How do towns come into existence? What circumstances determine whether they succeed or fail? In The Colonial Towns of Piedmont North Carolina, author Christopher E. Hendricks looks at one region in eighteenth-century America to explore answers to these questions. He examines the establishment and development of eleven towns in the Piedmont, classifying them into three types: county towns formed by the establishment of government institutions, such as a courthouse; trade towns formed around commercial opportunities; and religious towns such as the three towns developed in Wachovia, a region where Moravians settled. He uses these classifications to tell the stories of how these towns came into being, and how, in their development, they struggled against economic, cultural, and political challenges.
Ultimately, The Colonial Towns of Piedmont North Carolina deepens our understanding of the influence that American towns had on the settlement of the backcountry. Hendricks tells the poignant story of the Moravians’ struggle to maintain their neutral stance during the Revolutionary War, surviving exploitation and brutality from both the Continental Army and the British. The author also integrates the history of Native Americans into this mix of competing forces and shows how they were challenged by—and resisted—the newcomers. He emphasizes the role of individual initiative as well as the impetus of government, specifically courthouses, in establishing towns. By utilizing a variety of rarely examined primary sources, methodological approaches ranging from geographic theory to material culture studies, and a deep examination of local history, Hendricks provides a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of these towns on the frontier.
An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America
The idea that “all men are created equal” is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire-—one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations.
Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown’s fiction, congressional tariff debates, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.–Mexico War and the Yucatán’s Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.The coining of the term “intellectuals” in 1898 coincided with W. E. B. Du Bois’s effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the color line. Du Bois’s ideal of a “higher and broader and more varied human culture” is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that Color and Culture identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed and startlingly new historical perspective on “black intellectuals” as a social category, ranging over a century—from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is “white culture” and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.
The remarkable tradition that this book recaptures, culminating in a cosmopolitan disregard for demands for racial “authenticity” and group solidarity, is strikingly at odds with the identity politics and multicultural movements of our day. In the Du Boisian tradition Ross Posnock identifies a universalism inseparable from the particular and open to ethnicity—an approach with the power to take us beyond the provincialism of postmodern tribalism.
The first ever Temple University adult coloring book, Color Me...Cherry & White contains more than twenty iconic Temple University landmarks. From the magnificent Baptist Temple with its ornate stained glass windows, to Hooter the Owl, the campus food trucks, and the SEPTA rail station, students, parents, and alumni—even future Owls—now have a personal campus canvas to color with markers, pencils or crayons.
The images in Color Me...Cherry & White were created from photographs from the University Photography Department and crafted into pages for amateur artists to beautify. The designs will stoke memories as well as provide stress relief as artists create their own impressions of the campus. Moreover, this keepsake will make the perfect gift and provide memories for the worldwide Temple community.
“Read this book. It explains so much about the moment…Beautiful, heartbreaking work.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
“A deep accounting of how America got to a point where a median white family has 13 times more wealth than the median black family.”
—The Atlantic
“Extraordinary…Baradaran focuses on a part of the American story that’s often ignored: the way African Americans were locked out of the financial engines that create wealth in America.”
—Ezra Klein
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than 1 percent of the total wealth in America. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money seeks to explain the stubborn persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks.
With the civil rights movement in full swing, President Nixon promoted “black capitalism,” a plan to support black banks and minority-owned businesses. But the catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. In this timely and eye-opening account, Baradaran challenges the long-standing belief that black communities could ever really hope to accumulate wealth in a segregated economy.
“Black capitalism has not improved the economic lives of black people, and Baradaran deftly explains the reasons why.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A must read for anyone interested in closing America’s racial wealth gap.”
—Black Perspectives
With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history.
An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.
The vast Colorado River collects water from the highest Rocky Mountain peaks and traverses the widest plateaus, the deepest canyons, and the lowest deserts before emptying into the delta of northern Mexico. This austere land and mighty river resist exploration, settlement, and description. But in the hands of one of the West’s great writers, Frank Waters, the history and lore of its past make irresistible reading and a resounding case for mankind’s respect for the environment.
The new edition tells of conflicts, new alliances, and changing ways of life as Hispanic, European, and African American settlers flooded into a region that was already home to Native Americans. Providing balanced coverage of the entire state's history - from Grand Junction to Lamar and from Trinidad to Craig - the authors also reveal how Denver and its surrounding communities developed and gained influence.
While continuing to elucidate the significant impact of mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism on Colorado, this new edition broadens its coverage. The authors expand their discussion of the twentieth century with several new chapters on the economy, politics, and cultural conflicts of recent years. In addition, they address changes in attitudes toward the natural environment as well as the contributions of women, Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans to the state. Dozens of new illustrations, updated statistics, and an extensive bibliography of the most recent research on Colorado history enhance this edition.
In one comprehensive volume historian Derek Everett traces the establishment, planning, construction, and history of Colorado's state capitol - including a discussion on the importance of restoring and preserving the building for current and future generations of Coloradoans.
In each chapter of this book, you will find some questions, activities, and suggested reading to help you learn more of Colorado's story than we can present here. In these pages. you will discover a high, dry state with rugged natural beauty and an awesome history.
Each chapter is followed by questions, suggested activities, recommended reading, a "Did you know?" trivia section, and recommended websites, movies, and other multimedia that highlight the important concepts covered and lead the reader to more information. Additionally, the book is filled with photographs, making Colorado: The Highest State a fantastic text for middle and high school Colorado history courses.
This book will appeal to at students, non-lawyers involved with water issues, and general readers interested in Colorado’s complex water rights law.
The experiences of Colorado women differed greatly across economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Marital status, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation colored their worlds and others' perceptions and expectations of them. Each chapter addresses the everyday lives of women in a certain period, placing them in historical context, and is followed by vignettes on women's organizations and notable individuals of the time.
Native American, Hispanic, African American, Asian and Anglo women's stories hail from across the state--from the Eastern Plains to the Front Range to the Western Slope--and in their telling a more complete history of Colorado emerges. Colorado Women makes a significant contribution to the discussion of women's presence in Colorado that will be of interest to historians, students, and the general reader interested in Colorado, women's and western history.
Four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mildred McClellan Melville, a member of the Denver Woman’s Press Club, predicted that war would come for the United States and that its long arm would reach into the lives of all Americans. And reach it did. Colorado women from every corner of the state enlisted in the military, joined the workforce, and volunteered on the home front. As military women, they served as nurses and in hundreds of noncombat positions. In defense plants they riveted steel, made bullets, inspected bombs, operated cranes, and stored projectiles. They hosted USO canteens, nursed in civilian hospitals, donated blood, drove Red Cross vehicles, and led scrap drives; and they processed hundreds of thousands of forms and reports. Whether or not they worked outside the home, they wholeheartedly participated in a kaleidoscope of activities to support the war effort.
In Colorado Women in World War II Gail M. Beaton interweaves nearly eighty oral histories—including interviews, historical studies, newspaper accounts, and organizational records—and historical photographs (many from the interviewees themselves) to shed light on women’s participation in the war, exploring the dangers and triumphs they felt, the nature of their work, and the lasting ways in which the war influenced their lives. Beaton offers a new perspective on World War II—views from field hospitals, small steel companies, ammunition plants, college classrooms, and sugar beet fields—giving a rare look at how the war profoundly transformed the women of this state and will be a compelling new resource for readers, scholars, and students interested in Colorado history and women’s roles in World War II.
Hosokawa traces personal histories, such as Bob Sakata's journey from internment in a relocation camp to his founding of a prosperous truck farm; the conviction of three sisters for assisting the escape of German POWs; and the years of initiative and determination behind Toshihiro Kizaki's ownership of Sushi Den, a beloved Denver eatery. In addition to personal stories, the author also relates the larger history of the interweave of cultures in Colorado, from the founding of the Navy's Japanese language school at the University of Colorado to the merging of predominantly white and Japanese American congregations at Arvada's Simpson United Methodist Church.
With the author's long view and sharp eye, Colorado's Japanese Americans creates a storied document of lasting legacy about the Issei and Nisei in Colorado.
From 1840 to 1960 the profoundest claim of Americans who fought the institution of segregation was that the government had no business sorting citizens by the color of their skin. During these years the moral and political attractiveness of the antidiscrimination principle made it the ultimate legal objective of the American civil rights movement. Yet, in the contemporary debate over the politics and constitutional law of race, the vital theme of antidiscrimination has been largely suppressed. Thus a strong line of argument laying down one theoretical basis for the constitutional protection of civil rights has been lost.
Andrew Kull provides us with the previously unwritten history of the color-blind idea. From the arguments of Wendell Phillips and the Garrisonian abolitionists, through the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment and Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy, civil rights advocates have consistently attempted to locate the antidiscrimination principle in the Constitution. The real alternative, embraced by the Supreme Court in 1896, was a constitutional guarantee of reasonable classification. The government, it said, had the power to classify persons by race so long as it acted reasonably; the judiciary would decide what was reasonable.
In our own time, in Brown v. Board of Education and the decisions that followed, the Court nearly avowed the rule of color blindness that civil rights lawyers continued to assert; instead, it veered off for political and tactical reasons, deciding racial cases without stating constitutional principle. The impoverishment of the antidiscrimination theme in the Court's decision prefigured the affirmative action shift in the civil rights agenda. The social upheaval of the 1960s put the color-blind Constitution out of reach for a quartercentury or more; but for the hard choices still to be made in racial policy, the colorblind tradition of civil rights retains both historical and practical significance.
Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.
In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan wrote a brief but immensely readable book entitled The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. The grandson of a white voyageur and a mulatto woman, he was himself a member of the "colored aristocracy." In a setting where the vast majority of African Americans were slaves, and where those who were free generally lived in abject poverty, Clamorgan's "aristocrats" were exceptional people. Wealthy, educated, and articulate, these men and women occupied a "middle ground." Their material advantages removed them from the mass of African Americans, but their race barred them from membership in white society.
The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is both a serious analysis of the social and legal disabilities under which African Americans of all classes labored and a settling of old scores. Somewhat malicious, Clamorgan enjoyed pointing out the foibles of his friends and enemies, but his book had a serious message as well. "He endeavored to convince white Americans that race was not an absolute, that the black community was not a monolith, that class, education, and especially wealth, should count for something."
Despite its fascinating insights into antebellum St. Louis, Clamorgan's book has been virtually ignored since its initial publication. Using deeds, church records, court cases, and other primary sources, Winch reacquaints readers with this important book and establishes its place in the context of African American history. This annotated edition of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis includes an introductory essay on African Americans in St. Louis before the Civil War, as well as an account of the lives of the author and the members of his remarkable family—a family that was truly at the heart of the city's "colored aristocracy" for four generations.
A witty and perceptive commentary on race and class, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis is a remarkable story about a largely forgotten segment of nineteenth-century society. Scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Clamorgan's insights into one of antebellum America's most important communities.
A hidden history connects India and the United States, the world’s two largest democracies. From the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, activists worked across borders of race and nation to push both countries toward achieving their democratic principles. At the heart of this shared struggle, African Americans and Indians forged bonds ranging from statements of sympathy to coordinated acts of solidarity. Within these two groups, certain activists developed a colored cosmopolitanism, a vision of the world that transcended traditional racial distinctions. These men and women agitated for the freedom of the “colored world,” even while challenging the meanings of both color and freedom.
“Slate exhaustively charts the liberation movements of the world’s two largest democracies from the 19th century to the 1960s. There’s more to this connection than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s debt to Mahatma Gandhi, and Slate tells this fascinating tale better than anyone ever has.”
—Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Slate does more than provide a fresh history of the Indian anticolonial movement and the U.S. civil rights movement; his seminal contribution is his development of a nuanced conceptual framework for later historians to apply to studying other transnational social movements.”
—K. K. Hill, Choice
Lester A. Walton was a well-known public figure in his day. An African American journalist, cultural critic, diplomat, and political activist, he was an adviser to presidents and industrialists in a career that spanned the first six decades of the twentieth century. He was a steadfast champion of democracy and lived to see the passage of major civil rights legislation. But one word best describes Walton today: forgotten.
Exploring the contours of this extraordinary life, Susan Curtis seeks to discover why our collective memory of Walton has failed. In a unique narrative of historical research, she recounts a fifteen-year journey, from the streets of Harlem and “The Ville” in St. Louis to scattered archives and obscure public records, as she uncovers the mysterious circumstances surrounding Walton’s disappearance from national consciousness. And despite numerous roadblocks and dead ends in her quest, she tells how she came to know this emblematic citizen of the American Century in surprising ways.
In this unconventional book—a postmodern ghost story, an unprecedented experiment in life-writing—Curtis shares her discoveries as a researcher. Relating her frustrating search through long-overlooked documents to discover this forgotten man, she offers insight into how America’s obsession with race has made Walton’s story unwelcome. She explores the treachery, duplicity, and archival accidents that transformed a man dedicated to the fulfillment of American democracy into a shadowy figure.
Combining anecdotal memories with the investigative instincts of the historian, Curtis embraces the subjectivity of her research to show that what a society forgets or suppresses is just as important as what it includes in its history. Colored Memories is a highly original work that not only introduces readers to a once-influential figure but also invites us to reconsider how we view, understand, and preserve the past.
The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finster’s famous Paradise Gardens, his journey—of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle—is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finster’s contemporaries: the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.
With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation; Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables; and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists’ works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms—one of today’s finest young writers—gets at the heart of what they have in common: the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.
In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.
A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.”
While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.
West of the Four Corners and east of the Colorado River, in southeastern Utah, a unique one-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-foot-high, serrated cliff cuts the sky. Whether viewed as barrier wall or sheltering sanctuary, Comb Ridge has helped define life and culture in this region for thousands of years. Today, the area it crosses is still relatively remote, though an important part of a scenic complex of popular tourist destinations that includes Natural Bridges National Monument and Grand Gulch just to the west, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Lake Powell a bit farther west, Canyonlands National Park to the north, Hovenweep National Monument to the east, and the San Juan River and Monument Valley to the south. Prehistorically Comb Ridge split an intensively used Ancient Puebloan homeland. It later had similar cultural—both spiritual and practical—significance to Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos and played a crucial role in the history of European American settlement. To tell the story of this rock that is unlike any other rock in the world and the diverse people whose lives it has affected, Robert S. McPherson, author of multiple books on Navajos and on the Four Corners region, draws on the findings of a major, federally funded project to research the cultural history of Comb Ridge. He carries the story forward to contention over present and future uses of Comb Ridge and the spectacular country surrounding it.
Loomis provides a clear and disturbing picture of military land-use planning and how it has affected residents in Nevada. He contends that a lack of citizen participation in the development of land-use plans is a weakness in the planning process and that both the military and the citizenry should take an active role to avoid future conflicts.
Bob Black was a member of Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in the 1970s. Black's memoir of his time with the man he called the Chief offers the unique vantage point of a man who traveled and performed extensively with the Father of Bluegrass at a time when the music had opened up to new audiences--and Monroe had become a living legend.
Both role model and taskmaster, Monroe exerted a profound influence on Black and the musicians who have carried on the bluegrass tradition. In addition to Black's one-of-a-kind story, Come Hither to Go Yonder includes complete listing of Black's appearances with Monroe, recollections of the memorable experiences they shared while working together, descriptions of other important musicians and bands, and suggestions for further reading and listening.
Offering a rare perspective on the creative forces that drove one of America's greatest composers and musical innovators, Come Hither to Go Yonder rewards fans of Bill Monroe and bluegrass while offering an insider's view of a crucial time in the music's history.
An enthusiast’s look at the art of physical comedy—now in paperback!
Legendary screen comedian Jerry Lewis once said, "The premise of all comedy is a man in trouble." The films that endeared Lewis and others to us hinged on the physical assault of their hero, the pie in the face or slip on the banana peel that reduced the movie star to the level of the audience. Alan Dale presents a lively and accessible look at slapstick, a form of comedy with roots in the circus and vaudeville that has been refashioned by actors ranging from Buster Keaton to the Marx Brothers, from Katharine Hepburn to Jim Carrey.
Winner of the Theater Library Association’s Special Jury Prize for Distinguished AchievementQuilts bear witness to the American experience. With a history that spans the early republic to the present day, this form of textile art can illuminate many areas of American life, such as immigration and settlement, the development of our nation’s textile industry, and the growth of mass media and marketing. In short, each quilt tells a story that is integral to America’s history.
Comfort and Glory introduces an outstanding collection of American quilts and quilt history documentation, the Winedale Quilt Collection at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. This volume showcases 115 quilts—nearly one-quarter of the Winedale Collection—through stunning color photographs (including details) and essays about each quilt’s history and construction. The selections span more than two hundred years of American quiltmaking and represent a broad range of traditional styles and functions. Utility quilts, some worn or faded, join show quilts, needlework masterpieces, and “best” quilts saved for special occasions. Texas quilts, including those made in or brought to Texas during the nineteenth century, constitute a significant number of the selections. Color photographs of related documents and material culture objects from the Briscoe Center’s collections—quilting templates, a painted bride’s box, sheet music, a homespun dress, a brass sewing bird, and political ephemera, among them—enrich the stories of many of the quilts.
2023 Ray and Pat Browne Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Popular and American Culture, Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)
2023 Ray and Pat Browne Best Edited Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular Culture Award (Honorable Mention), Popular and American Culture Association (PACA) / Popular Culture Association (PCA)
2023 Peter C. Rollins Book Award, Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations (SWPACA)
A revisionist history of women's pivotal roles as creators of and characters in comic books.
The history of comics has centered almost exclusively on men. Comics historians largely describe the medium as one built by men telling tales about male protagonists, neglecting the many ways in which women fought for legitimacy on the page and in publishers’ studios. Despite this male-dominated focus, women played vital roles in the early history of comics. The story of how comic books were born and how they evolved changes dramatically when women like June Tarpé Mills and Lily Renée are placed at the center rather than at the margins of this history, and when characters such as the Black Cat, Patsy Walker, and Señorita Rio are analyzed.
Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality, the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and others. This revisionist history reclaims the forgotten work done by women in the comics industry and reinserts female creators and characters into the canon of comics history.
The modern comic book shop was born in the early 1970s. Its rise was due in large part to Phil Seuling, the entrepreneur whose direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers. Stores could then better customize their offerings and independent publishers could access national distribution. Shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants.
Comic Shop is the first book to trace the history of these cultural icons. Dan Gearino brings us from their origins to the present-day, when the rise of digital platforms and a changing retail landscape have the industry at a crossroads. When the book was first published in 2017, Gearino had spent a year with stores around the country, following how they navigated the business. For this updated and expanded paperback edition, he covers the wild retail landscape of 2017 and 2018, a time that was brutal for stores and rich for comics as an art form.
Along the way he interviews pioneers of comics retailing and other important players, including many women; top creators; and those who continue to push the business in new directions. A revised guide to dozens of the most interesting shops around the United States and Canada is a bonus for fans.
A who’s who of American popular music fills this lively memoir, in which Ray Benson recalls how a Philadelphia Jewish hippie and his bandmates in Asleep at the Wheel turned on generations of rock and country fans to Bob Wills–style Western swing.
A six-foot-seven-inch Jewish hippie from Philadelphia starts a Western swing band in 1970, when country fans hate hippies and Western swing. It sounds like a joke but—more than forty years, twenty-five albums, and ten Grammy Awards later—Asleep at the Wheel is still drawing crowds around the world. The roster of musicians who’ve shared a stage with the Wheel is a who’s who of American popular music—Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, George Strait, Vince Gill, Lyle Lovett, and so many more. And the bandleader who’s brought them all together is the hippie that claimed Bob Wills’s boots: Ray Benson.
In this hugely entertaining memoir, Benson looks back over his life and wild ride with Asleep at the Wheel from the band’s beginning in Paw Paw, West Virginia, through its many years as a Texas institution. He vividly recalls spending decades in a touring band, with all the inevitable ups and downs and changes in personnel, and describes the making of classic albums such as Willie and the Wheel and Tribute to the Music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The ultimate music industry insider, Benson explains better than anyone else how the Wheel got rock hipsters and die-hard country fans to love groovy new-old Western swing. Decades later, they still do.
More than just a commentary on the aesthetics of the genre, this book looks at the evolution and cultural significance of these programs, disputing claims that they are nothing more than harmless entertainment. In the work’s revealing first half, Vicki Abt and Leonard Mustazza uncover the mechanics of the talk-show game. The second half examines the behind-the-scenes economic games and their implications, revealing a web of complex commercial and political interests that influence their production. A detailed description of the corporate players and the revenues they are generating is also provided. The study concludes with suggestions for what we as a culture might do to protect ourselves from its inherent deceptions and misinformation.
Movie trailers—those previews of coming attractions before the start of a feature film—are routinely praised and reviled by moviegoers and film critics alike: "They give away too much of the movie." "They're better than the films." "They only show the spectacular parts." "They lie." "They're the best part of going to the movies." But whether you love them or hate them, trailers always serve their purpose of offering free samples of a film to influence moviegoing decision-making. Indeed, with their inclusion on videotapes, DVDs, and on the Internet, trailers are more widely seen and influential now than at any time in their history.
Starting from the premise that movie trailers can be considered a film genre, this pioneering book explores the genre's conventions and offers a primer for reading the rhetoric of movie trailers. Lisa Kernan identifies three principal rhetorical strategies that structure trailers: appeals to audience interest in film genres, stories, and/or stars. She also analyzes the trailers for twenty-seven popular Hollywood films from the classical, transitional, and contemporary eras, exploring what the rhetorical appeals within these trailers reveal about Hollywood's changing conceptions of the moviegoing audience. Kernan argues that movie trailers constitute a long-standing hybrid of advertising and cinema and, as such, are precursors to today's heavily commercialized cultural forms in which art and marketing become increasingly indistinguishable.
In the summer of 2005, distinguished geographer Yi-Fu Tuan ventured to China to speak at an international architectural conference, returning for the first time to the place he had left as a child sixty-four years before. He traveled from Beijing to Shanghai, addressing college audiences, floating down the Yangtze River on a riverboat, and visiting his former home in Chongqing.
In this enchanting volume, Tuan’s childhood memories and musings on the places encountered during this homecoming are interspersed with new lectures, engaging overarching principles of human geography as well as the changing Chinese landscape. Throughout, Tuan’s interactions with his hosts, with his colleague’s children, and even with a garrulous tour guide, offer insights into one who has spent his life studying place, culture, and self.
At the beginning of his trip, Tuan wondered if he would be a stranger among people who looked like him. By its end, he reevaluates his own self-definition as a hyphenated American and sheds new light on human identity’s complex roots in history, geography, and language.
Yi-Fu Tuan is author of Cosmos and Hearth, Dear Colleague, and Space and Place, all from Minnesota. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.
Pegged pants poodle skirts, record hops, rock ‘n’ roll, soda shops: in the interval between the bombing of Hiroshima and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, these were distinguishing marks of the "typical" postwar teenager-if there was a "typical" teenager. In this richly illustrated account of Youth in postwar Buffalo, William Graebner argues that the so-called Youth culture was really a variety of "disparate subcultures, united by age but in conflict over class, race, ethnicity, and gender." Using scrap books, oral histories, school Yearbooks, and material culture, he shows how Buffalo teenagers were products of diverse and often antagonistic subcultures. The innocuous strains of "Rock Around the Clock" muffled the seething gang loyalties and countercultural influence of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Buffalo’s own "Hound Dog" Lorenz. Racial antipathies once held in check spilled out on Memorial Day, 1956, when white and black Youth clashed on board a take Erie pleasure boat in a "riot" that recast the city’s race relations for decades to come.
While exploring the diversity within Youth subcultures, Graebner examines the ways in which adults—educators, clergy, representatives of the media, and other authorities—sought to contain this generation. The Hi-Teen Club, Buffalo Plan dress code, record hops, graduation ceremonies, film censorship, and restrictions on secret societies and on corner lounging were all forms of social engineering that reinforced social and economic boundaries that were at the heart of the dominant culture. The prevailing adult influence on activities, attitudes, and style served to redirect the "misguided Youth" of the fifties and to obliterate their image from public memory. Although the media still portrays this decade as the golden age of cultural homogeneity, the diversity in musical preferences, hair and clothing styles, and allegiances to disc jockeys suggest the wide diversity of Youth experiences and challenges to adult authority that were part of coming of age in postwar America.
Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.
Coming of Age in the Other America illuminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods—either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means—achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an “identity project”—or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job—to finish school and build a career.
Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed—particularly those who had not developed identity projects—were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students.
Coming of Age in the Other America presents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of “social reproduction”—where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents—is far from inevitable.
In this absorbing memoir, Merrill D. Peterson traces his progress from a young Kansas Republican to a "Left Liberal," Democrat by reconstructing how the New Republic singularly influenced his intellectual development and academic career during some of the most turbulent years in American history—the final years of the Great Depression through World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War. Peterson recalls how, as a young man, he was guided to intellectual maturity by such extraordinary individuals as Max Lerner, Archibald MacLeish, Vincent Sheean, Alfred Kazin, Lewis Mumford, and Malcolm Cowley—all contributors to this important magazine. We look back, with Peterson, and see how their views are inextricably reflected in his own developing worldview.
Peterson was introduced to this liberal weekly by one of his teachers during his senior year of high school (1938-1939). For the next ten years, the magazine served as his principal guide to the politics and culture of the times. Now, at seventy-eight years of age, Peterson revisits the magazine that he read so eagerly during those early, impressionable years. With considerable skill and charm, Peterson weaves together the fresh reading, the history of the country during the 1940s, and his own personal history to give us the heart of the book. In addition, he includes brief essays on Vernon L. Parrington, Lewis Mumford, and Max Lerner, the three American writers and intellectuals he believes had the most influence on him.
Peterson discusses several turning points in his young life, but he focuses primarily on his education and the role the magazine played in it. The book concludes when Peterson, with a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization, accepts his first academic appointment, at Brandeis University, and approaches the publication of his first book. Thus, a critical chapter in his life comes to a close.
World War I is widely considered “the Great War” and World War II, “the Good War.” Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to engage historians and literary scholars searching for an understanding of both the actual war experiences and the modern culture of grief they embody. In Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars Stout argues that poetry, of all the arts, most fully captures and conveys those cultural responses.
While probing the work of such well known war poets as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell, Stout also highlights the impact of the wars on lesser studied, but equally compelling, sources such as the music of Charles Ives and Cole Porter, Aaron Copland and Irving Berlin. She challenges the commonplace belief that war poetry came only from the battlefield and was written only by men by examining the wartime writings of women poets such as Rose Macaulay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. She also challenges the assumption that World War II did not produce poetry of distinction by studying the work of John Ciardi, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized.
A final chapter considers Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem as a culmination and embodiment of the anti-war tradition in 20th-century poetry and music, and speculates on the reasons why, despite their abundance and eloquence, these expressions of grief and opposition to war have effected so little change.Commager on Tocqueville is Henry Steele Commager's masterful interpretation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Using Tocqueville's classic as a vehicle for discussing such contemporary issues as the environment, civil rights, and the military-industrial complex, Commager calls for a new vision of American leadership that trascends nationalism.
In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln called General Henry W. Halleck to Washington, D.C., to take command of all Union armies in the death struggle against the Confederacy. For the next two turbulent years, Halleck was Lincoln's chief war advisor, the man the President deferred to in all military matters. Yet, despite the fact that he was commanding general far longer than his successor, Ulysses S. Grant, he is remembered only as a failed man, ignored by posterity.
In the first comprehensive biography of Halleck, the prize-winning historian John F. Marszalek recreates the life of a man of enormous achievement who bungled his most important mission. When Lincoln summoned him to the nation's capital, Halleck boasted outstanding qualifications as a military theorist, a legal scholar, a brave soldier, and a California entrepreneur. Yet in the thick of battle, he couldn't make essential decisions. Unable to produce victory for the Union forces, he saw his power become subsumed by Grant's emergent leadership, a loss that paved the way for Halleck's path to obscurity.
Harnessing previously unused research, as well as the insights of modern medicine and psychology, Marszalek unearths the seeds of Halleck's fatal wartime indecisiveness in personality traits and health problems. In this brilliant dissection of a rich and disappointed life, we gain new understanding of how the key decisions of the Civil War were taken, as well as insight into the making of effective military leadership.
Commerce in Color exploresthe juncture of consumer culture and race by examining advertising, literary texts, mass culture, and public events in the United States from 1893 to 1933. James C. Davis takes up a remarkable range of subjects—including the crucial role publishers Boni and Liveright played in the marketing of Harlem Renaissance literature, Henry James’s critique of materialism in The American Scene, and the commodification of racialized popular culture in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of anEx-Colored Man—as he argues that racial thinking was central to the emergence of U.S. consumerism and, conversely, that an emerging consumer culture was a key element in the development of racial thinking and the consolidation of racial identity in America. By urging a reassessment of the familiar rubrics of the “culture of consumption” and the “culture of segregation,” Dawson poses new and provocative questions about American culture and social history.
Both an influential literary study and an absorbing historical read, Commerce in Color proves that—in America—advertising, publicity, and the development of the modern economy cannot be understood apart from the question of race.
“A welcome addition to existing scholarship, Davis’s study of the intersection of racial thinking and the emergence of consumer culture makes connections very few scholars have considered.”
—James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts
James C. Davis is Assistant Professor of English at Brooklyn College. The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century traces the major transformation of newspapers from a politically based press to a commercially based press in the nineteenth century. Gerald J. Baldasty argues that broad changes in American society, the national economy, and the newspaper industry brought about this dramatic shift.
Increasingly in the nineteenth century, news became a commodity valued more for its profitablility than for its role in informing or persuading the public on political issues. Newspapers started out as highly partisan adjuncts of political parties. As advertisers replaced political parties as the chief financial support of the press, they influenced newspapers in directing their content toward consumers, especially women. The results were recipes, fiction, contests, and features on everything from sports to fashion alongside more standard news about politics.
Baldasty makes use of nineteenth-century materials—newspapers from throughout the era, manuscript letters from journalists and politicians, journalism and advertising trade publications, government reports—to document the changing role of the press during the period. He identifies three important phases: the partisan newspapers of the Jacksonian era (1825-1835), the transition of the press in the middle of the century, and the influence of commercialization of the news in the last two decades of the century.
For three years while serving as a senior adviser to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce—one of the most powerful committees in Congress—Bruce C. Wolpe kept a diary, a senior staffer’s look at how committees develop and promote legislation. With its insider’s view of the rough-and-tumble politics of cap-and-trade, healthcare reform, tobacco, oversight, and the debt ceiling agreement, The Committee uniquely melds the art of politics and policymaking with the theory and literature of political science. The authors engage with the important questions that political science asks about committee power, partisanship, and the strategies used to build winning policy coalitions both in the Committee and on the floor of the House. In this new edition, the authors revisit the relationship between the executive and Congress in the wake of the sweeping changes wrought by the Trump administration, as well as thoughts about how that relationship will change again as President Biden faces a 117th Congress that is strikingly similar to Obama’s 111th. The insider politics and strategies about moving legislation in Congress, from internal and external coalition building to a chairman’s role in framing policy narratives, will captivate both novice and die-hard readers of politics.
The Commodification of Childhood begins with the publication of the children’s wear industry’s first trade journal, The Infants’ Department, in 1917 and extends into the early 1960s, by which time the changes Cook chronicles were largely complete. Analyzing trade journals and other documentary sources, Cook shows how the industry created a market by developing and promulgating new understandings of the “nature,” needs, and motivations of the child consumer. He discusses various ways that discursive constructions of the consuming child were made material: in the creation of separate children’s clothing departments, in their segmentation and layout by age and gender gradations (such as infant, toddler, boys, girls, tweens, and teens), in merchants’ treatment of children as individuals on the retail floor, and in displays designed to appeal directly to children. Ultimately, The Commodification of Childhood provides a compelling argument that any consideration of “the child” must necessarily take into account how childhood came to be understood through, and structured by, a market idiom.
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