bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Winning in Smaller Ways
Authors: Figone Albert J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter covers the 1978–79 Boston College basketball scandal, which involved a case of game fixing that notably implicated not only three Boston College players, but members of an organized crime syndicate as well. The Boston College scandal illustrated that even after decades of investigations and prosecutions, gamblers and fixers could still use vulnerable college athletes to manipulate the outcome of games. These players were willing to expose themselves to danger and to compromise their futures for relatively small sums of money. The NCAA's failure to investigate gambling in the late 1970s reinforces the view of critics who argue that the organization's primary goal has been to convince the public that college sports are uncorrupted by professionalization and commercialization.
A Renegade Union
Authors: Phillips Lisa
Published: May 2017

Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered “unorganizable” by other unions, the progressive New York City-based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. This book presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. The book shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for “unskilled,” unrepresented workers and to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs.
A Third Labor Federation?
Authors: Phillips Lisa
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers how the union's leadership attempted to continue its social revolution within the completely changed context of the emerging Cold War with the Soviet Union. By 1948, “65” was for all intents and purposes expelled from the CIO. It refused to give up on what it called “catch-all” organizing—its version of community-based civic unionism—and joined with other refugees of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to continue to organize poor workers in various areas under the auspices of the Distributive, Processing, and Office Workers of America (DPO). From 1950 to 1954, the DPO, a merger of the Distributive Workers Union (DWU) with the FTA and the UOPWA, constituted a third labor federation, an alternative to the Cold War versions of the AFL and CIO.
John Brunner
Authors: Smith Jad
Published: May 2017

Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934–1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. This book, an intensive review of Brunner's life and works, demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, the book approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including his uneasy association with the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and between hard and soft science fiction, and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.
Art Deco News
Authors: Wallace Aurora
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates the turn toward modernism embodied by the bold Art Deco structure erected by the Daily News in 1930, a new form to house the new form of the tabloid. As New York grew to be the largest city in the world in 1925, the emergence of tabloids and radio changed the media landscape once again. Taking their cues from the enhanced corporate image that the Singer, Woolworth, and Chrysler Buildings had brought to their companies, newspapers advertised with yet taller corporate architecture. The buildings looked not to the past but toward the future, as was befitting a new cosmopolitanism. These forward-looking designs branded the media according to the emerging principles of public relations, iconography, and advertising.
One Woman in a Hundred
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

Gifted harpist Edna Phillips (1907–2003) joined the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1930, becoming not only that ensemble's first female member but also the first woman to hold a principal position in a major American orchestra. Plucked from the Curtis Institute of Music in the midst of her studies, Phillips was only 23 years old when Leopold Stokowski, one of the twentieth century's most innovative and controversial conductors, named her principal harpist. This book traces Phillips's journey through the competitive realm of Philadelphia's virtuoso players, where she survived—and thrived—thanks to her undeniable talent, determination, and lively humor. The book chronicles the training, aspirations, setbacks, and successes of this pioneering woman musician. It recounts numerous insider stories of rehearsal and performance with Stokowski and other renowned conductors of the period such as Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Otto Klemperer, Sir Thomas Beecham, and Eugene Ormandy. It also depicts Phillips's interactions with fellow performers, the orchestra management, and her teacher, the wily and brilliant Carlos Salzedo. Blessed with a nimble wit, Phillips navigated a plethora of challenges, ranging from false conductors' cues to the advances of the debonair Stokowski and others. She remained with the orchestra through some of its most exciting years from 1930 to 1946 and was instrumental in fostering harp performance, commissioning many significant contributions to the literature.
A Season of Firsts
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the arrival of Arturo Toscanini in Philadelphia as part of a highly publicized maestro exchange between the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic that had been set up by Arthur Judson, manager of both orchestras. A canny businessman who understood the value of a good public relations ploy—as did both Stokowski and Toscanini—Judson arranged to have his star conductors each lead the other's orchestra for two weeks. Accustomed to Stokowski's quietly intense demeanor in rehearsals, the members of the orchestra now found themselves the brunt of one explosive outburst after another from Toscanini, who screamed and subjected them to vituperation for their mistakes, breaking batons in perfect fury. While Phillips initially avoided attracting Toscanini's wrath, that was not to last. It soon descended on the harp section in a complicated spot in Siegfried's Death from Götterd Gämmerung.
“Mortally Wounded”
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on events following the death of Edna Phillips' younger sister Peggy in a plane crash. Not long after the Phillips family received the cable informing them of Peggy's death, the orchestra's personnel manager, Paul Lotz, who had already spoken with Stokowski, called Phillips. That Monday evening, the very next day, the orchestra was scheduled to play a concert that had the César Franck Symphony on the program, which the second harpist had not rehearsed with the orchestra. Stokowski asked Lotz to convey a message to Phillips for him. “As a man,” the maestro said, “I'd tell her not to play, but as an artist, she must if she possibly can. ” And so Phillips played the concert on Monday night. Although Edna's grief over Peggy was deep, her work in the orchestra couldn't be ignored. She had to go forward, and she did.
A Month Out of School
Authors: Welsh Mary Sue
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the Philadelphia Orchestra's transcontinental tour, the first ever taken by a symphony orchestra, after the end of the regular season in 1936. Thanks to generous funding from RCA Victor, they would visit twenty-seven cities across the United States and into Canada in an undertaking that Stokowski, who longed to share his great orchestra with the world, had worked many years to achieve. Over a thousand well-wishers jammed into Philadelphia's old Broad Street Station at Broad and Market Streets on April 13, 1936, to bid bon voyage to the 107 men and three women (Edna Phillips, Elsa Hilger, and Marjorie Tyre) of the orchestra.
Fight Night
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter details the rise of Gaspar “Indio” Ortega. Gaspar Ortega grew up poor and fought his way out of the dusty streets of Colonia Morelos, Tijuana, traveling from utter obscurity to international celebrity in the space of a few short years. He is a Friday Night Fighter. At breakfast tables, water coolers, subway stations, restaurants, and bars across America and south of the border, Indio is the topic of lively conversation. Along with the others in his elite cohort—such as Jake LaMotta, Carmen Basilio, Tony DeMarco, Chico Vejar, Benny “Kid” Paret, Willie Pep, Emile Griffith, Kid Gavilan, and Dick Tiger—Gaspar Ortega is a part of the fabric of popular television culture and hence of American life.
“The Regular Friday Coaxial Bloodbath”
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the historical and cultural factors that shaped the rise of TV boxing. It suggests that Cold War hypermasculinity combined with lived war memories to provided a potent cultural milieu in which boxing found a comfortable place. Though it is difficult to prove that war “made” TV boxing popular, a few facts suggest linkages. This was truly a generation of soldiers. An astounding 80 percent of the men born in the 1920s became veterans. It is entirely possible that this unprecedented wave of warriors coincided with the absolute height of boxing viewing in America is sheer coincidence. But this fact, combined with much anecdotal evidence and a cultural backdrop of gunslinging violence, indicates a connection. Whether it was the cover story of Life magazine featuring a five-year-old “fleaweight” boxer, the enthusiastic core of veterans who watched the fights, or the ongoing dialogue about women and the “caveman” allure, boxing and war experience cannot easily be separated.
The Friday Night Fighters
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the rise of the Friday Night Fighters. The new age of television meant grand opportunity for Friday Night Fighters. As broadcasts expanded in the postwar years, fighters discovered that a main event fight in Madison Square Garden equaled instant national celebrity and a big pile of cash. To make it on TV, a boxer first needed to be in New York. Some migrated internally, arriving from the red dirt roads of the Deep South or the rangy farmlands of the Midwest. For others, home was the cane fields and ghettos of the Caribbean or the desert metropolises of Mexamerica. Still others crossed the Atlantic, originating in Europe, Asia, even Africa. In a way, the Friday Night Fighters symbolized New York immigration. The remainder of the chapter explains the effect of television on the sport, how both science and theater played into the persona of the Friday Night Fighter, by letting two boxers stand in for the whole. The first— Kid Gavilan—is an exemplar of that group of rugged, quality fighters who made many appearances but whom the history books have let pass unnoticed into the mists of boxing lore. The second— Chuck Davey—was a man almost too perfect for television and wholly unprepared for it.
Bloodying the Sport
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the events leading up to the end of Friday Night Fights. The reasons for the end read like the ingredients for disaster: some greed, some overexposure, some crime, some death, some changes in audience taste. By the time Indio fought Griffith for the title, the writing was on the wall. Before charting the final lurches into the abyss for both TV boxing and Gaspar's career, some ominous developments are examined, including the Justice Department's filing of a civil antitrust suit in 1955 claiming that the International Boxing Club violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Justice Department's operation to take down the “underworld commissioner” of boxing, Mr. Gray himself.
Nightmares
Authors: Rondinone Troy
Published: May 2017

This chapter first describes the physical toll boxing took on boxers such as Gaspar Ortega and Emile Griffith. Research shows that boxers suffer disproportionally from neurological damage. The scientific term for it is chronic traumatic brain injury. The results are permanent and progressive. Symptoms include Parkinsonism, dementia, personality changes, and cerebellum dysfunction. Gaspar began suffering from nightmares. Griffith exhibited brain damage while Don Jordan lost his mind as well. The remainder of the chapter details Gaspar's life and activities after retiring from boxing. The brain damage that wiped the joy out of the golden years of so many of this boxing cohort did not strike Gaspar. He attributes this to his defensive, slippery style. Though he is occasionally off balance when he walks, that is minor compared to the devastation that brought such misery to so many other retired fighters.
From a Basement on Long Island to a Mansion on the Hill
Authors: Comentale Edward P.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter tackles the central themes of this book, at the same time expounding on the author's own musical experiences—here termed “taste biography”—and his aims to expand the scope of this work from the personal to the national. It also discusses a “vernacular modernism” relating to the genres of music to be discussed in succeeding chapters—what according to author Miriam Hansen considers “the vast and varied aesthetic experience of modern life that, in its everydayness, sustained a vital forum of exchange and transformation for those otherwise excluded from traditional forms of power and prestige.” Finally, the chapter argues that these genres sustain not just a set of alternative cultures, but also an alternative economy and an alternative public sphere—a countermodernity within modernity.
The Lessons of Musical America
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks at how Judson's New York experience forced him to confront the harsh realities of America's music industry. His performance struggles were part of that confrontation, but so was his work for Musical America. The magazine gave him an opportunity to explore the concert climate around him, contemplate how it worked, and share his thoughts with others. Judson's first assignments with the magazine were fairly pedestrian, but gradually he was assigned more challenging topics. By the 1910–11 season, Judson had his own bimonthly opinion column, which appeared for nearly two years. These opinion pieces offer an intriguing glimpse of Judson's time in New York. They comment on the central issues of the period and provide some insight into Judson's thinking in the early 1910s.
Managing a Renewal, 1922–1930
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter illustrates how the Philharmonic had completely transformed itself in just eight years. It had silenced concerns about its artistic integrity, withstood challenges to its financial viability, and broadened its listener base. Judson played an integral role in the makeover. His managerial skills provided a steady hand, as he helped to direct Clarence Mackay's enthusiasm into shoring up the Philharmonic's foundation. But the 1930s had a new batch of challenges, particularly at the Philharmonic, which came to be increasingly reliant on guest conductors. Even though Arturo Toscanini was the face of the Philharmonic in the early 1930s and served as its principal conductor from 1930–35, the Philharmonic was far from being a single-conductor orchestra under his reign.
The List, the Old Man, and the English Replacement
Authors: Doering James M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how the early 1930s tested Judson's mettle as an orchestra manager because the Depression completely redefined the rules of business. The 1910s and 1920s had been periods of tremendous optimism. The audience base grew exponentially, and nearly everything that Judson tried—artist management, coalitions of managements, radio technology—yielded some form of success. But when the economic conditions changed, optimism turned to protectionism. Funding dried up; deficits became more serious; the margin of error became thinner. Moreover, the shift was not temporary. The challenges Judson started to face in the 1930s would fester in the remainder of the twentieth century, as American orchestras struggled to find enthusiastic funding sources and to control costs in an unstable marketplace.
The Rise and Fall of Mob Violence against Mexicans in Arizona, 1859–1915
Authors: Carrigan William D. , Webb Clive
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews conventional narratives of racism and lynching, examining the extensive mob violence directed against persons of Mexican descent in Arizona Territory. While demonstrating the historical depth and contours of anti-Mexican animus in Arizona, the chapter also traces the pivotal social and political changes that shifted opinion against the lynching of Mexicans in the era of statehood in the 1910s. Moreover, there is no record of the illegal hanging of any Mexicans in Arizona after 1915. The strong reaction of Arizona's constituted authorities to the lynching of Mexican outlaws Jose and Hilario Leon did not end discrimination against Mexicans in the state, but it did close the door on what was agreed as the most symbolic and visible form of racial and ethnic persecution—community-sanctioned, extralegal murder.
Introduction
Authors: Pfeifer Michael J.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses how the origins of American lynching can best be understood as a national, and a transnational, process of cultural and legal formation. Diverging significantly from England and western Europe, the United States' transition to a capitalist economy was not accompanied by the emergence of a strong, centralized national state that claimed and enforced an exclusive monopoly over violence and the administration of criminal justice to secure the rule of law. Rather, American criminal justice developed along a distinctive path that emphasized local authority and opinion, self-help and ad hoc law enforcement practices, and the toleration of extralegal violence. Lynching was an important aspect of this distinctive American trajectory from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.
Antis Win the New York State Campaign, 1912–1915
Authors: Goodier Susan
Published: May 2017

Activities of the anti-suffrage movement ebbed and flowed with those of the suffrage movement, suggesting the responsive nature of both movements. This chapter focuses on this process. The leadership of Alice Hill Chittenden, elected in the fall of 1912 to serve as president of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, accounts for the increased politicization of the anti-suffrage movement. Anti-suffragists won this battle, apparent in the results of the November 1915 referendum. However, it is also apparent by 1915 that anti-suffrage leaders faced serious challenges to their campaign to prevent enfranchisement, leading to a far different campaign for the 1917 referendum.
Weavers of Dreams, Unite!
Authors: Holmes Sean P.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which to explore the efforts of American actors to define what it meant to earn a living on the stage at a historical moment when the cultural landscape of the United States was undergoing seismic changes. In so doing, it sheds light on a number of larger issues: the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century; languages of class and their role in the construction of cultural hierarchy; and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry. The book focuses on that section of the American acting community that earned its living in the so-called legitimate theater, a cultural category that by the early twentieth century had come to be defined, at least in a metropolitan context, less by a particular set of performance traditions than by the social identity of its audience. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
The Prison of Culture
Authors: Paul David C.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the contributions made by “bright young academicians” to discourse about Charles E. Ives during the period 1965–1985. More specifically, it considers the impact that historians who worked under the “American Studies” rubric had on Ives's reception. The chapter first provides an overview of the 1965 premiere of Ives's Fourth Symphony before discussing the 1974 centenary celebrations of his birth. It then explores the convergence of Cold War politics and Ives's reception, along with the structure and assumptions of the field of intellectual history and its connection to American Studies. It also analyzes Ives's influence on American Studies and intellectual history and describes an approach that calls for a rethinking of America and of history “from the bottom up.” The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's prospects in American Studies in the late 1970s.
Kings for Three Days
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. This book delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas—Ecuador's province most associated with blackness—engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. The book shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spatial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.
Introduction
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the Ecadorians of African descent in the province of Esmeraldas. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine playful African diasporic performative representations of racial and gender identities in the Afro-Esmeraldian Festival of the Kings, locally called La Fiesta de los Reyes, La Fiesta de los Santos Reyes, and also El Juego de los Cucuruchos (the Play of the Cowls), as it has been celebrated from January 6 to 8 in two different villages of the northern sector of Esmeraldas, Santo Domingo de Ónzole and La Tola. References to the particularities of the two village contexts considered here explain the originality of the representations of racial and gender identities and of the Ecuadorian racial-spatial order in each village. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
The Village of Santo Domingo de Ónzole and the Period of Preparation of the Festival of the Kings
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the nine-day period of preparation of the Festival in the village of Santo Domingo de Ónzole and presents an ethnographic discussion of the village's marked sexual dichotomy. This ethnographic information will help explain why gender is so important in that village's Festival performances. Topics discussed include the subsistence economy in the northern sector of Esmeraldas; the founding of the village at the end of the nineteenth century; kinship networks in Santo Domingo; outmigration from Santo Domingo de Ónzole; socioeconomic differentiation in Santo Domingo; geography of the village; and the organization of the Festival by a committee of women.
The Festival of the Kings in Santo Domingo de Ónzole
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides ethnographic interpretations of the performances of the three-day-long (January 6–8) Festival in Santo Domingo de Ónzole. The principal activity on January 6 is the act of the president, which involves two groups of disguised actors. The first is the group of cucuruchos. They number about twenty and include the women of the committee who prepared the Play. The second protagonist of the act is the group composed of a dozen adolescents and young men who are disguised as soldiers and called “the troop” (la tropa). The principal activity of January 7 is the begging performance by cucuruchos going from house to house, which evokes the descriptions of European medieval carnival. January 8 is dedicated to the negritos and the cayapas, although some reyeras disguised as whites are still participating in the activities. January 8 is also called el día de todos, “the day of everybody.”
Race, Sexuality, and Gender as They Relate to the Festival of the Kings
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores further the socioeconomic and political realities that make the contexts of the Play in Santo Domingo de Ónzole and La Tola by paying special attention to these two fields of meaning: race and racial relations, and sexual dichotomy, gender relations, and sexual role reversal. These explorations should provide additional evidence in support of interpretations of the Play in the two villages while also shedding some light on the Play's acts. The discussions cover Afro-Esmeraldian sexuality, “matrifocality,” and gender relations; reputation and the prevalence of the sexuality and gender relations field of meaning in Santo Domingo; and the prevalence of the racial relations field of meaning in La Tola.
Performances and Contexts of the Play in January 2003
Authors: Rahier Jean Muteba
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides ethnographic information about the Play in Santo Domingo de Ónzole and La Tola at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In December 2002, the author traveled to the province of Esmeraldas, where he spent four weeks doing some fieldwork. His objective was to find out how the Play was being performed since he last visited. Once back home in Miami, he revised his diary in order to develop his initial analyses. He also inserted transcriptions of fragments of interviews conducted while in the field. The chapter maintains the diary format in the hopes that this approach would be a better way to share with readers his progressive reconnection with the Festival and the two villages.
Revolution
Authors: Jockers Matthew L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the enormous promise of computational approaches to the study of literature, with particular emphasis on digital humanities as an emerging field. By 2008 computers, with their capacity for number crunching and processing large-scale data sets, had revolutionized the way that scientific research is carried out. Now, the same elements that have had such an impact on the sciences are slowly and surely revolutionizing the way that research in the humanities gets done. This chapter considers the history of digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, community of practice, or field of study/theory/methodology, and how revolution in this emerging field is being catalyzed by big data. It also emphasizes the potential of literary computing and cites the existence of digital libraries and large electronic text collections as factors that are sparking the digital humanities revolution.
Tradition
Authors: Jockers Matthew L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses traditions that inform the book's macroanalytic approach to digital literary studies as well as the strength of macroanalysis as a tool in the study of literature. It begins with an overview of some early concerns and contemporary criticisms regarding literary computing and the digital revolution. It then considers the emergence of the so-called “digital humanities” or humanities computing and shows that its foundation, computational text analysis, has come a long way. It also examines the contributions of computing humanists to humanities scholarship, such as the creation of digital archives, along with a number of useful tools that have been developed by computer scientists working in natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics. Finally, the chapter cites examples of projects working to apply the tools and techniques of text mining and corpus linguistics to literature. It suggests that, despite all of the achievements and the overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and collegiality that permeates the DH community, there is much more work to be done.
October 1871
Authors: Leslie Thomas
Published: May 2017

This chapter details the reconstruction of Chicago following the Great Fire. Chicago grew faster than any American city through the depression-scarred 1870s. By 1880 its population reached half a million, nearly doubling in size since the Fire. In 1879 just under 1100 new buildings were constructed in the city, but in 1883 there were over 4000. The city's building code, developed in the conservative years of the depression, came under increasing pressure as the motive to build higher returned with new investment. The emergence of the tall skyscraper was gradual, and the convergence of Chicago skyscrapers toward remarkably similar composition, proportions, and even detail occurred in several loosely defined steps between the end of the “hard times” around 1879 and the flourishing of what was called the “Chicago Style” or “Chicago Construction” of the late 1880s.
Steel and Wind: The Braced Frame, 1890–1897
Authors: Leslie Thomas
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes major structures built from 1890 to 1897, many of which featured wind-braced frames that used steel to reduce spatially inefficient masonry walls and piers. Before the late nineteenth century, wind bracing had rarely been more than a minor consideration in structural calculations—the dead weight of brick or stone construction could absorb all but the most severe wind forces. However, the lighter weight of skeletal buildings, their increased height, and the unreliable nature of iron connections brought this issue to the fore. Chicago's tall building designers of the 1880s were among the first to recognize this problem and to solve it with dedicated lateral-resistant systems.
The Moment of Decision
Authors: Lorence James J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explains how Empire Zinc acted out of fear that a successful strike might enhance the Mexican American unity already encouraged by the policies Jencks had encouraged Local 890 to adopt. The genius of democratic unionism was the empowerment of local union members and their community, which encouraged an immediate and vigorous response to the company's refusal to negotiate. Once the strike began, local committees were created with responsibility for various functions, including relief, negotiations, publicity, police relations, and fund-raising. As the community mobilized, it became clear that the great union advantage was to be its human resources, organizational capacities, and wide-ranging ability to employ external support in both the union family and the Mexican American community.
The Misery the World Is Made Of
Authors: White Rob
Published: May 2017

There are moments in Todd Haynes’s films when someone is so unnerved that it is difficult to imagine that any good can come from the experience. In Safe (1995), Carol White (Julianne Moore) is suddenly distressed while she is talking to her husband: “Oh God, what is this? Where am I? Right now?” It is as if she feels that there is almost nothing left of her as a result of psychic erosion she never knew was occurring. Then, in the five-part miniseries ...
This Is What Trafficking Looks Like
Authors: Chang Grace
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the implications of U.S. antitrafficking policy and practice for both trafficking survivors and immigrant workers across labor sectors. In U.S. media and public policy discourses alike, the term “human trafficking” has become synonymous with sex trafficking, which in turn has been equated with sexual violence and prostitution. Yet the many forms of violence enacted in human trafficking can include racial and sexual violence as well as economic and imperialist violence. This chapter argues that the current U.S. anti-sex trafficking agenda is so narrowly focused on the sex industry and instead gives more emphasis on enforcement and prosecution as well as the explicit and exclusive criminalization of prostitution. In order to highlight the dangers and pitfalls of this policy, the chapter considers a case of extreme labor abuse, tantamount to trafficking, of immigrant workers in the United States in the meatpacking industry in Postville, Iowa.
Gendered Labor
Authors: Gurung Shobha Hamal , Purkayastha Bandana
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how contemporary globalization has created gendered labor by drawing on the experiences of Nepali immigrant women within pan-ethnic informal labor markets in Boston and New York City. After a brief overview of the existing theoretical framework, the chapter presents data on Nepali women's experiences in the informal economy. It shows how the economic opportunities available to these women are shaped by within-ethnic-group social location—Nepali Americans' social location in relation to wealthier Indian Americans (and their religious and linguistic similarity to this group). It also considers how some Nepali women, especially those who worked in the formal sector in Nepal, have begun to “bank” their social capital in their home countries. The Nepali women's experiences highlight the segmentation of the informal labor market for care work and suggest that, while they send remittances back to their home countries, some of this money is sent to nonfamily members.
The First Exiles
Authors: Fuentecilla Jose V.
Published: May 2017

On September 22, 1972, a nationwide dragnet swept up hundreds of Filipinos deemed hostile to the sudden imposition of martial law that day. They included politicians, journalists, civil rights activists, lawyers, and suspected members of the Communist-leaning insurgent New People's Army. In the days to come, more people would be apprehended and moved to detention centers. President Marcos declared that this drastic action was necessary because these sectors had all threatened to overthrow the government. Marcos had been impelled to act, it was reported, because of an assassination attempt on Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile while he was reportedly riding in his car in the late evening of September 22. Senator Raul Manglapus was in a Tokyo hotel on September 23, on his way to California for a series of speaking engagements, when he read about the assassination attempt in the Japan Times. He had left Manila the previous afternoon. This chapter presents a slightly edited account of that day, which Manglapus wrote on October 15, 1983, in Washington, D.C. This account appears in A Pen for Democracy, a compilation of published articles, letters, and U.S. congressional testimonies compiled by the Movement for a Free Philippines. It omits details about how those who managed to escape the dragnet made it out of the country, because when it was written, Marcos was still in full control, rounding up more suspects.
The Music of Alec Wilder
Authors: Lambert Philip
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter evaluates Alec Wilder's music. Listeners are often struck by the tunefulness of Wilder's creations, whether a popular song or a concerto or sonata. Indeed, many of his melodies, in music of all types, easily satisfy one of his own standards of measurement in his book, American Popular Song (1972): that a good tune should be capable of standing alone, without accompaniment or any other contextualizing factors. At the same time, Wilder was equally devoted to a melody's harmonic setting. As he explained in American Popular Song, some effective melodies are “conceived in terms of harmony” and may not work so well in isolation. To his popular songs he brought the harmonic language of late romanticism. To his music for the concert hall he brought the language of jazz harmony. The personality and distinction of his musical language in general are as much determined by his chord constructions and progressions as by the melodies they support.
Introduction
Authors: Nathan Daniel A.
Published: May 2017

This book explores the complicated, double-edged process of inclusion and exclusion, of rooting for the home team. It examines the ways different American communities (big cities, small rural towns, suburbs, college towns, and so forth) used or use sport to create and maintain a sense of their collective identity. Predicated on the idea that rooting for local athletes and home teams often symbolizes a community's preferred understanding of itself, and that doing so is an expression of connectedness, the book demonstrates how sport brings people together yet also contributes to separation, misunderstanding, and antagonism. It considers the complicated, multilayered lived experiences that arise from playing together, playing apart, and rooting for the home team by looking at professional and amateur sports, from the 1920s to the present, played in different parts of the United States: these include golf, basketball, baseball, softball, and football.
Bobby Jones, Southern Identity, and the Preservation of Privilege
Authors: Lewis Catherine M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the recent Tiger Woods affair by using 1920s golfing icon Bobby Jones and the sense of southern identity and white privilege that he personified. During the 2010 Masters Tournament, the sporting world witnessed the return of Tiger Woods, who was still reeling from scandals resulting from more than a dozen extramarital affairs. Woods's conduct threatened the game's most cherished traditions at its most beloved tournament. This chapter first provides a background on the 1920s, often described as the “Golden Age of Sports,” a period dominated by Jones and other legendary athletic heroes. It then considers how interest in Jones's legacy is fueled by the Masters Golf Tournament held every April in Augusta, Georgia. It also discusses the marketing of Jones as an antidote to Woods's conduct, raising important issues about class, race, and identity in sport. The chapter argues that the golfing world continues to trade on Jones's legend to promote itself as “the last gentleman's game, with a distinctly southern flavor.”
Football Town under Friday Night Lights
Authors: Oriard Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the history of two competing views about the role of high school football in American communities: the “Football Town” and the “Friday Night Lights syndrome.” “Friday Night Lights” was named after H. G. Bissinger's 1990 book Friday Night Lights, a journalistic account of football at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. “Football Town” originated from a series of portraits in popular magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. The chapter first provides a background on interscholastic football before discussing how the high school football game's place in the local community began to take on larger meanings when the national media began paying attention to it in the late 1930s.
Finding My Place
Authors: Cahn Susan
Published: May 2017

In this chapter, the author shares her sports odyssey that began in suburban Chicago and ended in Buffalo, New York. The author recalls the time when, as a young girl, she spent many hours by herself. Her tomboy persona simply didn't fit in with the girl culture at her school and there were no alternative girl playmates in her neighborhood. Yet even as hery tomboyish love of sports contributed to her isolation, it also helped solve it. The author explains how sport provided her solace and joy. Her story is about sports played for different reasons in different communities. It is about coming to terms with her lesbian identity, finding supportive spaces comprised of people who respect difference, and a regular pickup basketball game at the Bob Lanier Center, known as “The Bob.” According to the author, “basketball at the Bob is about familiarity, a sense of belonging, meaningful activity, and ties that bind.” She concludes by reflecting on a contrasting vision of sport and community linked to sport spectatorship.
“Ranch Stiffs” and “Beach Cowboys” in the Shrinking Public Sphere
Authors: Seymour Nicole
Published: May 2017

This chapter counters universal readings of Brokeback Mountain (2005) as either a simplistic pastoral that romanticizes the American West, or a universal love story in service of gay normalization by highlighting how the film accounts for its historical setting and by focusing on how it frames its protagonists in relation to the natural world. It also brings new attention to the 1964 film Surf Party, which Brokeback Mountain briefly excerpts. Through a comparative reading, the chapter shows this seemingly frivolous beach romp to be a crucial intertext: like Brokeback, it depicts the policing of illicit desire in a natural context. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how, through its commentary on access to natural public space, Brokeback Mountain critiques the contemporary state of Western and, especially, U.S. gay politics.
Conclusion
Authors: Seymour Nicole
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter maintains that queer ecological values are more aligned with futurity and future-thinking, particularly when it comes to combating corporate greed and social/environmental injustice, even as it highlights the fact that a lack of concern for the future more accurately characterizes regimes such as heteronormativity and global capitalism: while they may operate out of concern for the reproduction of the white, middle-class heterosexual family or for the accumulation of wealth, they also ignore their immediate and future costs to the poor, to people of color, to the environment, and even to themselves. The kind of queer ecological futurity thus posited here is, instead, ethically attuned to the present and future health and safety of the biosphere as it encompasses the human, the non-human, and everything in between.
Sweetening the Pot
Authors: Julier Alice P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins with a discussion of a dinner party attended by the author to highlight the complexity of social events with food when all the rigid rules of dinner parties are not applicable or desired. For many reasons, the majority of people's social events do not fit into those formal templates, so they must “invent” new ways of doing this. But in doing so, all modifications are fraught with new rules and new ways of negotiating a shared understanding of what is appropriate, what tastes good, and what makes both hosts and guests feel “comfortable,” appreciated, and connected to each other. It argues that the path to intimacy and closeness is not as free of constraints as the ideology of friendship suggests. In fact, people intentionally use these events to create bounded groups whose similarities exclude others.
Potlucks
Authors: Julier Alice P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the social significance of potlucks. In the United States, the word potluck has come to mean a particular category of commensal events, where each participant brings a “dish to pass” to create a communal meal. As a social social event, the potluck represents a shift in both the form of the meal and the normative expectations of hospitality, away from formality and temporal sequencing. Because both emotional and material labor is shared at potlucks, people potentially construct different situated identities through these events than they might if orienting their social lives around more formal modes of entertaining. Potlucks are also about constructing temporary unities, bounded groups of informal and often heterogeneous people.
Introduction
Authors: Allegro Linda , Wood Andrew Grant
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter begins by discussing the significant growth in the increased the number of Latin American migrants to the U.S. Heartland (Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa) since the mid-1990s. While many heartlanders have welcomed the new arrivals by establishing community and religious-based initiatives and various partnerships to accommodate them, others less tolerant have crafted exclusionary and restrictive laws that have marginalized immigrants. Stalled reforms at the federal level have also obstructed nearly all legitimate, documented paths to legal residency and potential citizenship. The chapter then offers a portrait of a peoples and their encounters as they enter the United States into the early part of the twenty-first century by drawing on a selection of leading texts in the study of Latin American immigration. This is followed by a discussion of what should be done about undocumented migration and an overview of the subsequent chapters.
“The Best-Known Woman in the World”
Authors: Dahlquist Marina
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the fate of Pearl White's serials on the Swedish market during the early 1900s. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of censorship on White's films, and American serial films in general, in Sweden. Aside from censorship imposing stringent regulations on crime serials, traditional forms of marketing diluted the impact of the format and upset the chronology for the episodes, undercutting the popularity of the serial queens. Despite all the hype concerning her international following, White was never perceived as a truly big star in Sweden, mainly because only a selected few of her films actually made it to Swedish audiences. Out of her eleven serial films, only The Perils of Pauline and the three Exploits of Elaine serials were screened in Sweden. Furthermore, none of the Swedish copies have survived. The chapter also discusses Pathé Frère's impact on the Swedish film industry.
Fascinations for the Nation
Authors: Johnson Kevin B.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.