22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 955 start with f

cover of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

From Reverence to Rape

The Treatment of Women in the Movies

Molly Haskell

University of Chicago Press, 1987

For this edition of her classic study of the feminine role in film, Molly Haskell has written a new chapter addressing recent developments in the appearance and perception of women in the movies.

"An incisive, exceedingly thoughtful look at the distorted lens through which Hollywood has historically viewed women. It is a valuable contribution not just of film criticism but to a society in which the vital role of women is just beginning to emerge."—Christian Science Monitor

"Haskell is interested in women—how they are used in movies, how they use movies, and how the parts they play function as projections and verifications of our myths about women's lot and woman's psyche and even, lately, women's lib."—Jane Kramer, Village Voice

"In examining the goddesses worshipped by an entire nation, Molly Haskell reveals a good deal about our national character and our most cherished sexual myths. . . . Concerned with the deeply ingrained belief of women's inferiority, she analyzes movies as a social product as well as a social arbiter, and she effectively demonstrates how women are encouraged to impose limitations on themselves by fashioning those selves after flickering shadows in a darkened auditorium—sexual creatures who possess neither ability nor ambition beyond their bodies. . . . Both as an examination of film and as sociology, From Reverence to Rape is excellent."—Harriet Kriegel, The Nation
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cover of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition

From Reverence to Rape

The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Third Edition

Molly Haskell

University of Chicago Press, 2016

A revolutionary classic of feminist cinema criticism, Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape remains as insightful, searing, and relevant as it was the day it was first published. Ranging across time and genres from the golden age of Hollywood to films of the late twentieth century, Haskell analyzes images of women in movies, the relationship between these images and the status of women in society, the stars who fit these images or defied them, and the attitudes of their directors. This new edition features both a new foreword by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and a new introduction from the author that discusses the book’s reception and the evolution of her views.
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cover of From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle

From Rights to Lives

The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle

Edited by Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity.

From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
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cover of From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times

From Russia with Code

Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times

Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lepinay, editors

Duke University Press, 2019

While Russian computer scientists are notorious for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election, they are ubiquitous on Wall Street and coveted by international IT firms and often perceive themselves as the present manifestation of the past glory of Soviet scientific prowess. Drawing on over three hundred in-depth interviews, the contributors to From Russia with Code trace the practices, education, careers, networks, migrations, and lives of Russian IT professionals at home and abroad, showing how they function as key figures in the tense political and ideological environment of technological innovation in post-Soviet Russia. Among other topics, they analyze coders' creation of both transnational communities and local networks of political activists; Moscow's use of IT funding to control peripheral regions; brain drain and the experiences of coders living abroad in the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, and Finland; and the possible meanings of Russian computing systems in a heterogeneous nation and industry. Highlighting the centrality of computer scientists to post-Soviet economic mobilization in Russia, the contributors offer new insights into the difficulties through which a new entrepreneurial culture emerges in a rapidly changing world.

Contributors. Irina Antoschyuk, Mario Biagioli, Ksenia Ermoshina, Marina Fedorova, Andrey Indukaev, Alina Kontareva, Diana Kurkovsky, Vincent Lépinay, Alexandra Masalskaya, Daria Savchenko, Liubava Shatokhina, Alexandra Simonova, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Dimitrii Zhikharevich
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cover of From SWEETBACK to SUPER FLY: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop

From SWEETBACK to SUPER FLY

Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop

Gerald R. Butters, Jr.

University of Missouri Press, 2014

 
Racial politics and capitalism found a way to blend together in 1970s Chicago in the form of movie theaters targeted specifically toward African Americans. In From Sweetback to Super Fly, Gerald Butters examines the movie theaters in Chicago’s Loop that became, as he describes them, “black spaces” during the early 1970s with theater managers making an effort to gear their showings toward the African American community by using black-themed and blaxploitation films.

 

Butters covers the wide range of issues that influenced the theaters, from changing racial patterns to the increasingly decrepit state of Chicago’s inner city and the pressure on businesses and politicians alike to breathe life into the dying area. Through his extensive research, Butters provides an in-depth look at this phenomenon, delving into an area that has not previously been explored. His close examination of how black-themed films were marketed and how theaters showing these films tried to draw in crowds sheds light on race issues both from an industrial standpoint on the side of the theaters and movie producers, as well as from a cultural standpoint on the side of the moviegoers and the city of Chicago as a whole. Butters provides a wealth of information on a very interesting yet underexamined part of history, making From Sweetback to Super Fly a supremely enjoyable and informative book.
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cover of From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

From San Francisco Eastward

Victorian Theater in the American West

Carolyn Grattan Eichin

University of Nevada Press, 2020

Finalist for the 2021 Willa Literary Award in Scholarly Non-Fiction

Finalist for the 2021 Will Rogers Medallion Award in Western Non-Fiction



Carolyn Grattan Eichin’s From San Francisco Eastward explores the dynamics and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the nucleus of the western theatrical world, having attained prominence behind only New York and Boston as the nation’s most important theatrical center by 1870. By focusing on the West’s hinterland communities, theater as a capitalist venture driven by the sale of cultural forms is illuminated against the backdrop of urbanization.

Using the vagaries of the West’s notorious boom-bust economic cycles, Eichin traces the fiscal, demographic, and geographic influences that shaped western theater. With an emphasis on the 1860s and 70s, this thoroughly researched work uses distinct notions of ethnicity, class, and gender to examine a cultural institution driven by a market economy. From San Francisco Eastward is a thorough analysis of the ever-changing theatrical personalities and strategies that shaped Victorian theater in the West, and the ways in which theater as a business transformed the values of a region.

 
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cover of From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico

From Scenarios to Networks

Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico

Leo Cabranes-Grant

Northwestern University Press, 2016

In this innovative study, Leo Cabranes-Grant analyzes four intercultural events in the Viceroyalty of New Spain that took place between 1566 and 1690. Rather than relying on racial labels to describe alterations of identity, Cabranes-Grant focuses on experimentation, rehearsal, and the interaction between bodies and objects. His analysis shows how scenarios are invested with affective qualities, which in turn enable cultural and semiotic change. Central to his argument is Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, which figures society as a constantly evolving web of relationships among objects, people, and spaces. In examining these scenarios, Cabranes-Grant attempts to discern the reasons why the conditions of an intensified moment within this ceaseless flow take on a particular value and inspire their re-creation. Cabranes-Grant offers a fresh perspective on Latour’s theory and reorients debates concerning history and historiography in the field of performance studies.

 

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cover of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses

From Single to Serious

Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses

Malone, Dana M.

Rutgers University Press, 2018

College students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form successful unions, students at evangelical colleges balance sacred ideologies of purity, holiness, and godliness, while also dealing with more mainstream notions of popularity, the online world, and the appeal of sexual intimacy. 

In From Single to Serious, Dana M. Malone shines a light on friendship, dating, and, sexuality, in both the ideals and the practical experiences of heterosexual students at U. S. evangelical colleges. She examines the struggles they have in balancing their gendered and religious presentations of self, the expectations of their campus community, and their desire to find meaningful romantic relationships. 
 
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cover of From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy

From Skepticism to Competence

How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy

Mariana Craciun

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind—and the nature of medical expertise—as they are trained in psychotherapy.
 
While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles—a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor—psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.  

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illuminates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.
 
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cover of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

From Slave Cabins to the White House

Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

Koritha Mitchell

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Koritha Mitchell analyzes canonical texts by and about African American women to lay bare the hostility these women face as they invest in traditional domesticity. Instead of the respectability and safety granted white homemakers, black women endure pejorative labels, racist governmental policies, attacks on their citizenship, and aggression meant to keep them in "their place."

Tracing how African Americans define and redefine success in a nation determined to deprive them of it, Mitchell plumbs the works of Frances Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, and others. These artists honor black homes from slavery and post-emancipation through the Civil Rights era to "post-racial" America. Mitchell follows black families asserting their citizenship in domestic settings while the larger society and culture marginalize and attack them, not because they are deviants or failures but because they meet American standards.

Powerful and provocative, From Slave Cabins to the White House illuminates the links between African American women's homemaking and citizenship in history and across literature.

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cover of From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel

From Slave Ship to Supermax

Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel

Patrick Elliot Alexander

Temple University Press, 2017

In his cogent and groundbreaking book, From Slave Ship to Supermax, Patrick Elliot Alexander argues that the disciplinary logic and violence of slavery haunt depictions of the contemporary U.S. prison in late twentieth-century Black fiction. Alexander links representations of prison life in James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk to his engagements with imprisoned intellectuals like George Jackson, who exposed historical continuities between slavery and mass incarceration. Likewise, Alexander reveals how Toni Morrison’s Beloved was informed by Angela Y. Davis’s jail writings on slavery-reminiscent practices in contemporary women’s facilities. Alexander also examines recurring associations between slave ships and prisons in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, and connects slavery’s logic of racialized premature death to scenes of death row imprisonment in Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying. 

Alexander ultimately makes the case that contemporary Black novelists depict racial terror as a centuries-spanning social control practice that structured carceral life on slave ships and slave plantations—and that mass-produces prisoners and prisoner abuse in post–Civil Rights America. These authors expand free society’s view of torment confronted and combated in the prison industrial complex, where discriminatory laws and the institutionalization of secrecy have reinstated slavery’s system of dehumanization.

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cover of From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedman's Bureau in Arkansas 1865-1869

From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom

The Freedman's Bureau in Arkansas 1865-1869

Randy Finley

University of Arkansas Press, 1996

As African Americans in Arkansas emerged from slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, it was the job o the Federal Freedmen's Bureau to help them build bridges to freedom. The bureau supported former slaves as they assumed new names, searched for lost family members, moved to new homes, worked to provide for their families, learned to read and write, formed and attended their own churches, created their own histories and myths, and struggled to obtain land.

In this account of hte gains made by Arkansas freedman during this period, Randy Finley describes the ways that blacks, whites, and bureau officials undertook their foles in a new society and began to live the complex reality of freedom.

1996 Certificate of Commendation American Association for State and Local History
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cover of From Sleep Unbound

From Sleep Unbound

Andrée Chedid

Ohio University Press, 1983

From Sleep Unbound portrays the life of Samya, an Egyptian woman who is taken at age 15 from her Catholic boarding school and forced into a loveless and humiliating marriage. Eventually sundered from every human attachment, Samya lapses into despair and despondence, and finally an emotionally caused paralysis. But when she shakes off the torpor of sleep, the sleep of avoidance, she awakens to action with the explosive energy of one who has been reborn.
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cover of From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale

From Small Talk to Microaggression

A History of Scale

Michael Lempert

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.
 
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication “microscopically.” In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn’t see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences.
 
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.
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cover of From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City

From South Central to Southside

Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City

Adam Baird

Temple University Press, 2024

When he visited in 2011, sociologist Adam Baird wondered what the Bloods and Crips were doing in Southside Belize City. He soon discovered that migrant Belizean members of colors gangs from South Central Los Angeles were deported there in the 1980s. Once established “back home,” membership in the Bloods and Crips was seen as an aspirational pathway to manhood for the urban underclass.

From South Central to Southside charts the genesis and evolution of a transnational gang culture. Baird provides firsthand interviews with gang members and “narco” families and explains the surprising source of Belize City’s severe violence and skyrocketing homicide rates. He identifies gang violence in the U.S. and Belize as stemming from populations blighted by historical, brutal inequality and marginalization. Analyzing the gendered dynamics as young men and women face the temptations, risks, and dangers of gang life, Baird shines a light on “chronic vulnerability" in Belize City.
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cover of From Spaniard to Creole: The Archaeology of Cultural Formation at Puerto Real, Haiti

From Spaniard to Creole

The Archaeology of Cultural Formation at Puerto Real, Haiti

Charles Robin Ewen

University of Alabama Press, 1991

Tracing the archaeological origins of Creole identity in the early colonial Caribbean.

While most studies of intercultural contact focus on the impact of the intrusive power on the native culture, this book examines the effects of the colonization process on the Spaniards in the New World during the 16th century. The site of Puerto Real on the north coast of Haiti serves as a case study. Based on the results of excavations at both Puerto Real and St. Augustine, Florida, this study suggests that the introduction of New World and African cultural elements into Spanish colonial culture began almost at contact. The model of acculturative processes, developed in St. Augustine and tested at Puerto Real, can serve to guide future Spanish colonial research. It can also be applied to non-Hispanic colonial sites in the New World. Did the French and British adapt to their new environments in a manner similar to the Spanish? Work done at Puerto Real demonstrates the utility of archaeology in the study of the effects of culture contact.

 

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cover of From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music

From Spirituals to Symphonies

African-American Women Composers and Their Music

Helen Walker-Hill

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Exploding the assumption that black women's only important musical contributions have been in folk, jazz, and pop

Helen Walker-Hill's unique study provides a carefully researched examination of the history and scope of musical composition by African American women composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the effect of race, gender, and class, From Spirituals to Symphonies notes the important role played by individual personalities and circumstances in shaping this underappreciated category of American art. The study also provides in-depth exploration of the backgrounds, experiences, and musical compositions of eight African American women including Margaret Bonds, Undine Smith Moore, and Julia Perry, who combined the techniques of Western art music with their own cultural traditions and individual gifts. Despite having gained national and international recognition during their lifetimes, the contributions of many of these women are today forgotten.

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cover of From Strangers to Neighbors: Post-Disaster Resettlement and Community Building in Honduras

From Strangers to Neighbors

Post-Disaster Resettlement and Community Building in Honduras

By Ryan Alaniz

University of Texas Press, 2017

Natural disasters, the effects of climate change, and political upheavals and war have driven tens of millions of people from their homes and spurred intense debates about how governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term resettlement strategies. Many resettlement efforts have focused primarily on providing infrastructure and have done little to help displaced people and communities rebuild social structure, which has led to resettlement failures throughout the world. So what does it take to transform a resettlement into a successful community?

This book offers the first long-term comparative study of social outcomes through a case study of two Honduran resettlements built for survivors of Hurricane Mitch (1998) by two different NGOs. Although residents of each arrived from the same affected neighborhoods and have similar demographics, twelve years later one resettlement wrestles with high crime, low participation, and low social capital, while the other maintains low crime, a high degree of social cohesion, participation, and general social health. Using a multi-method approach of household surveys, interviews, ethnography, and analysis of NGO and community documents, Ryan Alaniz demonstrates that these divergent resettlement trajectories can be traced back to the type and quality of support provided by external organizations and the creation of a healthy, cohesive community culture. His findings offer important lessons and strategies that can be utilized in other places and in future resettlement policy to achieve the most effective and positive results.

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cover of From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959

From Submarines to Suburbs

Selling a Better America, 1939–1959

Cynthia Lee Henthorn

Ohio University Press, 2006

During World War II, U.S. businesses devised marketing strategies that encouraged consumers to believe their country’s wartime experience would launch a better America. Advertisements and promotional articles celebrated the immense industrial output that corporations achieved during the war. These commercial messages positioned wartime technologies and corporate expertise as the means to streamline America and invent a socially hygienic future free from poverty, slums, drudgery, filth, and—for some businessmen—the New Deal administration.

From Submarines to Suburbs surveys the development, strategy, and effect of these campaigns over a span of twenty pivotal years. Cynthia Lee Henthorn takes a close look at how pre-fabricated suburban houses, high-tech kitchens, and miracle products developed from war-related industries were promoted as the hygienic solutions for establishing this better America, one led by the captains of free enterprise.

As Henthorn demonstrates, wartime advertising and marketing strategies tying consumer prosperity to war were easily adapted in the Cold War era, when a symbiotic relationship between military standing and standards of living intensified in a culture dependent on defense spending. Were the efforts to engineer a better America successful? Using documentary evidence in the form of numerous advertisements, From Submarines to Suburbs stands as a significant contribution to understanding how today’s “better” America evolved.
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cover of From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama

From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions

Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama

Carla Guerrón Montero

University of Alabama Press, 2020

A new reading of Panama’s nation-building process, interpreted through a lens of transnational tourism

Based on long-term ethnographic and archival research, From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama considers the intersection of tourism, multiculturalism, and nation building. Carla Guerrón Montero analyzes the ways in which tourism becomes a vehicle for the development of specific kinds of institutional multiculturalism and nation-building projects in a country that prides itself on being multiethnic and racially democratic.

The narrative centers on Panamanian Afro-Antilleans who arrived in Panama in the nineteenth century from the Greater and Leeward Antilles as a labor force for infrastructural projects and settled in Panama City, Colón, and the Bocas del Toro Archipelago. The volume discusses how Afro-Antilleans, particularly in Bocas del Toro, have struggled since their arrival to become part of Panama’s narrative of nationhood and traces their evolution from plantation workers for the United Fruit Company to tourism workers. Guerrón Montero notes that in the current climate of official tolerance, they have seized the moment to improve their status within Panamanian society, while also continuing to identify with their Caribbean heritage in ways that conflict with their national identity.

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cover of From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism

From Text to Context

The Turn to History in Modern Judaism

Ismar Schorsch

Brandeis University Press, 1994

Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
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cover of From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism

From Text to Context

The Turn to History in Modern Judaism

Ismar Schorsch

University Press of New England, 2003

Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.
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cover of From Theory to Practice: How to Assess and Apply Impartiality in News and Current Affairs

From Theory to Practice

How to Assess and Apply Impartiality in News and Current Affairs

Edited by Leon Barkho

Intellect Books, 2013

From Theory to Practice is the first scholarly look at the possibilities and challenges of impartial and objective journalism in our digitized media world. This volume brings together contributions from editors at premiere news outlets like Reuters and the BBC to discuss how to assess, measure, and apply impartiality in news and current affairs in a world where the impact of digital technologies is constantly changing how news is covered, presented, and received. In this changing media environment, impartial journalism is as crucial as it ever was in traditional media, and this book offers an essential analysis of how to navigate a media milieu in which technology has sharply reduced the gatekeeping role news gatherers and producers used to have in controlling content flow to audiences.

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cover of From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals: US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-Belonging

From Threatening Guerrillas to Forever Illegals

US Central Americans and the Cultural Politics of Non-Belonging

Yajaira M. Padilla

University of Texas Press, 2022

The experience of Central Americans in the United States is marked by a vicious contradiction. In entertainment and information media, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans are hypervisible as threatening guerrillas, MS-13 gangsters, maids, and “forever illegals.” Central Americans are unseen within the broader conception of Latinx community, foreclosing avenues to recognition.

Yajaira M. Padilla explores how this regime of visibility and invisibility emerged over the past forty years—bookended by the right-wing presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump—and how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations have contested their rhetorical disfiguration. Drawing from popular films and TV, news reporting, and social media, Padilla shows how Central Americans in the United States have been constituted as belonging nowhere, imagined as permanent refugees outside the boundaries of even minority representation. Yet in documentaries about cross-border transit through Mexico, street murals, and other media, US Central Americans have counteracted their exclusion in ways that defy dominant paradigms of citizenship and integration.

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cover of From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems

From Time Immemorial

Indigenous Peoples and State Systems

By Richard J. Perry

University of Texas Press, 1996

Around the globe, people who have lived in a place "from time immemorial" have found themselves confronted by and ultimately incorporated within larger state systems. During more than three decades of anthropological study of groups ranging from the Apache to the indigenous peoples of Kenya, Richard J. Perry has sought to understand this incorporation process and, more importantly, to identify the factors that drive it. This broadly synthetic and highly readable book chronicles his findings.

Perry delves into the relations between state systems and indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Australia. His explorations show how, despite differing historical circumstances, encounters between these state systems and native peoples generally followed a similar pattern: invasion, genocide, displacement, assimilation, and finally some measure of apparent self-determination for the indigenous people—which may, however, have its own pitfalls.

After establishing this common pattern, Perry tackles the harder question—why does it happen this way? Defining the state as a nexus of competing interest groups, Perry offers persuasive evidence that competition for resources is the crucial factor in conflicts between indigenous peoples and the powerful constituencies that drive state policies.

These findings shed new light on a historical phenomenon that is too often studied in isolated instances. This book will thus be important reading for everyone seeking to understand the new contours of our postcolonial world.

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cover of From Tribalism to Nationalism: The Anthropological Turn in Laos – A Tribute to Grant Evans

From Tribalism to Nationalism

The Anthropological Turn in Laos – A Tribute to Grant Evans

Edited by Yves Goudineau and Vanina Bouté

National University of Singapore Press, 2022

Laos has long been considered by ethnologists as a unique place of study. To this day, diverse ethnic minorities make up over half the country’s population. In earlier times, several good ethnographies were made but usually they were narrow in scope. War and revolution then made fieldwork impossible in Laos until the 1990s, when some international researchers returned, often in difficult and precarious conditions, bringing new theoretical perspectives. This volume brings together several such studies by this new generation of researchers, their fieldwork often joint projects in collaboration with Lao researchers. Published in collaboration with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), the book is a tribute to the late Grant Evans, whose work remains emblematic of this ‘anthropological turn’ in Lao studies.
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cover of From Tribute to Communal Sovereignty: The Tarascan and Caxcan Territories in Transition

From Tribute to Communal Sovereignty

The Tarascan and Caxcan Territories in Transition

Edited by Andrew Roth-Seneff, Robert V. Kemper, and Julie Adkins

University of Arizona Press, 2015

From Tribute to Communal Sovereignty examines both continuity and change over the last five centuries for the indigenous peoples of central western Mexico, providing the first sweeping and comprehensive history of this important region in Mesoamerica.

The continuities elucidated concern ancestral territorial claims that date back centuries and reflect the stable geographic locations occupied by core populations of indigenous language–speakers in or near their pre-Columbian territories since the Postclassical period, from the thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries. A common theme of this volume is the strong cohesive forces present, not only in the colonial construction of Christian village communities in Purhépecha and Nahuatl groups in Michoacán but also in the demographically less inclusive Huichol (Wixarika), Cora, and Tepehuan groups, whose territories were more extensive.

The authors review a cluster of related themes: settlement patterns of the last five centuries in central western Mexico, language distribution, ritual representation of territoriality, processes of collective identity, and the forms of participation and resistance during different phases of Mexican state formation. From such research, the question arises: does the village community constitute a unique level of organization of the experience of the original peoples of central western Mexico? The chapters address this question in rich and complex ways by first focusing on the past configurations and changes in lifeways during the transition from pre-Columbian to Spanish rule in tributary empires, then examining the long-term postcolonial process of Mexican independence that introduced the emerging theme of the communal sovereignty.
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cover of From Victimhood to Citizenship: The Path of Roma Integration

From Victimhood to Citizenship

The Path of Roma Integration

Will Guy

Central European University Press, 2013

The disappointing results of over two decades of activism in the supposedly more liberal climate of post-communist democracies prompted András Bíró, Hungarian journalist and renowned human rights activist to put down his reflections about the situation of Roma in Eastern Europe. These thoughts in turn stimulated insightful responses from two scholars of the subject: Nicolae Gheorghe, an ethnic Roma living in Romania, and Martin Kovats, among others special advisor on Roma issues to the European Commission in Brussels.These authors do not shrink from expressing forthright views, as in discussing the apparent conflict between certain human rights values and what some regard as ‘traditional’ Roma culture and in exploring difficulties and ambiguities implicit in using the term ‘Roma’. The respective merits of ethnically based Roma political parties as opposed to a civic approach are also examined.The three essays challenged other stakeholders who discussed the burning issues raised therein at a workshop, the distilled text of which constitutes the fourth chapter of the book. While no straightforward solutions are offered the pre-eminence of the main contributors and the lively ensuing conference arguments guarantee that this book will become a touchstone for future debate in a time when pro-Roma policies are facing ever-growing threats amidst the crisis in Europe.
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cover of From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana: Representation of the Sacred at Lake Titicaca

From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana

Representation of the Sacred at Lake Titicaca

By Verónica Salles-Reese

University of Texas Press, 1997

Surrounded by the peaks of the Andean cordillera, the deep blue waters of Lake Titicaca have long provided refreshment and nourishment to the people who live along its shores. From prehistoric times, the Andean peoples have held Titicaca to be a sacred place, the source from which all life originated and the site where the divine manifests its presence.

In this interdisciplinary study, Verónica Salles-Reese explores how Andean myths of cosmic and ethnic origins centered on Lake Titicaca evolved from pre-Inca times to the enthronement of the Virgin of Copacabana in 1583. She begins by describing the myths of the Kolla (pre-Inca) people and shows how their Inca conquerors attempted to establish legitimacy by reconciling their myths of cosmic and ethnic origin with the Kolla myths. She also shows how a similar pattern occurred when the Inca were conquered in turn by the Spanish.

This research explains why Lake Titicaca continues to occupy a central place in Andean thought despite the major cultural disruptions that have characterized the region's history. This book will be a touchstone in the field of Colonial literature and an important reference for Andean religious and intellectual history.

[more]
cover of From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies

From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park

Activism, Culture, and American Studies

Paul Lauter

Duke University Press, 2001

Paul Lauter, an icon of American Studies who has been a primary agent in its transformation and its chief ambassador abroad, offers a wide-ranging collection of essays that demonstrate and reflect on this important and often highly politicized discipline. While American Studies was formerly seen as a wholly subsidiary academic program that loosely combined the study of American history, literature, and art, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park reveals the evolution of an independent, highly interdisciplinary program with distinctive subjects, methods, and goals that are much different than the traditional academic departments that nurtured it.

With anecdote peppered discussions ranging from specific literary texts and movies to the future of higher education and the efficacy of unions, From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park entertains even as it offers a twenty-first century account of how and why Americanists at home and abroad now do what they do. Drawing on his forty-five years of teaching and research as well as his experience as a political activist and a cultural radical, Lauter shows how a multifaceted increase in the United States’ global dominion has infused a particular political urgency into American Studies. With its military and economic influence, its cultural and linguistic reach, the United States is—for better or for worse—too formidable and potent not to be understood clearly and critically.
[more]
cover of From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994

From War to Genocide

Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994

André Guichaoua, Translated by Don E. Webster, Foreword by Scott Straus

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

In April 1994 Rwanda exploded in violence, with political, social, and economic divisions most visible along ethnic lines of the Hutu and Tutsi factions. The ensuing killings resulted in the deaths of as much as 20 percent of Rwanda's population. André Guichaoua, who was present as the genocide began, unfolds a complex story with multiple actors, including three major political parties that each encompassed a spectrum of positions, all reacting to and influencing a rapidly evolving situation. Economic polarities, famine-fueled privation, clientelism, corruption, north-south rivalries, and events in the neighboring nations of Burundi and Uganda all deepened ethnic tensions, allowing extremists to prevail over moderates.

Guichaoua draws on years of meticulous research to describe and analyze this history. He emphasizes that the same virulent controversies that fueled the conflict have often influenced judicial, political, and diplomatic responses to it, reproducing the partisan cleavages between the former belligerents and implicating state actors, international institutions, academics, and the media. Guichaoua insists upon the imperative of absolute intellectual independence in pursuing the truth about some of the gravest human rights violations of the twentieth century.
[more]
cover of From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum

From Warism to Pacifism

A Moral Continuum

Authored by Duane Cady

Temple University Press, 2010

Duane Cady views warism and pacifism as polar extremes on a continuum that embraces a full spectrum of ethical positions on the morality of war and peace. Realizing that he could not intellectually defend the notions of just-war theory, he found that he was a reluctant pacifist. In this new edition of From Warism to Pacifism, Cady continues to expose the pervasive, subconscious warism that is the dominant ideology in modern Western culture. He explores the changes over the last twenty years—from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as Barack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace.

 Like racism and sexism, the uncritical presumption that war is morally justifiable, even morally required, misguides our attitudes and institutions. In its place, Cady proposes the development of a positive concept of peace. Citing common objections to pacifist values, he describes peace as something more than the mere absence of war and demonstrates that pacifism is a defensible position.  

[more]
cover of From Welfare to Work

From Welfare to Work

Judith M. Gueron

Russell Sage Foundation, 1991

From Welfare to Work appears at a critical moment, when all fifty states are wrestling with tough budgetary and program choices as they implement the new federal welfare reforms. This book is a definitive analysis of the landmark social research that has directly informed those choices: the rigorous evaluation of programs designed to help welfare recipients become employed and self-sufficient. It discusses forty-five past and current studies, focusing on the series of seminal evaluations conducted by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation over the last fifteen years. Which of these welfare-to-work programs have worked? For whom and at what cost? In answering these key questions, the authors clearly delineate the trade-offs facing policymakers as they strive to achieve the multiple goals of alleviating poverty, helping the most disadvantaged, curtailing dependence, and effecting welfare savings. The authors present compelling evidence that the generally low-cost, primarily job search-oriented programs of the late 1980s achieved sustained earnings gains and welfare savings. However, getting people out of poverty and helping those who are most disadvantaged may require some intensive, higher-cost services such as education and training. The authors explore a range of studies now in progress that will address these and other urgent issues. They also point to encouraging results from programs that were operating in San Diego and Baltimore, which suggest the potential value of a mixed strategy: combining job search and other low-cost activities for a broad portion of the caseload with more specialized services for smaller groups. Offering both an authoritative synthesis of work already done and recommendations for future innovation, From Welfare to Work will be the standard resource and required reading for practitioners and students in the social policy, social welfare, and academic communities.
[more]
cover of From Whence Cometh My Help: The African American Community at Hollins College

From Whence Cometh My Help

The African American Community at Hollins College

Ethel Morgan Smith

University of Missouri Press, 2000

In 1842 Charles Lewis Cocke arrived in Roanoke, Virginia, with sixteen slaves; there, he founded Hollins College, an elite woman's school. Many of the early students also brought their slaves to the college with them. Upon Emancipation some of the African Americans of the community "mostly women" stayed on as servants, forming what is now called the Hollins Community. Although the servants played an integral part in the college's success, students were strongly discouraged from acknowledging them as people. Rules forbidding any "familiarity" with the servants perpetuated a prejudicial attitude toward the African American community that would persist well into the 1940s.

Determined to give voice to the African American community that served as the silent workforce for Hollins College, Ethel Morgan Smith succeeded in finding individuals to step forward and tell their stories. From Whence Cometh My Help examines the dynamics of an institution built on the foundations of slavery and so steeped in tradition that it managed to perpetuate servitude for generations. Interviewing senior community members, Smith gives recognition to the invisible population that provided and continues to provide the labor support for Hollins College for more than 150 years.

Although African American students have been admitted to the college for roughly thirty years, to date only one person from the Hollins Community has graduated from the college. From Whence Cometh My Help explores the subtle and complex relationship between the affluent white world of Hollins College and the proud African American community that has served it since its inception. Interweaving personal observations, historical documents, and poetry throughout a revealing oral history, Smith shares her fascinating discoveries and the challenges involved in telling a story silenced for so long.

[more]
cover of From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sicotte, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism. 
 
From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Sociologist Diane Sicotte digs deep into the city’s past as a titan of American manufacturing to trace how only a few communities came to host nearly all of the area’s polluting and waste disposal land uses. By examining the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, she not only dissects what went wrong in Philadelphia but also identifies lessons for environmental justice activism today. 
 
Sicotte’s research tallies both the environmental and social costs of industrial pollution, exposing the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and economic inequality. From Workshop to Waste Magnet is a compelling read for anyone concerned with the health of America’s cities and the people who live in them. 
 
[more]
cover of From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press

From Yahweh to Yahoo!

The Religious Roots of the Secular Press

Doug Underwood

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Presenting religion as journalism's silent partner, From Yahweh to Yahoo!provides a fresh and surprising view of the religious impulses at work in contemporary newsrooms. Focusing on how the history of religion in the United States entwines with the growth of the media, Doug Underwood argues that American journalists draw from the nation's moral and religious heritage and operate, in important ways, as personifications of the old religious virtues. 

Underwood traces religion's influence on mass communication from the biblical prophets to the Protestant Reformation, from the muckraker and Social Gospel campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the modern age of mass media. While forces have pushed journalists away from identifying themselves with religion, they still approach such secular topics as science, technology, and psychology in reverential ways. Underwood thoughtful analysis covers the press's formulaic coverage of spiritual experience, its failure to cover new and non-Christian religions in America, and the complicity of the mainstream media in launching the religious broadcasting movement.

[more]
cover of From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands

From a Shattered Sun

Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands

Susan Mckinnon

University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

Among a growing number of ethnographies of eastern Indonesia that deal with cosmology, exchange, and kinship, From a Shattered Sun is the first to address squarely issues originally broached by Edmund Leach and Claude Lévi-Strauss concerning the relation between hierarchy and equality in asymmetric systems of marriage.
    On the basis of extensive fieldwork in the Tamimbar islands, Susan McKinnon analyzes the simultaneous presence of both closed, asymmetric cycles and open, asymmetric pathways of alliance—of both egalitarian and hierarchical configurations.  In addition, Tamimbarese society is marked by the existence of multiple, differentially valued forms of marriage, affiliation, and residence.  Rather than seeing these various forms as analytically separable types, McKinnon demonstrates that it is only by viewing them as integrally related—in terms of culturally specific understandings of "houses," gender, and exchange—that one can perceive the processes through which hierarchy and equality are created.

[more]
cover of From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

From a Taller Tower

The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

By Seamus McGraw

University of Texas Press, 2021

We, as a nation, have become desensitized to the shock and pain in the wake of mass shootings. In the bottomless silence between gunshots, as political stalemate ensures inaction, the killing continues; the dying continues. From a Taller Tower attends to the silence that has left us empty in the aftermath of these atrocities. Veteran journalist Seamus McGraw chronicles the rise of the mass shooter to dismantle the myths we have constructed around the murderers and ourselves.

In 1966, America’s first mass shooter, from atop the University of Texas tower, unleashed a new reality: the fear that any of us may be targeted by a killer, and the complicity we bear in granting these murderers the fame or infamy they crave. Addressing individual cases in the epidemic that began in Austin, From a Taller Tower bluntly confronts our obsession with the shooters—and explores the isolation, narcissism, and sense of victimhood that fan their obsessions. Drawing on the experiences of survivors and first responders as well as the knowledge of mental health experts, McGraw challenges the notion of the “good guy with a gun,” the idolization of guns (including his own), and the reliability of traumatized memory. Yet in this terrible history, McGraw reminds us of the humanity that can stop the killing and the dying.

[more]
cover of From that Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947

From that Place and Time

A Memoir, 1938-1947

Dawidowicz, Lucy

Rutgers University Press, 2008

From that Place and Time is the memoir of Lucy S. Dawidowicz, an American-Jewish historian who set out to study Yiddish language and Jewish history at YIVO, the Jewish Scientific Institute in Vilna, Poland, in 1938. Escaping Poland only days before the Nazi onslaught, she worked in the New York YIVO during the war, and returned to Europe from 1946 to 1947 to aid Jewish displaced persons in Munich and Belsen with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz's memoir not only describes her pre-war year in Jewish Eastern Europe, but also treats the ghostly post-war period, and her role in salvaging what remained of Vilna's scorched Jewish archives and libraries.

Nancy Sinkoff's new introduction explores the historical forces, particularly the dynamic world of secular Yiddish culture, which shaped Dawidowicz's decision to journey to Poland and her reassessment of those forces in the last years of her life.

[more]
cover of From the Battlefront to the Bridal Suite: Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946

From the Battlefront to the Bridal Suite

Media Coverage of British War Brides, 1942-1946

Barbara G. Friedman

University of Missouri Press, 2007

       With their gregarious natures and casual styles, American GIs in wartime England were instantly attractive to British women—especially in the absence of their fighting men. As a result, some seventy thousand British war brides returned to the United States—with many on the home front at first suspecting that the GIs were somehow being exploited.

            The war brides’ stories have been told in memoirs, romantic novels, and immigration history. Barbara Friedman sheds new light on their experiences by focusing on media representations of sexuality and marriage in wartime, showing how mass media interpretations turned from public suspicion of war brides to popular acceptance.

            Friedman tells how British media first insisted that GIs had come to fight, not to woo the locals, and shrugged off the first brides as an “American problem.” Yet, as Friedman shows, the British media were complicit in encouraging the relationships in the first place: the British press promoted a hospitality program that deemed the entertainment of American troops “patriotic duty,” while women’s magazines hailed American men as ideal husbands and the United States as a promised land.

From the American perspective, Friedman reveals, despite rules against foreign marriages, the U.S. Army encouraged GI-civilian fraternization through armed service publications, attitudes toward GI sexuality, and participation in the hospitality program. Armed service publications went from depicting British women as “frowsy dames” to honoring them as models of domesticity, while newspapers back home eventually legitimized the marriages by casting the brides as welcome additions to American society. Meanwhile, American women’s magazines viewed them as more similar to than different from their American counterparts and called on readers to help British brides master American homemaking.

            By combining letters and diaries of brides with published accounts, Friedman identifies accuracies and inaccuracies in the media record as well as gaps in coverage. She considers how the brides saw themselves compared to their media images and shows how the media co-opted brides as symbols of the Anglo-American “special friendship,” postwar power imbalance, and gendered ideals of marriage and domestication.

            From the Battlefront to the Bridal Suite is the untold story of overlooked participants in the most celebrated drama of the twentieth century—women whose lives were shaped profoundly by a war that was more than just a male enterprise. It shows the power of the press in the most unlikely matters and suggests a broader definition of the wartime experience.

[more]
cover of From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction

From the Civil War to the Apocalypse

Postmodern History and American Fiction

Timothy Parrish

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

Why don't we read novels as if they were histories and histories as if they were novels? Recent postmodern theorists such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon have argued that since history is a narrative art, it must be understood as a form of narrative representation analogous to fiction. Yet, contrary to the fears of some historians, such arguments have not undermined the practice of history as a meaningful enterprise so much as they have highlighted the appeal history has as a narrative craft.

In addressing the postmodernist claim that history works no differently than fiction, Timothy Parrish rejects the implication that history is dead or hopelessly relativistic. Rather, he shows how the best postmodern novelists compel their readers to accept their narratives as true in the same way that historians expect their readers to accept their narratives as true. These novelists write history as a form of fiction.

If the great pre-modernist American historians are Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Henry Adams, who are the great modernist or postmodernist historians? In the twentieth century, Parrish argues, the most powerful works of American history were written by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy. What survives a reading of these novels is the sense that writers otherwise identified as multicultural or postmodern share the view that nothing matters more than history and what one believes its possibilities to be. In other words, Parrish concludes, history, not identity, is the ground of postmodern American fiction.
[more]
cover of From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media, and Moral Panic in the United States, 1905-2010

From the Dance Hall to Facebook

Teen Girls, Mass Media, and Moral Panic in the United States, 1905-2010

Shayla Thiel-Stern

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

From the days of the penny press to the contemporary world of social media, journalistic accounts of teen girls in trouble have been a mainstay of the U.S. news media. Often the stories represent these girls as either victims or whores (and sometimes both), using journalistic storytelling devices and news-gathering practices that question girls' ability to perform femininity properly, especially as they act in public recreational space. These media accounts of supposed misbehavior can lead to moral panics that then further silence the voices of teenagers and young women.

In From the Dance Hall to Facebook, Shayla Thiel-Stern takes a close look at several historical snapshots, including working-class girls in dance halls of the early 1900s; girls' track and field teams in the 1920s to 1940s; Elvis Presley fans in the mid-1950s; punk rockers in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and girls using the Internet in the early twenty-first century. In each case, issues of gender, socioeconomic status, and race are explored within their historical context. The book argues that by marginalizing and stereotyping teen girls over the past century, mass media have perpetuated a pattern of gendered crisis that ultimately limits the cultural and political power of the young women it covers.
[more]
cover of From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print

From the Edge

Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print

Fagan, Allison E

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Chicana/o literature frequently depicts characters who exist in a vulnerable liminal space, living on the border between Mexican and American identities, and sometimes pushed to the edge by authorities who seek to restrict their freedom.  As this groundbreaking new study reveals, the books themselves have occupied similarly precarious positions, as Chicana/o literature has struggled for economic viability and visibility on the margins of the American publishing industry, while Chicana/o writers have grappled with editorial practices that compromise their creative autonomy. 
 
From the Edge reveals the tangled textual histories behind some of the most cherished works in the Chicana/o literary canon, tracing the negotiations between authors, editors, and publishers that determined how these books appeared in print. Allison Fagan demonstrates how the texts surrounding the authors’ words—from editorial prefaces to Spanish-language glossaries, from cover illustrations to reviewers’ blurbs—have crucially shaped the reception of Chicana/o literature. To gain an even richer perspective on the politics of print, she ultimately explores one more border space, studying the marks and remarks that readers have left in the margins of these books. 
 
From the Edge vividly demonstrates that to comprehend fully the roles that ethnicity, language, class, and gender play within Chicana/o literature, we must understand the material conditions that governed the production, publication, and reception of these works. By teaching us how to read the borders of the text, it demonstrates how we might perceive and preserve the faint traces of those on the margins. 
 
[more]
cover of From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society

From the Enemy's Point of View

Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious life of the Araweté—a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia—focuses on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity.

Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity—consumption—showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. From the Enemy's Point of View argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.
 
[more]
cover of From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy

From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court

Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy

Peter F. Lau, ed.

Duke University Press, 2004

Perhaps more than any other Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision declaring the segregation of public schools unconstitutional, highlighted both the possibilities and the limitations of American democracy. This collection of sixteen original essays by historians and legal scholars takes the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown to reconsider the history and legacy of that landmark decision. From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court juxtaposes oral histories and legal analysis to provide a nuanced look at how men and women understood Brown and sought to make the decision meaningful in their own lives.

The contributors illuminate the breadth of developments that led to Brown, from the parallel struggles for social justice among African Americans in the South and Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans in the West during the late nineteenth century to the political and legal strategies implemented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) in the twentieth century. Describing the decision’s impact on local communities, essayists explore the conflict among African Americans over the implementation of Brown in Atlanta’s public schools as well as understandings of the ruling and its relevance among Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. Assessing the legacy of Brown today, contributors analyze its influence on contemporary law, African American thought, and educational opportunities for minority children.

Contributors
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Davison M. Douglas
Raymond Gavins
Laurie B. Green
Christina Greene
Blair L. M. Kelley
Michael J. Klarman
Peter F. Lau
Madeleine E. Lopez
Waldo E. Martin Jr.
Vicki L. Ruiz
Christopher Schmidt
Larissa M. Smith
Patricia Sullivan
Kara Miles Turner
Mark V. Tushnet

[more]
cover of From the House to the Streets: The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940

From the House to the Streets

The Cuban Woman's Movement for Legal Reform, 1898-1940

K. Lynn Stoner

Duke University Press, 1991

From the House to the Streets is the first study on feminists and the feminist movement in Cuba between 1902 and 1940. In the four decades following its independence form Spain in 1898, Cuba adopted the most progressive legislation for women in the western hemisphere. K. Lynn Stoner explains how a small group of women and men helped to shape broad legal reforms: she describes their campaigns, the version of feminism they adopted with all its contradictions, and contrasts it to the model of feminism North Americans were transporting to Cuba.
Stoner draws on rich primary sources—texts, personal letters, journal essays, radio broadcasts, memoirs from women’s congresses—which allow these women to speak in their own voices. In reconstructing the mentalité of Cuban feminists, who came primarily from a privileged social status, Stoner shows how feminism drew from traditional notions of femininity and a rejection of gender equality to advance a cause that assumed women’s expanded roles were necessary for social progress. She also examines the values of the progressive male politicians who supported feminists and worked to change Cuban laws.
[more]
cover of From the Inside Out: The Rural Worlds of Mennonite Diarists

From the Inside Out

The Rural Worlds of Mennonite Diarists

Royden Loewen

University of Manitoba Press, 1999

Historian Royden Loewen has brought together selections from diaries kept by 21 Mennonites in Canada between 1863 and 1929, some translated from German for the first time. By skillfully comparing and contrasting a wide cross-section of lives, Loewen shows how these diaries often turn the hidden contours of household and community "inside out." The writers featured were ordinary rural people: young women and grandmothers, rural preachers and landless householders. They include a teenaged boy who immigrated from Russia to Manitoba in 1875 as well as a successful merchant, a traveling evangelist, and a devout, conservative church elder. An elderly grandfather recounted the daily circuit of his children's homes, while 19-year-old Marie Schoeder wrote of her literary aspirations, her "secret hope" that some day she would "write things that have a real worth, things that are worth printing, and things that other folks would love to read and pay for." From the Inside Out also contrasts diaries from two distinct Mennonite communities in Canada. The Swiss-American Mennonites in Waterloo County, Ontario, faced rapid urbanization, while the Dutch-Russian Mennonites in southern Manitoba maintained their more rural environment. The diaries mirror their writers' preoccupations with work and weather, but they also reveal a communityís social structure and round of activities such as weddings, funerals, and worship services. In the process of diary-keeping, the writers sought to make sense of a dynamic and often unpredictable world. Reading what they chose to record is to learn much about their culture. Their writings provide glimpses of their lives, their collective mindset, and their history as a people.
[more]
cover of From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

From the Jewish Heartland

Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost

University of Illinois Press, 2013

From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways reveals the distinctive flavor of Jewish foods in the Midwest and tracks regional culinary changes through time. Exploring Jewish culinary innovation in America's heartland from the 1800s to today, Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost examine recipes from numerous midwestern sources, both kosher and nonkosher, including Jewish homemakers' handwritten manuscripts and notebooks, published journals and newspaper columns, and interviews with Jewish cooks, bakers, and delicatessen owners.
 
With the influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came new recipes and foodways that transformed the culture of the region. Settling into the cities, towns, and farm communities of Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Jewish immigrants incorporated local fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles into traditional recipes. Such incomparable gustatory delights include Tzizel bagels and rye breads coated in midwestern cornmeal, baklava studded with locally grown cranberries, dark pumpernickel bread sprinkled with almonds and crunchy Iowa sunflower seeds, tangy ketchup concocted from wild sour grapes, Sephardic borekas (turnovers) made with sweet cherries from Michigan, rich Chicago cheesecakes, native huckleberry pie from St. Paul, and savory gefilte fish from Minnesota northern pike.
 
Steinberg and Prost also consider the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways, as reported in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and published accounts. They give special attention to the impact on these foodways of large-scale immigration, relocation, and Americanization processes during the nineteenth century and the efforts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients.
 
Including dozens of sample recipes, From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways takes readers on a memorable and unique tour of midwestern Jewish cooking and culture.
[more]
cover of From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest: Athapaskan Migrations, Mobility, and Ethnogenesis

From the Land of Ever Winter to the American Southwest

Athapaskan Migrations, Mobility, and Ethnogenesis

Deni J. Seymour

University of Utah Press, 2012

The Athapaskan departure from the Canadian Subarctic centuries ago and their subsequent arrival in the American Southwest has remained the subject of continuous debate in anthropological research. This book examines archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and traditional oral history data and brings them together in fresh ways, in many cases for the first time. With a backdrop of these new and interrelated lines of evidence, each subfield must now reevaluate its approach and the forms of evidence it uses to construct arguments.

The contributors here include the most knowledgeable scholars in each of the above fields, collectively providing the most up-to-date research on early Athapaskans and their movements and migrations. Each chapter approaches Athapaskan migration with data obtained from different regions, providing clarity as to the basis for individual arguments. Often, entrenched regional visualizations and localized conventions are clarified only when placed in juxtaposition to those of other regions. Because of this, conclusions rest on sometimes widely divergent theoretical and methodological underpinnings, thus expressing preference for and conveying weight to certain types of evidence and lines of reasoning. The goal of this volume is to expose these arguments in order to clarify appropriate directions for future research, making advances possible.
 

[more]
cover of From the Local to the Global, Third Edition: Key Issues in Development Studies

From the Local to the Global, Third Edition

Key Issues in Development Studies

Edited by Gerard McCann and Stephen McCloskey

Pluto Press, 2015

In recent years, the international development sector has found itself confronting new and persistent challenges to poverty eradication and the promotion of human rights. From The Local to the Global highlights the extent to which the local and global are interconnected in today’s world economy and questions the legitimacy of the neo-liberal model of development that they argue has propelled us into the crisis.
            This completely revised third edition takes stock of the international development environment as it embarks on new policy frameworks to confront new challenges, ensuring that From the Local to the Global will continue to serve as an indispensable introduction to key development issues such as aid, debt, trade, migration, security, gender, and climate change.
[more]