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4 books match the query 'American Heartland'
Becoming Beautiful
Ballroom Dance in the American HeartlandJoanna Bosse
University of Illinois Press, 2015
In Becoming Beautiful, Joanna Bosse explores the transformations undergone by the residents of a Midwestern town when they step out on the dance floor for the very first time.
Bosse uses sensitive fieldwork as well as her own immersion in ballroom culture to lead readers into a community that springs up around ballroom dance. The result is a portrait of the real people who connect with others, change themselves, and join a world that foxtrots to its own rules, conventions, and rewards. Bosse's eye for revealing, humorous detail adds warmth and depth to discussions around critical perspectives on the experiences the dance hall provides, the nature of partnership and connection, and the notion of how dancing allows anyone to become beautiful.
Bosse uses sensitive fieldwork as well as her own immersion in ballroom culture to lead readers into a community that springs up around ballroom dance. The result is a portrait of the real people who connect with others, change themselves, and join a world that foxtrots to its own rules, conventions, and rewards. Bosse's eye for revealing, humorous detail adds warmth and depth to discussions around critical perspectives on the experiences the dance hall provides, the nature of partnership and connection, and the notion of how dancing allows anyone to become beautiful.
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Manhood on the Line
Working-Class Masculinities in the American HeartlandStephen Meyer
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Stephen Meyer charts the complex vagaries of men reinventing manhood in twentieth century America. Their ideas of masculinity destroyed by principles of mass production, workers created a white-dominated culture that defended its turf against other racial groups and revived a crude, hypersexualized treatment of women that went far beyond the shop floor. At the same time, they recast unionization battles as manly struggles against a system killing their very selves. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Meyer recreates a social milieu in stunning detail--the mean labor and stolen pleasures, the battles on the street and in the soul, and a masculinity that expressed itself in violence and sexism but also as a wellspring of the fortitude necessary to maintain one's dignity while doing hard work in hard world.
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Punks in Peoria
Making a Scene in the American HeartlandJonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Punk rock culture in a preeminently average town
Synonymous with American mediocrity, Peoria was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled fury of punk rock. Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett explore the do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the 1980s and 1990s. From fanzines to indie record shops to renting the VFW hall for an all-ages show, Peoria's punk culture reflected the movement elsewhere, but the city's conservatism and industrial decline offered a richer-than-usual target environment for rebellion. Eyewitness accounts take readers into hangouts and long-lost venues, while interviews with the people who were there trace the ever-changing scene and varied fortunes of local legends like Caustic Defiance, Dollface, and Planes Mistaken for Stars. What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a youth culture in search of entertainment but just as hungry for community—the shared sense of otherness that, even for one night only, could unite outsiders and discontents under the banner of music.
Synonymous with American mediocrity, Peoria was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled fury of punk rock. Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett explore the do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the 1980s and 1990s. From fanzines to indie record shops to renting the VFW hall for an all-ages show, Peoria's punk culture reflected the movement elsewhere, but the city's conservatism and industrial decline offered a richer-than-usual target environment for rebellion. Eyewitness accounts take readers into hangouts and long-lost venues, while interviews with the people who were there trace the ever-changing scene and varied fortunes of local legends like Caustic Defiance, Dollface, and Planes Mistaken for Stars. What emerges is a sympathetic portrait of a youth culture in search of entertainment but just as hungry for community—the shared sense of otherness that, even for one night only, could unite outsiders and discontents under the banner of music.
A raucous look at a small-city underground, Punks in Peoria takes readers off the beaten track to reveal the punk rock life as lived in Anytown, U.S.A.
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The Midwestern Pastoral
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American HeartlandWilliam Barillas
Ohio University Press, 2006
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists—Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison—in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, and others. For these writers, the aim of writing is not merely intellectual and aesthetic, but democratic and ecological. In depicting and promoting commitment to local communities, human and natural, they express their love for, their understanding of, and their sense of place in the American Midwest. Students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment, will appreciate this study of writers who counter alienation and materialism in modern society.
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