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233 books match the query 'Political culture' and 3 start with n

cover of Nearly Neighbors: Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination

Nearly Neighbors

Jane Addams, Johnny Powers, and the Progressive Political Imagination

Terrence J. McDonald

University of Chicago Press, 2026

An engaging look at the encounter between Jane Addams, Hull House settlement co-founder and Progressive reformer, and Alderman Johnny Powers.
 
Jane Addams was full of courage and goodwill when she opened Hull House in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward in 1889. However, she failed to understand that her immigrant neighbors had been well-organized around mostly Catholic churches and schools for decades before her arrival. Her ultimate political rival, Johnny Powers, grew up in this culture but was no ethnic hero or deep political thinker. Nearly Neighbors is the first book to provide a contextualized history of their encounter, embedding it in the social and political culture and structures of Chicago and the Nineteenth Ward in the 1890s.

Terrence J. McDonald provides a crucial analysis of two pivotal figures in Chicago’s political history, in part by providing the first detailed assessment of Powers’s life and practices, but also by demonstrating Addams’s misconception of him and her neighbors—and why it matters for understanding her Progressive work overall. In both her political work and writings, Addams saw her ethnic neighbors as bundles of economic need, rather than bearers of ethnic culture. At the same time, she was recruited by elite allies into causes that appeared to be opposed by her neighbors. These views and practices permitted Powers to win in their climactic political battle in 1898 simply by claiming to be the neighborhood defender against Addams and her “downtown” allies. Nearly Neighbors offers a new way of understanding Addams and the complicated legacy of her famous political work and writings. 
 
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cover of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History

Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

A Cultural History

Christopher Conway

Vanderbilt University Press, 2015

Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History provides a panoramic and accessible introduction to the era in which Latin America took its first steps into the Modern Age. Including colorful characters like circus clowns, prostitutes, bullfighters, street puppeteers, and bestselling authors, this book maps vivid and often surprising combinations of the new and the old, the high and the low, and the political and the cultural. Christopher Conway shows that beneath the diversity of the New World there was a deeper structure of shared patterns of cultural creation and meaning. Whether it be the ways that people of refinement from different countries used the same rules of etiquette, or how commoners shared their stories through the same types of songs, Conway creates a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the culture of an entire hemisphere.


The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.

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cover of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy

No Caption Needed

Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites

University of Chicago Press, 2007

In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites provide the definitive study of the iconic photograph as a dynamic form of public art. Their critical analyses of nine individual icons explore the photographs themselves and their subsequent circulation through an astonishing array of media, including stamps, posters, billboards, editorial cartoons, TV shows, Web pages, tattoos, and more. Iconic images are revealed as models of visual eloquence, signposts for collective memory, means of persuasion across the political spectrum, and a crucial resource for critical reflection.
Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.

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