Results by title
1861 books match the query 'Social life and customs' and 173 start with a
Arguing it Out
Discussion in Twelfth-Century ByzantiumAveril Cameron
Central European University Press, 2016
Aristocracy in America
From the Sketch-Book of a German NoblemanFrancis J. Grund, edited with an introduction by Armin Mattes
University of Missouri Press, 2018
Francis J. Grund, a German emigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including this fictional, satiric travel memoir in response to Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America. Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund’s dynamic engagement in American political life, and brings to light many of Grund’s reflections on American social and political life previously published only in German. Mattes shows how Grund’s work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States.
Aristocrats of Color
The Black Elite, 1880–1920Willard B. Gatewood
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Every American city had a small, self-aware, and active black elite, who felt it was their duty to set the standard for the less fortunate members of their race and to lead their communities by example. Rank within this black upper class rested on such issues as the status of one’s forebears as either house servants or field hands, the darkness of one’s skin, and the level of one’s manners and education.
Professor Gatewood’s study examines this class of African Americans by looking at the genealogies and occupations of specific families and individuals throughout the United States and their roles in their various communities. The resulting narrative is a full and illuminating account of a most influential segment of the African-American population. It explores fully the distinctive background, prestige, attitudes, behavior, power, and culture of this class. The Black Community Studies series from the University of Arkansas Press, edited by Professor Gatewood, continues to examine many of the same themes first explored in this important study.
Arkansas in Ink
Gunslingers, Ghosts, and Other Graphic TalesGuy Lancaster
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2014
Arkansas/Arkansaw
How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a StateBrooks Blevins
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Winner, 2011 Ragsdale Award
Army of Hope, Army of Alienation
Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War GermanyJohn P. Hawkins
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.
Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make soldier and family life more bearable.
In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and thought of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
Arresting Dress
Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San FranciscoClare Sears
Duke University Press, 2015
Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States
DiMaggio, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes
Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the PresentBy Mary Strong
University of Texas Press, 2012
From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society.
In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.
Artful Lives
The Francis Watts Lee Family and Their TimesPatricia J. Fanning
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee's daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier's most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age.
A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who formed Boston's bohemia. He married twice, first Agnes Rand, an award-winning poet and children's book author, and later, after their divorce, Marion Lewis Chamberlain, a librarian and MIT-trained architect. Francis and Agnes's eldest daughter, Peggy, who was so integral to the work of pioneer Pictorialists, died at age seven of juvenile diabetes. Her sister, Alice, who lost her hearing in infancy, became a wood carver and sculptor.
Utilizing previously unknown family archives and institutional sources, Fanning traces the Lee family's story in the context of major artistic, political, social, and religious trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and Aestheticism, while also showing how their experiences reflected the national culture's evolving conceptions of family, gender, childhood, medicine, deaf education, and mourning. This richly drawn and gracefully written account of one family informs our understanding of this vibrant era, in Boston and well beyond.
Arts in Earnest
North Carolina FolklifeDaniel W. Patterson and Charles G. Zugg, III, eds.
Duke University Press, 1990
Personal interviews are an important element in the book. Laura Lee, an elderly black woman from Chatham County, describes the quilts she made from funeral flower ribbons; witnesses and friends each remember varying details of the Duke University football player who single-handedly vanquished a gang of would-be muggers; Clyde Jones leads a safari through his backyard, which is filled with animals made of wood and cement that represent nontraditional folk art; the songs and sermon of a Primitive Baptist service flow together as one—“it tills you up all over”; Durham bluesman Willie Trice, one of a handful of Durham musicians who recorded in the 1930s and early 1940s, remembers when the active tobacco warehouses offered ready audiences—“They’d tip us a heap of change to play some music”; and Goldsboro tobacco auctioneer H. L. “Speed” Riggs chants 460 words per minute, five to six times faster than a normal conversational rate.
As Others See Chicago
Impressions of Visitors, 1673-1933Bessie Louise Pierce
University of Chicago Press, 2004
First published in 1933 by the University of Chicago Press to mark the occasion of the Century of Progress Exhibition, As Others See Chicago consists of writings culled from over a thousand men and women who visited the city and commented on the best and worst it had to offer, from the skyscrapers to the stockyards. Originally compiled by Bessie Louise Pierce, the first major historian of Chicago, and featuring her own incisive commentary, the volume brings together the impressions of visitors to Chicago over two and a half centuries, from the early years of Westward Expansion to the height of the Great Depression. In addition to writings from better known personalities such as Rudyard Kipling and Waldo Frank, the book collects the opinions of missionaries, aristocrats, journalists, and politicians—observers who were perfectly placed to comment on the development of the city, its inhabitants, and well known events that would one day define Chicago history, such as the Great Fire of 1871 and the 1893 World's Fair.
Taking us back to a time when Chicago was "more astonishing than the wildest visions of the most vagrant imaginations," As Others See Chicago offers an enthralling portrait of an enduring American metropolis.
Asbury Park's Glory Days
The Story of an American ResortPike, Helen-Chantal
Rutgers University Press, 2007
In Asbury Park's Glory Days, award-winning author Helen-Chantal Pike chronicles the city's heyday-the ninety-year period between 1890 and 1980. Pike illuminates the historical conditions contributing to the town's cycle of booms and recessions. She investigates the factors that influenced these peaks, such as location, lodging, dining, nightlife, merchandising, and immigration, and how and why millions of people spent their leisure time within this one-square-mile boundary on the northern coast of the state. Pike also includes an epilogue describing recent attempts to resurrect this once-vibrant city.
Aspiring in Later Life
Movements across Time, Space, and GenerationsMegha Amrith
Rutgers University Press, 2023
This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
Download the open access book here.
At Ansha's
Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in MozambiqueDaria Trentini
Rutgers University Press, 2021
At Pyramid Lake
Bernard Mergen
University of Nevada Press, 2014
For the Paiute, it was a spiritual center that provided life-sustaining resources, such as the cui-ui, a fish unique to the lake and now endangered. For the ranchers and farmers who settled on tribal lands, the waters that flowed into it were necessary to raise cattle and crops. Mergen tells how these competing interests have interacted with the lake and with each other, from the Paiute War of 1860 to the present. The lake’s very existence was threatened by dams and water diversion; it was saved by tribal claims, favorable court decisions, improved water laws, and the rise of environmentalism.
At Pyramid Lake is about more than Indians and water wars, however. It is the story of railroads on the reservation and the role of federal, state, and private groups interested in sportfishing. It is about scientists, artists, and tourists who were captivated by the lake’s beauty. Finally, it is also a story of the lake as a place of spiritual renewal and celebration. Mergen grew up near its shores in the 1940s and returned frequently through the years. In this cultural history, he combines his personal remembrances with other source material, including novels, poetry, newspaper and magazine journalism, unpublished manuscripts, and private conversations, to paint a fascinating portrait of one of Nevada’s natural wonders.
At the Border of Empires
The Tohono O'odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880-1934Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Beginning in the 1880s, the US government implemented programs to eliminate “vice” among the Tohono O’odham and to encourage the morals of the majority culture as the basis of a process of “Americanization.” During the next fifty years, tribal norms interacted with—sometimes conflicting with and sometimes reinforcing—those of the larger society in ways that significantly shaped both government policy and tribal experience. This book examines the mediation between cultures, the officials who sometimes developed policies based on personal beliefs and gender biases, and the native people whose lives were impacted as a result. These issues are brought into useful relief by comparing the experiences of the Tohono O’odham on two sides of a border that was, from a native perspective, totally arbitrary.
At the Margins
Minority Groups in Premodern ItalyStephen J. Milner
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Attu Boy
A Young Alaskan's WWII MemoirNick Golodoff
University of Alaska Press, 2015
One of those survivors, Nick Golodoff, became a prisoner of war at just six years old. He was among the dozens of Unangan Attu residents swept away to Hokkaido, and one of only twenty-five to survive. Attu Boy tells Golodoff’s story of these harrowing years as he found both friendship and cruelty at the hands of the Japanese. It offers a rare look at the lives of civilian prisoners and their captors in WWII-era Japan. It also tells of Golodoff’s bittersweet return to a homeland torn apart by occupation and forced internments. Interwoven with other voices from Attu, this richly illustrated memoir is a testament to the struggles, triumphs, and heartbreak of lives disrupted by war.
Authentic Texas
People of the Big BendBy Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and Bill Wright
University of Texas Press, 2013
Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2015
The Texas of vast open spaces inhabited by independent, self-reliant men and women may be more of a dream than a reality for the state’s largely urban population, but it still exists in the Big Bend. One of the most sparsely settled areas of the United States, the Big Bend attracts people who are willing to forego many modern conveniences for a lifestyle that proclaims “don’t fence me in.” Marcia Hatfield Daudistel and Bill Wright believe that the character traits exemplified by folks in the Big Bend—including self-sufficiency, friendliness, and neighborliness—go back to the founding of the state. In this book, they introduce us to several dozen Big Bend residents—old and young, long-settled and recently arrived, racially diverse—who show us what it means to be an authentic Texan.
Interviewing people in Marathon, Big Bend National Park, Terlingua, Redford, Presidio, Alpine, Marfa, Valentine, Balmorhea, Limpia Crossing, and Fort Davis, Daudistel and Wright discover the reasons why residents of the Big Bend make this remote area of Texas their permanent home. In talking to ranchers and writers, entrepreneurs and artists, people living off the grid and urban refugees, they find a common willingness to overcome difficulties through individual skill and initiative. As one interviewee remarks, you have to have a lot of “try” in you to make a life in the Big Bend. Bill Wright’s photographs of the people and landscapes are a perfect complement to the stories of these authentic Texans. Together, these voices and images offer the most complete, contemporary portrait of the Texas Big Bend.
Away Happens
Phil Crossman
University Press of New England, 2005
Awkward Rituals
Sensations of Governance in Protestant AmericaDana W. Logan
University of Chicago Press, 2022
In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution.
Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.
Aztec Music and Dance in California
Kristina F. Nielsen
University of Illinois Press, 2026