front cover of Birth Control on Main Street
Birth Control on Main Street
Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939
Cathy Moran Hajo
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Unearthing individual stories and statistical records from previously overlooked birth control clinics, Cathy Moran Hajo looks past the rhetoric of the birth control movement to show the relationships, politics, and issues that defined the movement in neighborhoods and cities across the United States. Whereas previous histories have emphasized national trends and glossed over the majority of clinics, Birth Control on Main Street contextualizes individual case studies to add powerful new layers to the existing narratives on abortion, racism, eugenics, and sterilization.

Hajo draws on an original database of more than 600 clinics run by birth control leagues, hospitals, settlement houses, and public health groups to isolate the birth control clinic from the larger narrative of the moment. By revealing how clinics tested, treated, and educated women regarding contraceptives, she shows how clinic operation differed according to the needs and concerns of the districts it served.

Moving thematically through the politicized issues of the birth control movement, Hajo infuses her analysis of the practical and medical issues of the clinics with unique stories of activists who negotiated with community groups to obey local laws and navigated the swirling debates about how birth control centers should be controlled, who should receive care, and how patients should be treated.

[more]

front cover of Main Street and Empire
Main Street and Empire
The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization
Poll, Ryan
Rutgers University Press, 2012
The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town’s centrality to the United States’ identity and imagination.

In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll addresses this need, arguing that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which America’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global scale.

Bringing together a broad selection of texts—from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show to the speeches of William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama—Poll examines how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century. He contends that the dominant small town, despite its innocent, nostalgic appearance, is central to the development of the U.S. empire and global capitalism.

[more]

front cover of Mexico on Main Street
Mexico on Main Street
Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II
Gunckel, Colin
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In the early decades of the twentieth-century, Main Street was the heart of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrant community. It was also the hub for an extensive, largely forgotten film culture that thrived in L.A. during the early days of Hollywood. Drawing from rare archives, including the city’s Spanish-language newspapers, Colin Gunckel vividly demonstrates how this immigrant community pioneered a practice of transnational media convergence, consuming films from Hollywood and Mexico, while also producing fan publications, fiction, criticism, music, and live theatrical events. 
 
Mexico on Main Street locates this film culture at the center of a series of key debates concerning national identity, ethnicity, class, and the role of Mexicans within Hollywood before World War II. As Gunckel shows, the immigrant community’s cultural elite tried to rally the working-class population toward the cause of Mexican nationalism, while Hollywood sought to position them as part of a lucrative transnational Latin American market. Yet ironically, both Hollywood studios and Mexican American cultural elites used the media to present negative depictions of working-class Mexicans, portraying their behaviors as a threat to middle-class respectability. Rather than simply depicting working-class immigrants as pawns of these power players, however, Gunckel reveals their active participation in the era’s film culture.  
 
Gunckel’s innovative approach combines media studies, urban history, and ethnic studies to reconstruct a distinctive, richly layered immigrant film culture. Mexico on Main Street demonstrates how a site-specific study of cultural and ethnic issues challenges our existing conceptions of U.S. film history, Mexican cinema, and the history of Los Angeles. 
 
 
 
[more]

front cover of Nightmare on Main Street
Nightmare on Main Street
Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic
Mark Edmundson
Harvard University Press, 1997

Once we've terrified ourselves reading Anne Rice or Stephen King, watching Halloween or following the O. J. Simpson trial, we can rely on the comfort of our inner child or Robert Bly's bongos, an angel, or even a crystal. In a brilliant assessment of American culture on the eve of the millennium, Mark Edmundson asks why we're determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn--and, at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.

Nightmare on Main Street depicts a culture suffused with the Gothic, not just in novels and films but even in the nonfictive realms of politics and academic theories, TV news and talk shows, various therapies, and discourses on AIDS and the environment. Gothic's first wave, in the 1790s, reflected the truly terrifying events unfolding in revolutionary France. What, Edmundson asks, does the ascendancy of the Gothic in the 1990s tell us about our own day?

And what of another trend, seemingly unrelated--the widespread belief that re-creating oneself is as easy as making a wish? Looking at the world according to Forrest Gump, Edmundson shows how this parallel culture actually works reciprocally with the Gothic.

An unchecked fixation on the Gothic, Edmundson argues, would result in a culture of sadomasochism. Against such a rancorous and dispiriting possibility, he draws on the work of Nietzsche and Shelley, and on the recent creations of Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner, to show how the Gothic and the visionary can come together in persuasive and renovating ways.

[more]

front cover of The Press and Main Street
The Press and Main Street
El Pais--Journalism in Democratic Spain
Juan Luis Cebrian, Translated by Brian Nienhaus
University of Michigan Press, 1990
In a nation that had no tradition of free speech, Juan Luis Cebrián has not only established El País as a model liberal newspaper but also made it the measure of Spanish democracy. The Press and Main Street is a collection of essays originally published in Spanish under the title La Prensa y La Calle: Escritos sobre Periodismo. Juan Luis Cebrián is one of Europe's most respected journalist-publishers. He draws on extensive experience in journalism from the period of the Franco dictatorship to the very recent reforms of Spanish society and her entry into the modern European community. Essay topics range from the complexities of operating a free press to the vagaries of letters to the editor and public opinion. Newly included is a chapter written for this edition that compares the press in the United States with that in Spain. All the essays are well-crafted messages of considerable importance to anyone interested in the press, Spain, or the relationship of politics to journalism.
[more]

front cover of The Shop on Main Street
The Shop on Main Street
Ladislav Grosman
Karolinum Press, 2019
Written by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, The Shop on Main Street is the story that inspired the highly successful Academy Award–winning Czechoslovak film of the same title. Looking at the Holocaust through the eyes of a complicit individual, the narrative follows a good-natured carpenter living in a Slovak town in 1942 who unwittingly becomes a participant in a moral crisis involving the abuse and persecution of Jews. Describing the film adaptation of Ladislav Grosman’s novel, the New York Times declared that it is a “human drama that is a moving manifest of the dark dilemma that confronted all people who were caught as witnesses to Hitler's terrible crime.” The review continues: “‘Is one his brother's keeper?’ is the thundering question the situation asks, and then, ‘Are not all men brothers?’ The answer given is a grim acknowledgement. But the unfolding of the drama is simple, done in casual, homely, humorous terms—until the terrible, heartbreaking resolution of the issue at the end.”
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter