How the creative use of pop music in film—think Saturday Night Fever or Apocalypse Now—has shaped and shifted music history since the 1960s
Quick: What movie do you think of when you hear “The Sounds of Silence”? Better yet, what song comes to mind when you think of The Graduate? The link between film and song endures as more than a memory, Nate Patrin suggests with this wide-ranging and energetic book. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movies and pop music, a phenomenon Patrin tracks through the past fifty years, revealing the power of music in movies to move the needle in popular culture.
Rock ’n’ roll, reggae, R&B, jazz, techno, and hip-hop: each had its moment—or many—as music deployed in movies emerged as a form of interpretive commentary, making way for the legitimization of pop and rock music as art forms worthy of serious consideration. These commentaries run the gamut from comedic irony to cheap-thrills excitement to deeply felt drama, all of which Patrin examines in pairings such as American Graffiti and “Do You Want to Dance?”; Saturday Night Fever and “Disco Inferno”; Apocalypse Now and “The End”; Wayne’s World and “Bohemian Rhapsody”; and Jackie Brown and “Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?”.
What gives power to these individual moments, and how have they shaped and shifted music history, recasting source material or even stirring wider interest in previously niche pop genres? As Patrin surveys the scene—musical and cinematic—across the decades, expanding into the deeper origins, wider connections, and echoed histories that come into play, The Needle and the Lens offers a new way of seeing, and hearing, these iconic soundtrack moments.
Nationalizing Blackness uses the music of the 1920s and 1930s to examine Cuban society as it begins to embrace Afrocuban culture. Moore examines the public debate over “degenerate Africanisms” associated with comparas or carnival bands; similar controversies associated with son music; the history of blackface theater shows; the rise of afrocubanismo in the context of anti-imperialist nationalism and revolution against Gerardo Machado; the history of cabaret rumba; an overview of poetry, painting, and music inspired by Afrocuban street culture; and reactions of the black Cuban middle classes to afrocubanismo. He has collected numerous illustrations of early twentieth-century performers in Havana, many included in this book.
Nationalizing Blackness represents one of the first politicized studies of twentieth-century culture in Cuba. It demonstrates how music can function as the center of racial and cultural conflict during the formation of a national identity.
"'All I gotta do is act naturally,' Buck Owens sang, and Pamela Fox knows where the acting comes in. From early hillbilly acts to alt.country, Natural Acts lays bare, with wide-ranging scholarship and incisive analysis, the ideologies of authenticity on which country music rests. As engrossing and useful as any book I know on country music."
---Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
"The first completely mature book of country music historical criticism. It is a deep investigation of country music's power to articulate the displaced pleasures and anxieties of a society wracked by structural change. Historically rigorous, Fox uncovers documents that demonstrate the ongoing power of minstrelsy in barn dance programs across the country past World War II; musically and lyrically astute, she shows how the best honky-tonk music simultaneously critiques the dangers of that setting while seductively luring listeners to those sawdust and alcohol drenched environments; with her ear attuned to the formal complexities of autobiography, Fox directs our attention to the contradictory performance of identity that characterizes the life stories of Reba McEntire, Naomi Judd, Dolly Parton, and others. Natural Acts is provocative, stunning, and engagingly written. Country music studies has come of age."
---Barry Shank, The Ohio State University
Whether found in country barn dances, the plaintive twang of Hank Williams, the glitzy glamour of Dolly Parton, or the country-pop sound of Faith Hill, country music has always maintained an allegiance to its own authenticity. Its specific sounds and images have changed over the past century, but country music has consistently been associated with rusticity, a notion connected to the working class and rooted in ideals like unspoiled rural life and values and humble origins. The music suggests not only uncomplicated musical arrangements and old-time instruments such as the banjo and fiddle, but performers who identify with their everyday fans.
Natural Acts explores the ways that country musicians---particularly women artists---have established a "natural" country identity. Pamela Fox focuses on five revealing moments in country performance: blackface comedy during country music's "Golden Age" of pre-1945 radio and stage programming; the minstrel's "rube" or hillbilly equivalent in the same period; postwar honky-tonk music and culture; the country star memoir or autobiography of the '80s and '90s; and the recent roots phenomenon known as alt.country.
Pamela Fox is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945 and coeditor (with Barbara Ching) of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music.
Photo: Lulu Belle Wiseman and Red Foley, 1930s. Courtesy of Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum.
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in interest in "roots music" and "world music," popular forms that fuse contemporary sounds with traditional vernacular styles. In the 1950s and 1960s, the music industry characterized similar sounds simply as "folk music." Focusing on such music since the 1950s, The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance analyzes the intrinsic contradictions of a commercialized folk culture. Both Rounder Records and the North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance have sought to make folk music widely available, while simultaneously respecting its defining traditions and unique community atmosphere. By tracing the histories of these organizations, Michael F. Scully examines the ongoing controversy surrounding the profitability of folk music. He explores the lively debates about the difficulty of making commercially accessible music, honoring tradition, and remaining artistically relevant, all without "selling out."
In the late 1950s through the 1960s, the folk music revival pervaded the mainstream music industry, with artists such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing historically or politically informed ballads based on musical forms from Appalachia and the South. In the twenty-first century, the revival continues, and it includes a variety of music derived from Cajun, African American, and Mexican traditions, among many others. Even though the mainstream music industry and media largely ignore the term "folk music," a strong allure based on nostalgia, the desire for community, and a sense of exclusiveness augments an enthusiastic following connected by word-of-mouth, numerous festivals, and the Internet. There are more folk festivals now than there were during the original boom of the 1960s, suggesting that music artists, agents, and record label representatives are striking a successful balance between tradition and profitability. Scully combines rich interviews of music executives and practicing folk musicians with valuable personal experience to reveal how this American subculture remains in a "never-ending revival" based on fluid definitions of folk and folk music.
Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. In The Nazi Perpetrator, Paul B. Jaskot fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi perpetrator.
Like their fellow Germans, postwar artists and architects grappled with the Nazi past and the problem of defining the Nazi perpetrator—a problem that was thoroughly entangled with contemporary conservative politics and the explosive issue of former Nazis living in postwar Germany. Beginning with the formative connection between Nazi politics and art during the 1930s, The Nazi Perpetrator traces the dilemma of identifying the perpetrator across the entire postwar period. Jaskot examines key works and episodes from West Germany and, after 1989, reunified Germany, showing how the changing perception of the perpetrator deeply impacted art and architecture, even in cases where artworks and buildings seem to have no obvious relation to the Nazi past. The book also reinterprets important periods in the careers of such major figures as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind.
Combining political history with a close analysis of specific works, The Nazi Perpetrator powerfully demonstrates that the ongoing influence of Nazi Germany after 1945 is much more central to understanding a wide range of modern German art and architecture than cultural historians have previously recognized.
Outlines an exciting new approach to this confluence of art, media, and poetry.
The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants.
In Saper’s analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures—networks, publications, and collective works—give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.“Nobody who has not taken one can imagine the beauty of a walk through Rome by full moon,” wrote Goethe in 1787. Sadly, the imagination is all we have today: in Rome, as in every other modern city, moonlight has been banished, replaced by the twenty-four-hour glow of streetlights in a world that never sleeps. Moonlight, for most of us, is no more.
So James Attlee set out to find it. Nocturne is the record of that journey, a traveler’s tale that takes readers on a dazzling nighttime trek that ranges across continents, from prehistory to the present, and through both the physical world and the realms of art and literature. Attlee attends a Buddhist full-moon ceremony in Japan, meets a moon jellyfish on a beach in Northern France, takes a moonlit hike in the Arizona desert, and experiences a lunar eclipse on New Year’s Eve atop the snowbound Welsh hills. Each locale is illuminated not just by the moonlight he seeks, but by the culture and history that define it. We learn about Mussolini’s pathological fear of moonlight; trace the connections between Caspar David Friedrich, Rudolf Hess, and the Apollo space mission; and meet the inventors of the Moonlight Collector in the American desert, who aim to cure all kinds of ailments with concentrated lunar rays. Svevo and Blake, Whistler and Hokusai, Li Po and Marinetti are all enlisted, as foils, friends, or fellow travelers, on Attlee’s journey.
Pulled by the moon like the tide, Attlee is firmly in a tradition of wandering pilgrims that stretches from Basho to Sebald; like them, he presents our familiar world anew.
A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements
Although “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between 1920 and 1970, uncovering the conflicting intentions that would go on to reshape the future of American domestic life.
Focusing on four primary figures—R. M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Charles and Ray Eames—Nothing Permanent demonstrates how this prolific era of modern architecture in California, rather than constituting a homogenous movement, was propelled by disparate approaches and aims. Exemplified by the twin pillars of Schindler and Neutra and their respective ideological factions, these two groups of architects represent opposing poles of architectural intentionality, embodying divergent views about the dynamic between interior and exterior, the idea of permanence, and the extent to which architects could exercise control over the inhabitants of their structures.
Looking past California modernism’s surface-level idealization in present-day style guides, home decor publications, films, and television shows, Nothing Permanent details the intellectual, aesthetic, and practical debates that lie at the roots of this complex architectural moment. Extracting this period from its diffusion into visual culture, Cronan argues that mid-century architecture in California raised questions about the meaning of architecture and design that remain urgent today.
Although best known as the Garden State, New Jersey could also be called the Church State. The state boasts thousands of houses of worship, with more than one thousand still standing that were built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Frank L. Greenagel has photographed more than six hundred. He has selected two hundred of these historic landmarks for an examination of why they are sited where they are and why they look the way they do.
Greenagel has sought out and included images of not only mainstream Christian churches, but also Jewish synagogues as well as the places of worship of religious groups such as the Moravians, the Church of the Brethren, and the Seventh Day Baptists. The photographs are arranged chronologically within sections on three major early settlement regions of the state ¾ the Hudson River, the Delaware River, and the Raritan Valley. For each building, Greenagel details the date of construction, the cultural, historic, and religious influences that shaped it, the architectural details that distinguish it, and what purpose it currently serves.
Little is known about Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen whose name means “a beautiful woman has come.” She was the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who ushered in the dramatic Amarna Age, and she bore him at least six children. She played a prominent role in political and religious affairs, but after Akhenaten’s death she apparently vanished and was soon forgotten.
Yet Nefertiti remains one of the most famous and enigmatic women who ever lived. Her instantly recognizable face adorns a variety of modern artifacts, from expensive jewelry to cheap postcards, t-shirts, and bags, all over the world. She has appeared on page, stage, screen, and opera. In Britain, one woman has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on plastic surgery in hope of resembling the long-dead royal. This enduring obsession is the result of just one object: the lovely and mysterious Nefertiti bust, created by the sculptor Thutmose and housed in Berlin’s Neues Museum since before World War II.
In Nefertiti’s Face, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley tells the story of the bust, from its origins in a busy workshop of the late Bronze Age to its rediscovery and controversial removal to Europe in 1912 and its present status as one of the world’s most treasured artifacts. This wide-ranging history takes us from the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt to wartime Berlin and engages the latest in Pharaonic scholarship. Tyldesley sheds light on both Nefertiti’s life and her improbable afterlife, in which she became famous simply for being famous.
The admired American painter Winslow Homer rose to national attention during the Civil War. But one of his most important early images remained unknown for a century. The renowned artist is best known for depicting ships and sailors, hunters and fishermen, rural vignettes and coastal scenes. Yet he also created some of the first serious black figures in American art. Near Andersonville (1865–66) is the earliest and least known of these impressive images.
Peter Wood, a leading expert on Homer’s images of blacks, reveals the long-hidden story of this remarkable Civil War painting. His brisk narrative locates the picture in southwest Georgia in August 1864 and provides its military and political context. Wood underscores the agony of the Andersonville prison camp and highlights a huge but little-known cavalry foray ordered by General Sherman as he laid siege to Atlanta. Homer’s image takes viewers “behind enemy lines” to consider the utter failure of “Stoneman’s Raid” from the perspective of an enslaved black Southerner.
By examining the interplay of symbolic elements, Wood reveals a picture pregnant with meaning. He links it to Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign of 1864 and underscores the enduring importance of Homer’s thoughtful black woman. The painter adopted a bottom-up perspective on slavery and emancipation that most scholars needed another century to discover. By integrating art and history, Wood’s provocative study gives us a fresh vantage point on Homer’s early career, the struggle to end slavery, and the dramatic closing years of the Civil War.
Norman Rockwell’s scenes of everyday small-town life are among the most indelible images in all of twentieth-century art. While opinions of Rockwell vary from uncritical admiration to sneering contempt, those who love him and those who dismiss him do agree on one thing: his art embodies a distinctively American style of innocence.
In this sure-to-be controversial book, Richard Halpern argues that this sense of innocence arises from our reluctance—and also Rockwell’s—to acknowledge the often disturbing dimensions of his works. Rockwell’s paintings frequently teem with perverse acts of voyeurism and desire but contrive to keep these acts invisible—or rather, hidden in plain sight, available for unacknowledged pleasure but easily denied by the viewer.
Rockwell emerges in this book, then, as a deviously brilliant artist, a remorseless diagnostician of the innocence in which we bathe ourselves, and a continuing, unexpected influence on contemporary artists. Far from a banal painter of the ordinary, Halpern argues, Rockwell is someone we have not yet dared to see for the complex creature he is: a wholesome pervert, a knowing innocent, and a kitschy genius.
Provocative but judicious, witty but deeply informed, Norman Rockwell is a book rich in suggestive propositions and eye-opening details—one that will change forever the way we think about this American icon and his works.
In the mid-twentieth century, Native artists began to produce work that reflected the accelerating integration of Indian communities into the national mainstream as well as, in many instances, their own experiences beyond Indian reservations as soldiers or students. During this period, a dynamic exchange among Native and non-Native collectors, artists, and writers emerged. Anthes describes the roles of several anthropologists in promoting modern Native art, the treatment of Native American “Primitivism” in the writing of the Jewish American critic and painter Barnett Newman, and the painter Yeffe Kimball’s brazen appropriation of a Native identity. While much attention has been paid to the inspiration Native American culture provided to non-Native modern artists, Anthes reveals a mutual cross-cultural exchange that enriched and transformed the art of both Natives and non-Natives.
Russian painter, explorer, and mystic Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) ranks as one of the twentieth century’s great enigmas. Despite mystery and scandal, he left a deep, if understudied, cultural imprint on Russia, Europe, India, and America. As a painter and set designer Roerich was a key figure in Russian art. He became a major player in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and with Igor Stravinsky he cocreated The Rite of Spring, a landmark work in the emergence of artistic modernity. His art, his adventures, and his peace activism earned the friendship and admiration of such diverse luminaries as Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, Jawaharlal Nehru, Raisa Gorbacheva, and H. P. Lovecraft.
But the artist also had a darker side. Stravinsky once said of Roerich that “he ought to have been a mystic or a spy.” He was certainly the former and close enough to the latter to blur any distinction. His travels to Asia, supposedly motivated by artistic interests and archaeological research, were in fact covert attempts to create a pan-Buddhist state encompassing Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet. His activities in America touched Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s cabinet with scandal and, behind the scenes, affected the course of three US presidential elections.
In his lifetime, Roerich baffled foreign affairs ministries and intelligence services in half a dozen countries. He persuaded thousands that he was a humanitarian and divinely inspired thinker—but convinced just as many that he was a fraud or a madman. His story reads like an epic work of fiction and is all the more remarkable for being true. John McCannon’s engaging and scrupulously researched narrative moves beyond traditional perceptions of Roerich as a saint or a villain to show that he was, in many ways, both in equal measure.
Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.
Thomas Bewick’s (1753–1828) History of British Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. In Nature’s Engraver, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer’s son from Tyneside who became one of Britain’s greatest and most popular engravers. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild—a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.
“A refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick’s woodcuts.”—New York Times
“Uglow’s clear prose sparkles like Bewick’s River Tyne.”—Los Angeles Times
“This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick’s own woodcuts.”—Sunday Telegraph
“A splendid biography. But it becomes an endearing one by the scattered presence of so many of Bewick’s woodcuts.”—Washington Post
“Another triumph for England’s most innovative biographer, and a marvelous treat for fans of Bewick’s beguiling work.”—Kirkus Reviews
Traditional quilts serve many purposes over the course of a useful life. Beginning as a beautiful bed covering, a quilt may later function as a ground cover at picnics until years of wear relegate it to someone's ragbag for scrap uses.
Observing this life cycle led authors John Forrest and Deborah Blincoe to the idea that quilts, like living things, have a natural history that can be studied scientifically. They explore that natural history through an examination of the taxonomy, morphology, behavior, and ecology of quilts in their native environment—the homes of humans who make, use, keep, and bestow them.
The taxonomy proposed by Forrest and Blincoe is rooted in the mechanics of replicating quilts so that it can be used to understand evolutionary and genetic relationships between quilt types. The morphology section anatomizes normal and abnormal physical features of quilts, while the section on conception and birth in the life cycle discusses how the underlying processes of replication intersect with environmental factors to produce tangible objects.
This methodology is applicable to many kinds of crafts and will be of wide interest to students of folklore, anthropology, and art history. Case studies of traditional quilts and their makers in the Catskills and Appalachia add a warm, human dimension to the book.
Essays on the rise of community-focused art projects and anti-monuments in Mexico since the 1980s.
Mexico has long been lauded and studied for its post-revolutionary public art, but recent artistic practices have raised questions about how public art is created and for whom it is intended. In The New Public Art, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, together with a number of scholars, artists, and activists, looks at the rise of community-focused art projects, from collective cinema to off-stage dance and theatre, and the creation of anti-monuments that have redefined what public art is and how people have engaged with it across the country since the 1980s.
The New Public Art investigates the reemergence of collective practices in response to privatization, individualism, and alienating violence. Focusing on the intersection of art, politics, and notions of public participation and belonging, contributors argue that a new, non-state-led understanding of "the public" came into being in Mexico between the mid-1980s and the late 2010s. During this period, community-based public art bore witness to the human costs of abuses of state and economic power while proposing alternative forms of artistic creation, activism, and cultural organization.
Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.
Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.
In the late 1990s Angels in America,Tony Kushner’s epic play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era, toured the country, inspiring protests in a handful of cities while others received it warmly. Why do people fight over some works of art but not others? Not Here, Not Now, Not That! examines a wide range of controversies over films, books, paintings, sculptures, clothing, music, and television in dozens of cities across the country to find out what turns personal offense into public protest.
What Steven J. Tepper discovers is that these protests are always deeply rooted in local concerns. Furthermore, they are essential to the process of working out our differences in a civil society. To explore the local nature of public protests in detail, Tepper analyzes cases in seventy-one cities, including an in-depth look at Atlanta in the late 1990s, finding that debates there over memorials, public artworks, books, and parades served as a way for Atlantans to develop a vision of the future at a time of rapid growth and change.
Eschewing simplistic narratives that reduce public protests to political maneuvering, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! at last provides the social context necessary to fully understand this fascinating phenomenon.
Photographer and filmmaker Nic Nicosia makes pictures. Since the late 1970s, Nicosia has staged and constructed sets, objects, and situations to be photographed rather than to reproduce something that already exists. These conceptual fabrications have ranged from elaborate sets with live actors to dioramas and abstract constructions. Whether his pictures contain a disturbing suburban narrative, or are fabricated by the act of drawing, or are simply created by the use of common objects with dramatic lighting, the familiar thread of Nicosia’s unique vision and sensibility is always present.
Nic Nicosia is the first major publication of the artist’s work and covers his entire oeuvre through 2011. The catalog presents images from all of Nicosia’s major photographic series, including Domestic Dramas, Near (modern) Disasters, The Cast, Life as We Know It, Real Pictures, Love + Lust, Acts, Sex Acts, Untitled Landscapes, 365 SaFe Days, Untitled (drawing), Space Time Light, I See Light, and in the absence of others, as well as stills from the videos Middletown, Moving Picture, Middletown Morning, Cerchi E Quadratti, On Acting America, and 9 1/2 Hours to SaFe. Accompanying the catalog is an overview of Nicosia’s career by Michelle White, an interview with the artist by Sue Graze, and an original short story by Philipp Meyer that powerfully resonates with the sense of wonder and menace in Nicosia’s art.
This biography captures the spirit and the flavor of Ms. Hanks's remarkable life, above all during the eight years in which she led the Endowment. Tracing her childhood in Florida and North Carolina through her achievements as a student leader at Duke University, Straight makes clear her conscious effort to find a path with more scope than the usual marriage-and-a-family when expected of Southern women. Nancy Hanks went to Washington and found a job with the Office of War Mobilization. She later worked with Nelson Rockefeller, who became governor of New York, a Republican party luminary, and vice president under Gerald Ford, in addition to being an heir to one of America's greatest fortunes. Her relationship with Rockefeller was crucial to her personal life, and his conception of government and its role and a lasting influence on her career.
Straight examines Nancy Hanks's leadership of the NEA and takes particular note of the intense debate over the role of government in fostering American artistic expression, an issue with roots running back through the New Deal to the early history of the United States. Nancy Hanks took a strong and activist role in the formulation and administration of a national arts policy, and her accomplishments have left an indelible mark on public support for arts in the United States. Straight, who worked closely with Ms. Hanks and admired her despite frequent policy disagreements, deals honestly with both the successes and failures of her efforts. His biography imparts a sense of the reasons why her many friends felt such loyalty to this complex and gifted woman.
Winner of the Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association
Winner of the Gomory Prize in Business History, American Historical Association and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Winner of the Fraenkel Prize, Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide
Honorable Mention, European Studies Book Award, Council for European Studies
To control information is to control the world. This innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire—and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda.
Information warfare may seem like a new feature of our contemporary digital world. But it was just as crucial a century ago, when the great powers competed to control and expand their empires. In News from Germany, Heidi Tworek uncovers how Germans fought to regulate information at home and used the innovation of wireless technology to magnify their power abroad.
Tworek reveals how for nearly fifty years, across three different political regimes, Germany tried to control world communications—and nearly succeeded. From the turn of the twentieth century, German political and business elites worried that their British and French rivals dominated global news networks. Many Germans even blamed foreign media for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The key to the British and French advantage was their news agencies—companies whose power over the content and distribution of news was arguably greater than that wielded by Google or Facebook today. Communications networks became a crucial battleground for interwar domestic democracy and international influence everywhere from Latin America to East Asia. Imperial leaders, and their Weimar and Nazi successors, nurtured wireless technology to make news from Germany a major source of information across the globe. The Nazi mastery of global propaganda by the 1930s was built on decades of Germany’s obsession with the news.
News from Germany is not a story about Germany alone. It reveals how news became a form of international power and how communications changed the course of history.
In The Networked Wilderness, Matt Cohen examines communications systems in early New England and finds that, surprisingly, struggles over information technology were as important as theology, guns, germs, or steel in shaping the early colonization of North America. Colonists in New England have generally been viewed as immersed in a Protestant culture of piety and alphabetic literacy. At the same time, many scholars have insisted that the culture of the indigenous peoples of the region was a predominantly oral culture. But what if, Cohen posits, we thought about media and technology beyond the terms of orality and literacy?
Reconceptualizing aural and inscribed communication as a spectrum, The Networked Wilderness bridges the gap between the history of the book and Native American systems of communication. Cohen reveals that books, paths, recipes, totems, and animals and their sounds all took on new interactive powers as the English negotiated the well-developed informational trails of the Algonquian East Coast and reported their experiences back to Europe. Native and English encounters forced all parties to think of each other as audiences for any event that might become a kind of "publication."
Using sources ranging from Thomas Morton's Maypole festival to the architecture of today's Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Cohen shows that the era before the printing press came to New England was one of extraordinary fertility for communications systems in America.
The transformation from an undifferentiated public to a surfeit of interest groups has become yet another distinguishing feature of the increasing polarization of American politics. Jill Edy and Patrick Meirick contend that the media has played a key role in this splintering. A Nation Fragmented reveals how the content and character of the public agenda has transformed as the media environment evolved from network television and daily newspapers in the late 1960s to today’s saturated social media world with 200 cable channels.
The authors seek to understand what happened as the public’s sense of shared priorities deteriorated. They consider to what extent our public agenda has “fallen apart” as attention to news has declined, and to what extent we have been “driven apart” by changes in the issue agendas of news. Edy and Meirick also show how public attention is limited and spread too thin except in cases where a highly consistent news agenda can provoke a more focused public agenda.
A Nation Fragmented explores the media’s influence and political power and, ultimately, how contemporary democracy works.
Since 2001, Media Lens has encouraged thousands of readers to challenge the filtered and distorted version of the world provided by major newspapers and broadcasters. The media responses, collected in Newspeak, are an exposé of the arrogance and servility to power of our leading journalists and editors, starring Andrew Marr, Alan Rusbridger, Roger Alton, Jon Snow, Jeremy Bowen and even George Monbiot.
Picking up where the highly acclaimed and successful Guardians of Power (2006) left off, Newspeak is packed with forensic media analysis, revealing the lethal bias in "balanced" reporting. Even the "best" UK media -- the Guardian, the Independent, Channel 4 News and the BBC -- turn out to be cheerleaders for government, business and war.
Alongside an A-Z of BBC propaganda and chapters on Iraq and climate change, Newspeak focuses on the demonisation of Iran and Venezuela, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the myth of impartial reporting and the dark art of smearing dissidents.
Islamic extremism is the dominant security concern of many contemporary governments, spanning the industrialized West to the developing world. Narrative Landmines explores how rumors fit into and extend narrative systems and ideologies, particularly in the context of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and extremist insurgencies. Its concern is to foster a more sophisticated understanding of how oral and digital cultures work alongside economic, diplomatic, and cultural factors that influence the struggles between states and non-state actors in the proverbial battle of hearts and minds. Beyond face-to-face communication, the authors also address the role of new and social media in the creation and spread of rumors.
As narrative forms, rumors are suitable to a wide range of political expression, from citizens, insurgents, and governments alike, and in places as distinct as Singapore, Iraq, and Indonesia—the case studies presented for analysis. The authors make a compelling argument for understanding rumors in these contexts as “narrative IEDs,” low-cost, low-tech weapons that can successfully counter such elaborate and expansive government initiatives as outreach campaigns or strategic communication efforts. While not exactly the same as the advanced technological systems or Improvised Explosive Devices to which they are metaphorically related, narrative IEDs nevertheless operate as weapons that can aid the extremist cause.
The Novel of Human Rights defines a new, dynamic American literary genre. It incorporates key debates within the contemporary human rights movement in the United States, and in turn influences the ideas and rhetoric of that discourse.
In James Dawes’s framing, the novel of human rights takes as its theme a range of atrocities at home and abroad, scrambling the distinction between human rights within and beyond national borders. Some novels critique America’s conception of human rights by pointing out U.S. exploitation of international crises. Other novels endorse an American ethos of individualism and citizenship as the best hope for global equality. Some narratives depict human rights workers as responding to an urgent ethical necessity, while others see only inefficient institutions dedicated to their own survival. Surveying the work of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Nathan Englander, Francisco Goldman, Anthony Marra, and John Edgar Wideman, among others, Dawes finds traces of slave narratives, Holocaust literature, war novels, and expatriate novels, along with earlier traditions of justice writing.
The novel of human rights responds to deep forces within America’s politics, society, and culture, Dawes shows. His illuminating study clarifies many ethical dilemmas of today’s local and global politics and helps us think our way, through them, to a better future. Vibrant and modern, the human rights novel reflects our own time and aspires to shape the world we will leave for those who come after.
Narrative as Communication is the first major treatise on narrative and narrative theory to make use of all the analytic tools developed in the twenty years. Intended as an up-to-date introduction, it carefully defines narrative discourse, distinguishing it from other discourses, and analyzes what it entails by referring to numerous examples spanning a wide range of media and literary works. At the same time, it orients narrative theory in the current debates surrounding the “New Historicism” and postmodern ideology, showing that theories of narrative are necessarily central to any understanding of history.
Not restricted to any single genre, Coste’s text emphasizes the production of narrative meaning in diverse contexts: The Epic of Gilgamesh, a John Ford film classic, French American, and Spanish new fiction, Dante, Shakespeare, the pastoral, the fairy tale, The Communist Manifesto, Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru, a painting by Gustave Moreau. Coste thoroughly and critically examines the usual concepts of voice, character, point of view and narrative syntax, and he develops radical revisions in the notion of fictionality, character, narrative economy and the function of narrative meaning itself. The book is a remarkable synthesis that will likely become a reference for future studies in narratology.For many years now John Clabeaux has been perfecting his technique for teaching New Testament Greek—using his classrooms at St. John’s Seminary College, Harvard Divinity School, and the Pontifical College Josephinum as language laboratories. The comprehensive, meticulous, and user-friendly text NT Greek: A Systems Approach is the fruit of these efforts.
NT Greek is designed to be used both as a classroom text and as a reference manual for those students pursuing degrees in theological and biblical studies. The text includes a Greek index, an English index, a Greek-to-English glossary, verb maps, noun and adjective declension charts, and a list of helpful hints and rules. A digitally mastered CD of Greek recitations comes with every book to assist students with their pronunciations.
New texts from Greek antiquity continue to emerge on scraps of papyrus from the sands of Egypt, not only adding to the surviving corpus of classical and Hellenistic literature, but also occasionally offering a glimpse into how these poems were studied in antiquity. New Literary Papyri from the Michigan Collection: Mythographic Lyric and a Catalogue of Poetic First Lines presents three such new texts: an innovative lyric poem on the Trojan cycle, a scholarly anthology of lyric verses, and a brief but enigmatic third text. Cassandra Borges and C. Michael Sampson offer the original Greek text of these pieces, along with their scholarly commentary, analyzing their features in a variety of contexts—historical, cultural, poetic, mythological, religious, and scholarly.
The fragments collected here are of considerable antiquity (late third to second century BCE) a fact that is significant inasmuch as it places them among the oldest Greek papyri, but all the more so because in this period, a scholarly community was thriving in Ptolemaic Alexandria, the political and cultural capital of Hellenistic Egypt. The fragments bear witness to that scholarly activity: not only is their anthology of poetic verses consistent with other scholarly selections, but the very survival of these texts may well be at least partially indebted to the work of the Alexandrians in studying and propagating Greek literature in Egypt.
This edition supplements the 1970s work of Reinhold Merkelbach and Denys Page. Recent digitizing for the APIS project revealed a previously unsuspected join with other material, however, which alone warrants a new, comprehensive edition and analysis.
The preeminent lyric poet of ancient Greece.
Of the Greek lyric poets, Pindar (ca. 518–438 BC) was “by far the greatest for the magnificence of his inspiration” in Quintilian’s view; Horace judged him “sure to win Apollo’s laurels.” The esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved. Most of the Greek lyric poets come down to us only in bits and pieces, but nearly a quarter of Pindar’s poems survive complete. William H. Race now brings us, in two volumes, a new edition and translation of the four books of victory odes, along with surviving fragments of Pindar’s other poems.
Like Simonides and Bacchylides, Pindar wrote elaborate odes in honor of prize-winning athletes for public performance by singers, dancers, and musicians. His forty-five victory odes celebrate triumphs in athletic contests at the four great Panhellenic festivals: the Olympic, Pythian (at Delphi), Nemean, and Isthmian games. In these complex poems, Pindar commemorates the achievement of athletes and powerful rulers against the backdrop of divine favor, human failure, heroic legend, and the moral ideals of aristocratic Greek society. Readers have long savored them for their rich poetic language and imagery, moral maxims, and vivid portrayals of sacred myths.
Race provides brief introductions to each ode and full explanatory footnotes, offering the reader invaluable guidance to these often difficult poems. His Loeb Pindar also contains a helpfully annotated edition and translation of significant fragments, including hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, maiden songs, and dirges.
Following nature in pursuit of ethics.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.
We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.
The treatises on natural phenomena, Naturales Quaestiones, are collected in Volumes VII and X of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.
In these intimate pages, award-winning Catalan poet Joan Margarit offers a passionate defense of poetry and of the intelligible poem—the well-made text that can provide refuge, wisdom, and consolation. Inspired by Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet, this slender volume explores poetry as vocation, obsession, and partnership between writer and reader, a "road toward inner growth." For Margarit, poetry promises "a clarity that allows us mysteriously to live without the need to forget." This is essential reading for poets young and old, writers, and readers seeking insights into the creative process and "the way both poet and reader can find their own way to face solitude."
This introduction to Norwegian helps students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure and use that knowledge to learn about Norway and Norwegian culture.
Once students acquire the basic units of vocabulary and structure, they will use their knowledge of the language to learn about Norway. Students will learn about the cities of Oslo and Bergen, how to converse when eating in a Norwegian home or restaurant, and about Norwegian schools. Emphasis is also given to travel and communications, as well as the seasons of the year and Norwegian holidays.
The present edition of the text features a short grammar summary, a reference for review to assist in drawing together aspects of the grammar that are presented throughout the text. To aid in developing good pronunciation and intonation habits, as well as to internalize certain items of vocabulary and structure, most chapters contain a practice dialogue for students to practice repeatedly while studying the chapter.
This intermediate-level anthology offers a lively collection of writingsfor students learning Norwegian. Introductions to selected Norwegian authors, vocabulary lists, and maps promote discussions of Norwegian history, culture, geography and literature.
For more than forty years, the Haugen Norwegian–English Dictionary has been regarded as the foremost resource for both learners and professionals using English and Norwegian. With more than 60,000 entries, it is esteemed for its breadth, its copious grammatical detail, and its rich idiomatic examples. In his introduction, Einar Haugen, a revered scholar and teacher of Norwegian to English speakers, provides a concise overview of the history of the language, presents the pronunciation of contemporary Norwegian, and introduces basic grammatical structures, including the inflection of nouns and adjectives and the declension of verbs.
“…a groundbreaking book that will…engage, inform, and connect with present and future teachers and teacher educators.”
---Stephanie Vandrick, Foreword to Narrating Their Lives
The field of TESOL has called attention to the ways that the issues of race and ethnicity, language status and power, and cultural background affect second language learners’ identities and, to some degree, those of teachers. In Narrating Their Lives, Kamhi-Stein examines the process of identity construction of classroom teachers so as to make connections between their personal and professional identities and their instructional practices. To do that, she has selected six autobiographical narratives from teachers who were once part of her TESL 570 (Educational Sociolinguistics) class in the MA TESOL program at California State University, Los Angeles. These six narratives cover a surprisingly wide range of identity issues but also touch on broader instructional themes that are part of teacher education programs.
Because of the reflective nature of the narratives—with the teachers using their stories to better understand how their experiences shape what they do in the classroom—this volume includes provocative chapter-opening and reflective chapter-closing questions. An informative discussion of the autobiographical narrative assignment and the TESL 570 course (including supplemental course readings and assessment criteria) is also included.
Johnson argues that nineteenth-century rhetoric was primarily synthetic, derived from the combination of classical elements and eighteenth-century belletristic and epistemological approaches to theory and practice. She reveals that nineteenth-century rhetoric supported several rhetorical arts, each conceived systematically from a similar theoretical foundation.
In Noise from the Writing Center, Boquet develops a theory of "noise" and excess as an important element of difference between the pedagogy of writing centers and the academy in general. Addressing administrative issues, Boquet strains against the bean-counting anxiety that seems to drive so much of writing center administration. Pedagogically, she urges a more courageous practice, developed via metaphors of music and improvisation, and argues for "noise," excess, and performance as uniquely appropriate to the education of writers and tutors in the center.
Personal, even irreverent in style, Boquet is also theoretically sophisticated, and she draws from an eclectic range of work in academic and popular culture-from Foucault to Attali to Jimi Hendrix. She includes, as well, the voices of writing center tutors with whom she conducted research, and she finds some of her most inspiring moments in the words and work of those tutors.
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