Brands

In Hollywood film and media culture of World War II, the Philippines acted as a 'homefront' or a space of identification through the presence of an 'American way of life'. World War II Hollywood films set in the Philippines — Texas to Bataan (1942), Corregidor (1943), Bataan (1943), They Were Expendable (1945) and Back to Bataan (1945) — establish a dynamic of foreign domesticity by grafting domestic signifiers onto the foreign space of the Philippines and across Filipino bodies; particularly through the trope of US heroism as signified by General MacArthur, references to the Alamo and the genre of the Western, and domestic cultural objects and practices. These films served related purposes: they recruited a public into a foreign war, created a recognizable war zone 'homefront', and consolidated the image and ideology of control over the formerly 'insurgent' colony.

Foreword Introduction: Sport and the Cold War 1. Sport and the American Way of Life 2. Molding America's Youth 3. Chip Hilton, Cold Warrior 4. Rehabilitating the American Way: The NCAA and the Myth of Purity 5. Predicting Loyalty: Sport, the American Way, and Their Opponents 6. Opportunities Gained: African-Americans and the American Way of Life 7. Opportunities Lost: Women and the American Way of Life Epilogue: Bringing It All Together Bibliography Index.

Book Review| July 01 1951 Freedom and the University: The Responsibility of the University for the Maintenance of Freedom in the American Way of Life by Edgar N. Johnson, et al Freedom and the University: The Responsibility of the University for the Maintenance of Freedom in the American Way of Life. By Johnson, Edgar N.; Calkins, Robert D.; Rostow, Eugene V.; Lilienthal, Joseph L.Jr.; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Kirkland, Edward C.. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950. Pp. ix, 129. $2.00. Alan K. Manchester Alan K. Manchester Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1951) 50 (3): 445–446. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-50-3-445 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alan K. Manchester; Freedom and the University: The Responsibility of the University for the Maintenance of Freedom in the American Way of Life by Edgar N. Johnson, et al. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1951; 50 (3): 445–446. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-50-3-445 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1951 by Duke University Press1951 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Complicity Noël Burch (bio) Anyone who comes in from the outside quickly learns that the people of the U$A are the most un/misinformed in the developed world, that the country is one [End Page 131] where there is no public debate about any of the essential issues of our time. Capitalism versus socialism, productivism, consumerism, and imperialism—all are carefully erased, dispersed, always already irrelevant. And indeed, along with "the lies my teacher told me"1 and a debased electoral system,2 the media are certainly the most important vector of this unique combination of ignorance, prejudice, and helplessness. But what else, one is tempted to ask, is new? So forgive me if I do not address questions of media studies, which anyway are not really in my ken. Instead, let me set forth briefly—and rather peremptorily, I am afraid—my objection to an assumption that seems to underlie all of these essays, one that sets the manipulators against the manipulated, the guilty ruling classes and their media flunkies against the innocent masses. Christopher Sharrett states this assumption thus: "Knowing the historical context of U.S. state operations is important to understanding how provoked or fabricated crises and a propaganda system that collaborates in this deception are necessary to gain public acceptance of policies that would otherwise be abhorrent." Really? Abhorrent to all Americans? I wonder. This kind of rhetoric belongs to a stalwart left tradition that probably has a Greek name and that consists of feigning to believe that "the people," or "the workers," implicitly share the consciousness of a lucid vanguard (feminists have been guilty of the same oratorical sleight of hand). As such, of course, it is a touching stamp of authenticity: all of these authors are fighting to keep alive the materialist values of the Left, and I salute their efforts. However, this distant observer—and until recently regular visitor—suspects on the contrary that there is a deep tacit complicity between those directly responsible for U$ actions abroad, judged abhorrent indeed by most of the rest of the world, and the mindset of the vast majority of people living in "America," whose usurped denomination has always hinted at its hegemonic vocation. That complicity has a name. Bush senior spelled it out when he defended the U$ refusal to adhere to the Kyoto protocol—meant to start containing the greenhouse effect—in the name of "the American way of life." This brazen contempt for the planet and the future of humanity failed to arouse substantial protest in the United States. Was it simply for lack of information? Or was it because the immense majority of the Bush family's compatriots—not just the alienated born-againers in the Bible Belt—are happy to benefit from that way of life . . . even its K-Mart tag ends? And because they have been trained to live in an eternal present. And I include most of the well-paid academics who constitute the backbone of the liberal and the Radical Left in the country. As Bush juniorand the rest of that gang know, if you are not going to reduce the consumption of gasoline, then you need new resources (hence the Alaska scandal, the campaign against Cesar Chavez, and the war to get Saddam's oil). And the electorate seems less and less disturbed about massacring a lot of gooks "out there," in that mostly fictional world that 80 percent of Americans have never visited. Terry Eagleton suggests that the popularity in the United States of postmodernist ideology is a way of coping with a lived contradiction: [End Page 132] This doctrine . . . is currently being deployed by some to defend the American way of life. . . . In order to avoid the unwelcome conclusion that there is no rational justification for one's form of life, one must seek to disable the very idea of critique itself, branding it as necessarily "metaphysical," "transcendent," "absolute," or "foundational."3 The American way of life has many dimensions, most of them pernicious,4 but Bush père was referring in fact to that culture of consumption/ WASTE (the latter being the obliterated face of the American way of life) that along...

This essay reads Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew alongside Robert Bellah’s “Civil Religion in America” to illuminate how mid-century thinkers constructed, rather than merely observed, a vision of, and for, American religion. Placing Herberg in direct conversation with Bellah illuminates why Herberg’s religious triptych depiction of America endured while his argument for an “American Way of Life”—the prototype for Bellah’s widely accepted idea of civil religion—flailed. Although Herberg’s “American Way of Life” and Bellah’s “Civil Religion” resemble one another as systems built on but distinct from faith traditions, they emerged from intellectual struggles with two distinct issues. Herberg’s work stemmed from the challenges wrought by ethnic and religious diversity in America, while Bellah wrote out of frustration with Cold War conformity. Both men used civil religion to critique American complacency, but Herberg agonized over trite formulations of faith while Bellah derided uncritical affirmations of patriotism. Bellah’s civil religion co-existed with and, more importantly, contained Herberg’s “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” triad and obscured the American Way of Life. In an increasingly diverse and divisive America, Bellah’s civil religion provided a more optimistic template for national self-critique, even as Herberg’s American Way of Life more accurately described the limits of national self-understanding.

Mindy Calling: Size, Beauty, Race in The Mindy Project

Considering the texts produced by Ad Reinhardt as a primary source, the study aimed to show the development of his thinking and the place of his writings in the domain of the discussions of art criticism that guided the production of North American avant-garde to the sixties of the twentieth century and examined the influence of his writings on authors who wrote in this same decade. Firstly, the work investigated the appropriations that the ideas linked to European artistic avant-garde suffered by comparison with the needs peculiar to the American cultural environment of the thirties. In a second moment, it analyzed how this debate is updated to serve as a basis for the creation and production of an artistic avant-garde of U.S., which, in turn, is made official and institutionalized in the post-war years. Years that, not by chance, marks the attempt to impose worldwide, in full progress of the cold war, the "American way of life" by consolidating the culture of middle class. In this context, considering the position of Ad Reinhardt, the question is shifted toward the limits and possibilities of the critic position implicit in his writings in contrast with the society articulated around the consumption of goods, as was set up in the post-war North American experience. In this sense, research is guided to verify the circumstances in which the Reinhardt's texts are read, especially by his colleagues from the mid-sixties. In short, this route, at the end of its journey, sought to demonstrate the importance, in the midst of the debate on North American modernism, of the central concept of Ad Reinhardt: Art-as-Art, and the ideas related to it

Examination of anti‐obscenity campaigns in the post‐war years suggests that the ideals of masculinity mandated by cold war politics troubled Americans in ways more complex than historians have recognised. Psychiatrists, politicians and clubwomen focused on the graphic depiction of an aggressive, even violent, male heterosexuality in comic books and erotica to suggest that American men had become too hard and undomesticated, unable to sustain the institution so central to the American way of life – the family. Framed as a defence of beleaguered mothers and their children against male sadists, these campaigns expressed the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands on gender and family ideologies required by the domestic and foreign policies of the cold war.

Americans are unlikely to lose their cherished rights because of a military coup or a foreign conquest, writes Michael Lind. The more plausible and frightening scenario is one in which foreign danger forces Americans themselves to jettison their way of life, sacrificing liberty to ensure security. To prevent this scenario from happening is the real purpose of American strategy. In The American Way of Strategy, Lind argues that the goal of U.S. foreign policy has always been the preservation of the American way of life--embodied in civilian government, checks and balances, a commercial economy, and individual freedom. Lind describes how successive American statesmen--from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton to Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--have pursued an American way of strategy that minimizes the dangers of empire and anarchy by two means: liberal internationalism and realism. At its best, the American way of strategy is a well-thought-out and practical guide designed to preserve a peaceful and demilitarized world by preventing an international system dominated by imperial and militarist states and its disruption by anarchy. When American leaders have followed this path, they have lead our nation from success to success, and when they have deviated from it, the results have been disastrous. Framed in an engaging historical narrative, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary debates. The American Way of Strategy is certain to change the way that Americans understand U.S. foreign policy.

The National Cybersecurity Strategy of the United States of America, issued in 2018 by the Donald Trump administration, indicated as the first pillar, among others, preserving the American way of life. The article aims to present the American way of life as a value that binds Americans, becomes symbols of America and at the same time is one of the political slogans of the Republican party. The American way of life consists of a number of features, including human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and association are legally protected, including in cyberspace. According to Trump, the development of the Internet has made one of the greatest advances since the industrial revolution, enabling great advances in trade, healthcare, communications and every element of the national infrastructure, and the United States aims to uphold the principles of protecting and promoting open, interoperable, reliable and secure Internet.

Focusing on the period of post-war European reconstruction, this article examines the ways in which the US influenced the course of social democracy in Denmark. Under the Marshall Plan, trade unionists were invited to see America with their own eyes to learn about 'the American way of life'. The Danes turned out not to be particularly interested in American ways of organizing trade unions and were not afraid to lecture the Americans on social rights. However, they did not have any problems in accepting that American-style productivity was a 'key to plenty'. The Social Democrats' plans for a welfare society were reinforced both by their visit to the prestigious New Deal project TVA and by their perception of what was still missing in the otherwise rich America. In their minds, the American concept of productivity and their own demand for full employment and social security would pave the way for a prosperous Denmark, where all levels of society would share the benefits of rising standards of living.

The financialization of society has generated an ethos based on the desire for profit without ethical limits worldwide, leading to the destruction of natural ecosystems and cultures, and poverty and inequality. Moreover, the financial lack of control has led to the crisis of the system itself, not only economically but also environmentally, because financial capitalism is not sustainable, since it needs to grow indefinitely to maintain itself. Naturally, this is not feasible for the simple fact that we live in a closed system, with limits that cannot be surpassed, which is Earth. Therefore, the grounds of this article rely upon the following hypothesis: the strategy against financial capitalism and consumer society resides in the transformation of the “American way of life” into a sustainable lifestyle. First and foremost, the present article aims to describe and offer an in-depth perspective about what, in the specialized literature, is known under the name of “The American way of life”. Our main goal is to pinpoint some of its key features and try to offer, for each one of them, a sustainable counterpart. Hence, a systematic literature review of the subject matter has been carried out with a search for information in various media such as books, magazines, newspapers, and web pages. The main topics pondered were: political and economic news; critical philosophical thinking with capitalism; the history of ecology and current proposals; and conferences of international institutions related to sustainable development. Therefore, the article is structured as follows: the first part of the article aims to review the current situation, based on recent informative data, books on the main theme as well as documents from international organizations. Thus, an analysis of the role of culture in civilization is being carried out, focusing on the cultural model of capitalist civilization and the reasons for its crisis, throughout the literature review. Secondly, we try to explain why there is a global need to move towards sustainable development by analyzing the possibilities of evolution. Finally, we try to advocate for a sustainable-oriented paradigm of doing business, one that can help us redirect and reconfigure our business effort of growing and expanding, underpinning research and practice of sustainability and development. It is therefore essential to adopt a core framework for practice and research on human-environmental systems, to bridge gaps between science and practice – on one hand, and social, ecological, professional sciences - on the other hand.

Reviewed by: Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe Jill Massino Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe. By Patrizia Albanese. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Pp. 224. $58.00 (cloth). In this book Patrizia Albanese uses gender relations and family policies in select countries in twentieth-century Europe as lenses through which to rethink and resolve debates regarding nationalism, modernity, and citizenship. Her overarching aim is to test "whether nationalism intends to modernize or archaize gender and family relations" (21) and evaluate the degree to which it succeeds in doing so. To this end, she takes a comparative historical approach, focusing on Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia/Croatia during the interwar and post-1989 periods. This is a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of space, and in the end the book sacrifices depth and nuance for breadth. While Albanese claims to examine "the virtually unpublicized side of nationalist traditionalism, xenophobia, and misogyny: what nationalist regimes do to and for their own women when the rest of the world is looking, but not seeing" (3), a good portion of the book synthesizes existing scholarship on gender in twentieth-century Germany, Italy, and Russia. Moreover, while Albanese aptly illustrates the negative impact of nationalist policies on women, she does not examine the diverse ways in which women were affected by and responded to these policies. Nonetheless, by revisiting women's historically complex relationship to nationalism in the European context, the book reminds us that nationalism is not simply something that happens in "distant lands with alien customs," it also exists in societies closer to home. The first two sections of the book sketch the general political, economic, and social contexts in each country, outlining governmental attitudes, policies, and practices as they related to women and the family. The third and final section compares the demographic outcomes of nationalist policies, [End Page 382] evaluating them according to governmental models (the welfare state vs. neoliberalism) and notions of civic and social rights. In section 1 Albanese compares the nationalist states of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to the nonnationalist states of Yugoslavia and revolutionary Russia during the interwar period, while in section 2 she compares the nonnationalist states of Germany and Italy to Croatia and Russia during the post-1989 period. According to Albanese, this comparative two-by-two model is designed to control for the impact of overall changes in the position of women in modern society as well as nation-specific trends and global events, such as recessions. Albanese's choice to focus on revolutionary Russia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as her nonnationalist case studies for the interwar period is both curious and problematic. Far from being nonnationalist, Yugoslavia was a hotbed of nationalist tension during the interwar period, especially between Croatia and Serbia. Albanese claims that, as a result of industrialization, traditional family forms were gradually being replaced by nuclear households and that over two hundred feminist groups existed in Yugoslavia by 1921; however, it is unclear what the overall impact of these processes was on women's status and roles, since she offers no information on women's political, legal, and economic status during this period. Instead she notes that marriage and family life was regulated by local, ethnic, and religious groups and that women were subject to "private patriarchy," a situation that, while not nationalist, was presumably considerably restricting for women. Meanwhile, by limiting her analysis to revolutionary Russia, she downplays the significance of nationalist tendencies and some of the conservative gender policies that characterized the majority of the interwar period under Stalin. Like nationalism, Stalinism was, in certain respects, a reaction to modernizing trends. For example, during the 1930s women lost the right to legal abortion and to file paternity suits and found it increasingly difficult to obtain a divorce. Albanese concludes that in all four nationalist regimes "a nationalist leader's rise to power was accompanied by changes to family policies, from relatively less to more traditional and patriarchal ones" (161). Accordingly, birthrates rose in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the 1930s (a time when they...

As United States policymakers charted a more aggressive internationalism at the end of World War II, it was not immediately clear how ordinary Americans might be affected by this new course. Early Cold War blueprints mentioned a role for civilians in the emerging East–West conflict, but this amounted to fervent but still fuzzy calls for heightened public interest in current events. As US–Soviet relations grew chillier, Cold War architects such as George Kennan sermonized that morally flabby Americans would have to strengthen their civic muscles and “measure up” to earlier generations of revolutionary Americans whose courage and commitment had preserved the nation. In more muted and sterile policy parlance, other Cold Warriors grimly foretold a future of higher taxes, cuts in nondefense spending, and the restraint of civil liberties for the promise of internal security. By 1950, however, a National Security Council policy paper, NSC 68, warned more starkly that the Cold War was not merely a clash of ideologies but rather “a real war in which the survival of the free world [was] at stake.” To meet the challenge, Americans would have to summon their better selves and demonstrate their “ingenuity, sacrifice, and unity.” Such were the stakes for mid-century Americans, but few of them readily understood their new civic burdens. National security planners talked more to one another than to their publics, and much of this early reflection about the Cold War’s domestic impact would be held closely within policy circles. And yet, to get the needed public engagement, presidents and a vast array of military and civilian administrators had to somehow translate and disseminate these plans to American citizens. From the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s, policymakers tasked the Cold War’s home-front institutions — state and local governments, schools, businesses, labor unions, civic organizations, and media — with the same objective of containment they would pursue at higher levels through military and covert means. The job was formidable: how could they popularize national security goals in a civilian vernacular? How could they reorient a nation-state around national security objectives while still maintaining the legal, economic, and cultural traditions that most citizens identified as “the American way of life”? Even NSC 68 acknowledged that the American people and American institutions would have to be mobilized through a “traditional democratic process” that respected basic values and institutions and the slower tempo of consensusbuilding.

Byte wars: the impact of September 11 on information technology