shift in public attitudes toward those suffering from loathsome diseases, as the old pesthouse regime has given way for the innovations of the twentieth century. In 1912, the isolation hospital became part of the city's public charity bureau, a bureaucratic move emblematic of post-earthquake San Francisco's political shifts. At the same time, the stigma of loathsomeness attached to contagious diseases seemed in decline. Alongside the improved public opinion toward the institutionalized, the chapter also details further shifts and demographics in San Francisco's ecology of disease. It goes further on into the twentieth century, recounting a possible resurgence of the old pesthouse regime in the advent of AIDs in the 1980s.
Prairie Crossing
Authors: Watson John Scott
Published: May 2017

Carved out of century-old farmland near Chicago, the Prairie Crossing development is a novel experiment in urban public policy that preserves 69 percent of the land as open space. The for-profit project has set out to do nothing less than use access to nature as a means to challenge America's failed culture of suburban sprawl. The first comprehensive look at an American conservation community, this book examines an effort to connect adults to the land while creating a healthy and humane setting for raising a new generation attuned to nature. The book is placed within the wider context of suburban planning, revealing how two first-time developers implemented a visionary new land ethic that saved green space by building on it. The remarkable achievements include a high rate of resident civic participation, the reestablishment of a thriving prairie ecosystem, the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species, and improved air and water quality. Yet, as the book shows, considerations like economic uncertainty, lack of racial and class diversity, and politics have challenged, and continue to challenge, Prairie Crossing and its residents.
A Geography of Somewhere
Authors: Watson John Scott
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the goal of Prairie Crossing: to create a geography of somewhere, a place where residents would feel invested enough to volunteer their time to create genuine community. It begins with a discussion of Prairie Crossing's third, fourth, and fifth guiding principles: “a sense of place,” which draws off of and expands many of the concepts espoused by the New Urbanism movement; “a sense of community,” which aims to encourage social interaction among residents and also between Prairie Crossing and the larger communities of Grayslake and Lake County; and “economic and racial diversity,” which seeks to remedy the tendency toward exclusivity and homogeneity in community housing. The chapter also considers the degree of residents' level of satisfaction with the Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association's governance; where Prairie Crossing, as an exemplar of the conservation community policy model, fits in relation to the new town movement; and the Prairie Crossing Charter School.
Civic Participation
Authors: Watson John Scott
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines local political participation in the Prairie Crossing project and how it differs from national participation. Local political participation is defined as being involved in private government through the Prairie Crossing Homeowners Association and voting in county, township, and municipal elections; national participation is defined as voting in national elections and engaging in political activity such as working for a candidate, attending a political rally or meeting, and influencing others to vote. Using questions taken from the American National Election Studies (ANES) database, the chapter compares the political participation of Prairie Crossing's residents to that of the national cohort. In particular, it discusses the voting behavior of Prairie Crossing residents as well as their record of public service involving the environment, education, water policy, and state, county, and municipal government. It also asks whether Prairie Crossing has helped in changing the culture of civic participation at both the local and national levels.
Scripts and Scoops
Authors: Williams Sonja D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's career in journalism and scriptwriting. As Durham moved through the early 1940s, he had yet to snag a full-time writing job. He began as a freelance writer for the NBC radio show The Lone Ranger, probably in July 1943. While his wife Clarice Durham started taking evening classes in early childhood education at Chicago's Pestalozzi Froebel Teachers College, Dick Durham applied to the Summer Radio Institute jointly sponsored by Northwestern University and the NBC network. Finally, in winter 1944, a full-time job offer provided Durham with a springboard onto a new writing path; he was hired by the Chicago Defender as a reporter, and came under the guidance of its editor-in-chief Metz Tulus Paul Lochard. However, he was fired by the newspaper two years later. Durham eventually landed a position as an associate editor and feature writer with a newly created progressive newspaper called the Chicago Star. He also resumed his writing duties for the Chicago Defender's Democracy USA radio series sometime during late summer 1946.
Freedom
Authors: Williams Sonja D.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on Richard Durham's presentation of progressive blacks “as heroes fighting white supremacy” in Destination Freedom. Durham varied his storytelling approach, alternating between straightforward dramatic narratives and more whimsical or comical takes to create eloquent, politically outspoken scripts. The radio show's multiracial cast and crew then transformed those scripts into the aural equivalent of a page-turning novel. Its protagonists stood up for their rights while championing equality and justice for their fellow citizens. But Destination Freedom had its share of problems. NBC rejected some of the show's script ideas; it had its detractors; and it had to contend with censorship inside the WMAQ radio station. On August 13, 1950, Destination Freedom unceremoniously ended its broadcast life on WMAQ.
Traditional Revival with Socialist Characteristics
Authors: Wu Ka-ming
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role of northern Shaanxi folk storytelling (Shaanbei shuoshu), a musical drama prevalent in the Yan'an area, in isolated rural communities where villagers actively seek folk storytelling to reflect on new desires and problems. In particular, it considers how both state propaganda and folk cultural tradition continue to intertwine in their contemporary forms and contents, and yet both have been subjected to radical reinterpretations. The chapter explains how northern Shaanxi storytelling remains connected to the Maoist legacy of mass culture, while responding to agrarian change and translocal conditions in rural communities of Yan'an today. It suggests that popular religious revival is not only a rural phenomenon but also rampant in today's urban prosperous Yan'an city. Northern Shaanxi storytelling can be considered a quasi-religious resource with late socialist characteristics, which responds to new social and communal desires in the context of a great rural–urban divide.
Spirit Cults in Yan’an
Authors: Wu Ka-ming
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and spirit possession in and out of China before discussing how deity worship figures as a form of unspoken yet widely circulated knowledge, communal bonds, and spiritual services in rural Yan'an. It then considers how spirit cults in Yan'an produce what it calls a “surrogate rural subjectivity” and proceeds by turning to the emergence of women spirit mediums in the 1990s. The chapter argues that, in the context of rapid urbanization, spirit cults provide occasions for the expression of disappearing rural communal relations, folk values, and ritual memories. It also suggests that folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse through which the urbanizing rural subject of China is recognized. Finally, it describes spirit cults as a major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions, and desires are de facto produced and reconstructed in the urbanization of the rural area.
Race, Class, Free Enterprise, and Suburbia
Authors: Connell Tula A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on suburban opposition to annexation. Frank Zeidler's attempt to annex land on the city's periphery and provide the territorial expansion and improved tax base necessary for Milwaukee's growing population set the stage for a massive battle with the suburbs. The conflict highlights the interconnections between classist and racialist notions, with the growing socioeconomic needs of the city's inner core of low-income residents pitted against an “iron ring” of suburbs whose inhabitants were equally convinced of the right to define who could be their neighbors. Further, the years-long standoff, which gained momentum in the mid-1950s, highlighted the winner-take-all perception involved in the battle between individual rights and the collective good, and further complicates the suburban–urban dialectic that often focuses on busing or white flight. The chapter also explores how the issue of race was wielded as a political weapon against Zeidler, dividing the city as never before.
Collective Action and the Threat to Free Enterprise
Authors: Connell Tula A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter underlines the role of anti-unionism in challenges to the New Deal consensus, further highlighting the influence of economic conservatism in the immediate postwar years. New Deal-era laws increased workers' ability to form unions and set a minimum wage for many workers, fueling an economic prosperity that by the 1950s had created the century's narrowest income gap between the wealthy and middle-income workers. Corporate and conservative interests had challenged these laws from the start, and many emerged from World War II motivated by a renewed determination to slow labor's growing momentum and return workplace economics to the private sector.
Conclusion
Authors: Connell Tula A.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter describes a historic “reversal” of state legislation in Wisconsin. The state's seemingly lightning-quick repeal of collective bargaining rights had stunned many commentators who pointed to its precedent-setting adoption of public-employee rights and long history of progressive politics. But the seeds had been planted decades before. The chapter then looks to the years following the legislation, as the postwar era through the 1950s encompassed a key transitional period for the nation, in which foundational issues such as civil rights, the role of government, and the challenges of a pluralistic society confronted the postwar status quo. In struggling to respond while at the same time shaping the course of governance, Zeidler wrestled with issues, the resolutions of which would determine the course of the next decades.
Painting the Gospel Blues
Authors: Pinder Kymberly N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines William E. Scott's murals at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, including his 1936 Life of Christ series. Originally a synagogue designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in 1891, Pilgrim became the home of one the country's most politically influential black churches when sold to the congregation in 1920. In the 1930s Thomas A. Dorsey introduced blues singing into regular church services, making Baptist the birthplace of gospel music and one of the first megachurches in the United States. The chapter considers the support provided by Junius C. Austin, a prominent advocate of social change and black empowerment, to Scott's goals to create images that promoted black pride through a very conventional, representational painting style at Pilgrim Baptist Church. It also discusses the role of Scott and Dorsey in creating a visually and sonically inclusive atmosphere at the church. Finally, it highlights rebirth or resurrection, politically and socially, as the underlying theme of much of the rhetoric about the future of African Americans during the period.
Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden
Authors: Pinder Kymberly N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Frederick D. Jones's murals that form a central part of the media ministry of the First Church of Deliverance (FCOD). FCOD's charismatic founder Clarence Henry Cobbs was the forerunner of Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and other notable megachurch televangelists of the last two decades. In 1934 he became one of the first African American church leaders to broadcast his sermons on the radio and in 1953 the very first to do so on television. In 1939 he commissioned the black architect Walter T. Bailey to renovate FCOD, a converted hat factory, and hired Jones to paint a set of murals that emphasized the inclusive and progressive aspect of his urban church. In 1946 Jones painted Neighborhood People Flocking to the Lord in the foyer of FCOD. Jones meticulously represents key themes of the FCOD ministry, such as class diversity and inclusivity, and specific aspects of the Spiritualist service and the church's interior. This chapter considers FCOD's founding, architecture, and gospel music before discussing Jones's murals.
Black Liberation Theology, Black Power, and the Black Arts Movement at Trinity United Church of Christ
Authors: Pinder Kymberly N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Black Mural Movement in the context of religious imagery by focusing on the evolution of Joseph W. Evans Jr.'s art. In 1986 Evans illustrated the motto of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” with a painting of a Jesus with dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair, his arms outstretched around a smiling African American family. This image of a black Christ was Evans's vision of being black and Christian. In the 1970s Evans joined TUCC, where the pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr., promoted Black Liberation Theology and recommended specific texts and sermons for the artist to study that transformed his conception of Christ. This chapter first considers black theology and pan-Africanism at TUCC before discussing the influence of the Black Arts Movement and the muralist William Walker on Chicago. It also assesses the impact, in terms of style and content, of the murals on Chicago's South Side on Evans's work and concludes with an overview of TUCC's stained glass program.
Where the Black Christ Suffers and the Politics of Black Tragic Space in Chicago
Authors: Pinder Kymberly N.
Published: May 2017

This conclusion reflects on the conflation of empathetic realism and tragic space inside and outside black churches in Chicago. It examines complex issues of ownership, displacement, and tragedy that make the black church fulfill many needs regarding refuge and racial affirmation. It considers various sites of black tragedy in Chicago, citing as an example Pilgrim Baptist Church which burned to the ground on January 7, 2006, resulting in the loss of historically significant murals, a historic landmark, and many primary documents concerning the birth of gospel music. The author places this loss in the context of “tragic tourism,” arguing that it is part of a lineage of “tragic Black spaces” in Chicago that also connect to other such sites across the country and across history. She notes that many black churches have been set on fire due to racial intimidation. She ends the discussion by emphasizing the integral role of black suffering in the activation of empathy and the diverse and shifting publics for its imagery.