The concept of “un-Americanism,” so vital to the HUAC crusade of the 1940s and 1950s, was resoundingly revived in the emotional rhetoric that followed the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today’s political and cultural climate makes it more crucial than ever to come to terms with the consequences of this earlier period of repression and with the contested claims of Americanism that it generated.
“Un-American” Hollywood reopens the intense critical debate on the blacklist era and on the aesthetic and political work of the Hollywood Left. In a series of fresh case studies focusing on contexts of production and reception, the contributors offer exciting and original perspectives on the role of progressive politics within a capitalist media industry.
Original essays scrutinize the work of individual practitioners, such as Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Edward Dmytryk, and examine key films, including The Robe, Christ in Concrete, The House I Live In, The Lawless, The Naked City, The Prowler, Body and Soul, and FTA.
During the Cold War, Ellis Island no longer served as the largest port of entry for immigrants, but as a prison for holding aliens the state wished to deport. The government criminalized those it considered un-assimilable (from left-wing intellectuals and black radicals to racialized migrant laborers) through the denial, annulment, and curtailment of citizenship and its rights. The island, ceasing to represent the iconic ideal of immigrant America, came to symbolize its very limits.
Unbecoming Americans sets out to recover the shadow narratives of un-American writers forged out of the racial and political limits of citizenship. In this collection of Afro-Caribbean, Filipino, and African American writers—C.L.R. James, Carlos Bulosan, Claudia Jones, and Richard Wright—Joseph Keith examines how they used their exclusion from the nation, a condition he terms “alienage,” as a standpoint from which to imagine alternative global solidarities and to interrogate the contradictions of the United States as a country, a republic, and an empire at the dawn of the "American Century.”
Building on scholarship linking the forms of the novel to those of the nation, the book explores how these writers employed alternative aesthetic forms, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship. Ultimately they produced a vital counter-discourse of freedom in opposition to the new formations of empire emerging in the years after World War II, forms that continue to shape our world today.
In An Uncertain Cure, Cassandra White goes deep into the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro to give a riveting account of the contemporary leprosy experience among poor and working class Brazilians. In this ethnographic treatment of leprosy sufferers, White exposes the web of historical, socioeconomic, religious, and political forces that complicate the path to wellness and perpetuate high rates of infection. Drawing on nearly ten years of research, White shows how anthropological research can contribute to more effective treatment of chronic infectious diseases around the world.
Sergei Konenkov was one of this century's most distinguished Russian artists. A celebrated sculptor, he was a leading figure of the young Soviet art establishment in the early 1920s. After spending over twenty years in the United States, he returned to the Soviet Union in 1945 to become a respected member of the Soviet art world. The mentor to an entire generation of Soviet sculptors, he was renowned for his personal charisma and artistic versatility. This collection of essays, interviews, and personal reminiscences is the first appraisal of his work and life published outside of Russia.
The contributors view Konenkov’s work within a variety of cultural, artistic, and philosophical contexts. With particular attention to his awareness of both indigenous Russian traditions and European innovations, they trace the many stages of his artistic development as he explored and experimented with techniques borrowed from Realism, Symbolism, salon portraiture, African wood carving, Socialist Realism, and Surrealism. The many different historical sources that inspired Konenkov’s artistic expression, from Orthodox Christianity and the folklore of the Russian peasantry to the Egyptian pyramids and pre-classical antiquity are also discussed. The contributors also explore the relationship of Konenkov's life and ideology to art, and the effects of expatriation on creativity.
Illustrated with dozens of photographs of Konenkov’s art, this study of one of the most enigmatic and fascinating artists of the modern period will accompany an exhibition at The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.
In the postwar era, American urban fiction is dominated by the imagery of containment. Across the fictional landscape, the city is divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence, and set off from the safety of equally contained suburbs. Mean and dangerous, the city can only be navigated by a solitary expert, alienated and male. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler offers a critique of this familiar story-evident in the noir. narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote, and others —and challenges its link to the postwar city.
Discussing film, short stories, and novels from a cross-section of American cities, Wheeler integrates these stories of containment into a shared pattern and reads them across a broad spectrum of famous and forgotten works by men and women of various ethnic and literary traditions to reveal a larger vision of postwar America. Knowing that containment is never the entire story, that diversity or trauma always shows itself, she shows how the uncontained has shaped the historical moment. Aware that liberating counterstories do get told, she places them in dialogue with those of the alienated man, the war veteran, Beat hipster, noir detective, and ironic suburbanite — in historical context — and revives the idea of urban space as a place of openness, thereby challenging a literary containment of racial difference, gender, and sexuality. By reading Paule Marshall in tandem with Philip Roth, Wheeler explores the relationships between adjacent neighborhoods and reconnects separate literary and geographic areas. By bringing Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction, Hubert Selby's cult novels, or the work of John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks's, Jo Sinclair, and many others to bear on more canonical texts, she offers a more complete understanding of this period of American fiction — one that points toward a city that is open and inclusive.
Uncontained suggests that while decline, division, and decay form a major part of the story of mid-century urban America, the postwar city also represents much of what is best about American life. Rather than reproducing the containment of culture, Wheeler places together the wildly disparate to show how we move beyond containment.
In the postwar era, American urban fiction is dominated by the imagery of containment. Across the fictional landscape, the city is divided into segregated zones, marked by the threat of inevitable violence, and set off from the safety of equally contained suburbs. Mean and dangerous, the city can only be navigated by a solitary expert, alienated and male. In Uncontained, Elizabeth A. Wheeler offers a critique of this familiar story-evident in the noir. narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote, and others —and challenges its link to the postwar city.
Discussing film, short stories, and novels from a cross-section of American cities, Wheeler integrates these stories of containment into a shared pattern and reads them across a broad spectrum of famous and forgotten works by men and women of various ethnic and literary traditions to reveal a larger vision of postwar America. Knowing that containment is never the entire story, that diversity or trauma always shows itself, she shows how the uncontained has shaped the historical moment. Aware that liberating counterstories do get told, she places them in dialogue with those of the alienated man, the war veteran, Beat hipster, noir detective, and ironic suburbanite — in historical context — and revives the idea of urban space as a place of openness, thereby challenging a literary containment of racial difference, gender, and sexuality. By reading Paule Marshall in tandem with Philip Roth, Wheeler explores the relationships between adjacent neighborhoods and reconnects separate literary and geographic areas. By bringing Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp fiction, Hubert Selby's cult novels, or the work of John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, Chester Himes, Gwendolyn Brooks's, Jo Sinclair, and many others to bear on more canonical texts, she offers a more complete understanding of this period of American fiction — one that points toward a city that is open and inclusive.
Uncontained suggests that while decline, division, and decay form a major part of the story of mid-century urban America, the postwar city also represents much of what is best about American life. Rather than reproducing the containment of culture, Wheeler places together the wildly disparate to show how we move beyond containment.
Undead Science examines the story of cold fusion, one of the most publicized scientific controversies of the late twentieth century. In 1989 two Utah-based “discoverers” claimed to have developed an electrochemical process that produced more energy than was required to initiate the process. Finding no other explanation, the researchers described their findings as some kind of nuclear reaction. If they were correct, an important new energy source would have been found. Objections surfaced quickly, and in the year that followed, hundreds of scientists worldwide attempted to reproduce these results. Most, though not all, failed, and the controversy became increasingly antagonistic. By 1990, general scientific opinion favored the skeptics and experimental work went into a steep decline. Nevertheless, many scientists continue to do research in what Bart Simon calls this “undead science.”
Simon argues that in spite of widespread skepticism in the scientific community, there has been a continued effort to make sense of the controversial phenomenon. Researchers in well-respected laboratories continue to produce new and rigorous work. In this manner, cold fusion research continues to exist long after the controversy has subsided, even though the existence of cold fusion is circumscribed by the widespread belief that the phenomenon is not real.
The survival of cold fusion signals the need for a more complex understanding of the social dynamics of scientific knowledge making, the boundaries between experts, intermediaries, and the lay public, and the conceptualization of failure in the history of science and technology.
Did our ancestors live in tropical forests? Although we see the rainforest as a bountiful environment teeming with life forms, most anthropologists and archaeologists have long viewed these areas as too harsh for human occupation during the pre-agricultural stages of hominid development.
Under the Canopy turns conventional wisdom on its head by providing a well-documented, geographically diverse overview of Stone Age sites in the wet tropics. New research indicates that, as humanity and its precursors increased their geographical and ecological ranges, rainforests were settled at a much earlier period than had previously been thought.
Featuring the work of leading scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Malaysia, Panama, Spain, and the United States, Under the Canopy creates a new niche in paleolithic studies: the archaeology of tropical rainforests. This book provides the first synthesis of archaeological research in early foraging sites across the rainforest zone, and indicates that tropical forests could harbor important clues to human evolution, origins of modern behavior, cultural diversity, and human impact on tropical ecosystems.
Every year, about forty million Americans require surgery. Few truly understand what happens to them during the procedure-especially what the anesthesiologist does to ensure their survival and well being. An anesthesiologist disarms your entire nervous system with the most effective drugs for your body chemistry; keeps you alive while you're subjected to manipulations that would otherwise kill you; and ensures your safe return to consciousness. Yet despite their crucial role, anesthesiologists are often the unseen doctors. Under the Mask, written by a compassionate practitioner, demystifies the surgical process with detailed information that will make you a better-informed consumer.
Part One describes the development and current scope of anesthesiology, the medications and techniques used, and what the anesthesiologist does both in and outside the operating room. It explains your-the patient's- rights and advises you how to use the preoperative consultation with the anesthesiologist to your best advantage, specifying what information you need provide and what questions you should ask.
Part Two details the most common surgical and diagnostic procedures requiring anesthesia or conscious sedation. Using clear language, it explains each procedure, the possible risks, and the choices to make if there is more than one option. It also covers the anesthesiologist's crucial role in controlling pain caused by chronic conditions. The last chapter describes the newest anesthetic and pain control techniques available.
The author also helps you understand anesthesiology within the managed care system and explains what you can expect and what to do if you aren't getting what you need. This book enables you to make informed decisions regarding surgical anesthesia and subsequent pain control within the managed care system to protect your well-being and hasten your recovery.Self-help groups have encountered fierce criticism as places where individuals join to share personal problems and to engage in therapeutic intervention without the aid of skilled professionals. These groups have flourished since the 1970s and continue to serve more people than professional therapy.
Yet these groups have been criticized as fostering a culture of whiners and victims, and not using professional help as needed. Thomasina Jo Borkman debunks this commonly held assessment, and also examines the reasons for these groups’ enduring popularity since the 1960s—more people attend these meetings (word?) than see professional therapists. What accounts for their success and popularity?
Understanding Self-Help / Mutual-Aid Groups is the first book to describe three stages of individual and group evolution that is part of this organization’s very structure; it also reconceptualizes participants’ interactions with professionals. The group as a whole, Borkman posits, draws on the life experiences of its membes to foster nurturing, support, and transformation through a “circle of sharing.” Groups create more positive and less stigmatizing “meaning perspectives” of the members’ problems than is available from professionals or lay folk culture.
Carolina Maria de Jesus' book, Quarto de Despejo (The Trash Room), depicted the harsh life of the slums, but it also spoke of the author's pride in her blackness, her high moral standards, and her patriotism. More than a million copies of her diary are believed to have been sold worldwide. Yet many Brazilians refused to believe that someone like de Jesus could have written such a diary, with its complicated words (some of them misused) and often lyrical phrasing as she discussed world events. Doubters prefer to believe the book was either written by Audáulio Dantas, the enterprising newspaper reporter who discovered her, or that Dantas rewrote it so substantially that her book is a fraud. With the cooperation of de Jesus' daughter, recent research shows that although Dantas deleted considerable portions of the diary (as well as a second one), every word was de Jesus'.
But Dantas did "create" a different Carolina from the woman who coped with her harsh life by putting things down on paper. This book sets the record straight by providing detailed translations of de Jesus' unedited diaries and explains why Brazilian elites were motivated to obscure her true personality and present her as something she was not. It is not only about the writer but about Brazil as recorded by her sarcastic pen. The diary entries in this book span from 1958 to 1966, five years beyond text previously known to exist. They show de Jesus as she was, preserving her Joycean stream-of-consciousness language and her pithy characterizations.
Unfamiliar Relations restores the family and its many forms and meanings to a central place in the history of South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
In her incisive introduction, Indrani Chatterjee argues that the recent wealth of scholarship on ethnicity, sexuality, gender, imperialism, and patriarchy in South Asia during the colonial period often overlooks careful historical analysis of the highly contested concept of family. Together, the essays in this book demolish "family" as an abstract concept in South Asian colonial history, demonstrating its exceedingly different meanings across temporal and geographical space.
The scholarship in this volume reveals a far more complex set of dynamics than a simple binary between indigenous and colonial forms and structures. It approaches this study from the pre-colonial period on, rather than backwards as has been the case with previous scholarship. Topics include a British colonial officer who married a Mughal noblewoman and converted to Islam around the turn of the nineteenth century, the role gossip and taboo play in the formation of Indian family history, and an analysis of social relations in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands.
In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened its doors, igniting a controversy still burning in the art world. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum’s arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it, Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for “controversial” art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict and charges of commercialization.
The contributors to this volume use the Sensation exhibition as a stepping-stone to analyze larger questions such as the authority the government has to withhold funds, various interpretations of the First Amendment, how to respect divergent cultural and religious values; and the economic stake of museums and dealers in art. In their articles—written expressly for this volume, and spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art—the contributors consider issues at the center of arts policy. They propose various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts.
In September 1999, Sensation, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, opened its doors, igniting a controversy still burning in the art world. This collection of cutting-edge art from the Saatchi collection in England, and the museum’s arrangements with Charles Saatchi to finance the show, so offended New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he attempted to shut the museum down by withholding city funds that are crucially needed by that institution. Only a legal ruling prevented him from doing so. Like the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition before it, Sensation once again raises questions about public spending for “controversial” art, but with the added dimension of religious conflict and charges of commercialization.
The contributors to this volume use the Sensation exhibition as a stepping-stone to analyze larger questions such as the authority the government has to withhold funds, various interpretations of the First Amendment, how to respect divergent cultural and religious values; and the economic stake of museums and dealers in art. In their articles—written expressly for this volume, and spanning the disciplines of law, cultural studies, public policy, and art—the contributors consider issues at the center of arts policy. They propose various legal strategies, curatorial practices, and standards of doing business intended to serve the public interest in the arts.
The deep oceans are the last great frontier remaining on Earth. Humans have conquered the vast wilderness of the terrestrial surface, from the searing deserts and dark forests of the tropics to the icy polar regions. Today, anyone with enough ambition and money can travel upriver into the heart of the Borneo jungle, climb Mount Everest, or spend the night at the South Pole. But the oceans beyond the continental shelves remain forbidding, beyond the reach of science, adventurism, and commerce.
Not long ago, scientists viewed the ocean floor as a vast, featureless plain, an ancient repository of detritus eroded from the surface of an unchanging Earth. Light never reached the seemingly lifeless depths. The ocean basins were only of marginal scholarly interest. This all changed with the Herculean quest to discover what lay on the world's ocean floor—a quest that inspired the continental drift-plate tectonics revolution and overturned prevailing scientific notions of how the Earth’s surface was created, rearranged, and destroyed.
Upheaval from the Abyss spans a 130-year period, beginning with the early, backbreaking efforts to map the depths during the age of sail; continuing with improvements in research methods spurred by maritime disaster and war; and culminating in the publication of the first map of the world’s ocean floor in 1977. The author brings this tale to life by weaving through it the personalities of the scientists-explorers who struggled to see the face of the deep, and reveals not only the facts of how the ocean floor was mapped, but also the human dimensions of what the scientists experienced and felt while in the process.
The recent riots in Los Angeles brought the urban crisis back to the center of public policy debates in Washington, D.C., and in urban areas throughout the United States. The contributors to this volume examine the major policy issues--race, housing, transportation, poverty, the changing environment, the effects of the global economy--confronting contemporary American cities.
Raymond A. Mohl begins with an extended discussion of the origins, evolution, and current state of Federal involvement in urban centers. Michael B. Katz follows with an insightful look at poverty in turn-of-the-century New York and the attempts to ameliorate the desperate plight of the poor during this period of rapid economic growth. Arnold R. Hirsch, Mohl, and David R. Goldfield then pursue different facets of the racial dilemma confronting American cities. Hirsch discusses historical dimensions of residential segregation and public policy, while Mohl uses Overtown, Miami, as a case study of the social impact of the construction of interstate highways in urban communities. David Goldfield explores the political ramifications and incongruities of contemporary urban race relations.
Finally, Carl Abbott and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., examine the impact of global economic developments and the environmental implications of past policy choices. Collectively, the authors show us where we have been, some of the needs that must be addressed, and the urban policy alternatives we face.
U.S.-China relations became increasingly important and complex in the twentieth century. While economic, political, and military interactions all grew over time, the most dramatic expansion took place in educational exchange, turning it into the strongest tie between the two nations. By the end of the 1940s, tens of thousands of Chinese and American students and scholars had crisscrossed the Pacific, leaving indelible marks on both societies. Although all exchange programs were terminated during the cold war, the two nations reemerged as top partners within a decade after the reestablishment of diplomatic relations.
Approaching U.S.-China relations from a unique and usually overlooked perspective, Hongshan Li reveals that both the drastic expansion and complete termination of educational ties between the two nations in the first half of the twentieth century were largely the results of direct and deep intervention from the American and Chinese governments. Benefiting from government support and collaboration, educational exchange succeeded in diffusing knowledge and improving mutual understanding between the two peoples across the divide of civilizations. However, the visible hand of government also proved to be most destructive to the development of healthy intercultural relations when educational interactions were treated merely as an instrument for crisis management.
Winner of the 2008 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities
Utopia. New Jersey. For most people—even the most satisfied New Jersey residents—these words hardly belong in the same sentence. Yet, unbeknown to many, history shows that the state has been a favorite location for utopian experiments for more than a century. Thanks to its location between New York and Philadelphia and its affordable land, it became an ideal proving ground where philosophical and philanthropical organizations and individuals could test their utopian theories.
In this intriguing look at this little-known side of New Jersey, Perdita Buchan explores eight of these communities. Adopting a wide definition of the term utopia—broadening it to include experimental living arrangements with a variety of missions—Buchan explains that what the founders of each of these colonies had in common was the goal of improving life, at least as they saw it.
In every other way, the communities varied greatly, ranging from a cooperative colony in Englewood founded by Upton Sinclair, to an anarchist village in Piscataway centered on an educational experiment, to the fascinating Physical Culture City in Spotswood, where drugs, tobacco, and corsets were banned, but where nudity was widespread.
Despite their grand intentions, all but one of the utopias—a single-tax colony in Berkeley Heights—failed to survive. But Buchan shows how each of them left a legacy of much more than the buildings or street names that remain today—legacies that are inspiring, surprising, and often outright quirky.
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