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5 books match the query 'Main Street'

cover of Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939

Birth Control on Main Street

Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1939

Cathy Moran Hajo

University of Illinois Press, 2010

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

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

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

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cover of Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Main Street and Empire

The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization

Poll, Ryan

Rutgers University Press, 2012

The small town has become a national icon that circulates widely in literature, culture, and politics as an authentic American space and community. Yet there are surprisingly few critical studies that analyze the small town’s centrality to the United States’ identity and imagination.

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

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


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cover of Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II

Mexico on Main Street

Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II

Gunckel, Colin

Rutgers University Press, 2015

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

The Press and Main Street

El Pais--Journalism in Democratic Spain

Juan Luis Cebrian, Translated by Brian Nienhaus

University of Michigan Press, 1990

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

The Shop on Main Street

Ladislav Grosman

Karolinum Press, 2019

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