American Cultural Landscape Research Articles

The Sulphur Creek Trestle Preservation Project

The Sulphur Creek Trestle Preservation Project Carolyn Barske (bio), Sunhui Sim (bio), Frances Osborn Robb (bio), and Jonathan Steadman (bio) On september 25, 1864, confederate troops under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked Union forces guarding the Sulphur Creek Trestle Bridge, located one mile south of Elkmont, Alabama, in Limestone County. The ensuing battle was the bloodiest in north Alabama, with more than 200 Union and forty Confederate troops killed. Forrest took as prisoners the remaining 820 Union soldiers. The Confederates burned Sulphur Creek Trestle Bridge, the tallest bridge on the Nashville & Decatur line, making rail travel from Nashville to Decatur impossible. The previous day, September 24, Forrest and his men defeated Union forces at Athens, Alabama, and destroyed an additional section of the Nashville & Decatur railroad line. Both engagements were part of a campaign to destroy Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s supply lines, which were necessary for his movement east through Georgia. The Nashville & Decatur railroad line connected in Decatur with the Memphis & Charleston Railroad which led directly to Chattanooga, Tennessee. These rail lines were essential for moving supplies for Union forces from Nashville to Chattanooga during Sherman’s [End Page 287] Atlanta Campaign. The Confederate victories at Athens and Sulphur Creek Trestle had less effect upon Sherman’s Georgia campaign than if they had been carried out earlier in the year, as Forrest had urged, when disarray and disagreement over the attacks’ necessity within the Confederate command structure resulted in delay. Nevertheless, the Battle of Sulphur Creek Trestle resulted in a welcome victory for the Confederacy. It also represents the first major engagement involving United States Colored Infantry (USCI) in north Alabama, as black federal soldiers serving in the 110th and 111th USCI regiments fought in close proximity to the plantations where they had previously been enslaved. In the fall of 2013, the Departments of History and Geography at the University of North Alabama received a grant from the American Battlefield Protection Program to expand and update a 1973 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Battle of Sulphur Creek Trestle. That 1973 nomination, submitted by the Alabama Historical Commission, resembles many National Register nominations from the early phase of the National Register process. After the National Register was created in 1966, preservationists hurried to nominate as many properties of historic significance as possible to begin the process of documenting the American cultural landscape. These early nominations were often very brief and lacked sufficient context, and sometimes they included only a fraction of the significant landscape. The 1973 Sulphur Creek Trestle Fort National Register nomination is a case in point. It encompassed only the fort site itself and protected just 0.787 acres. The expanded boundaries of the recent nomination, submitted in 2015, covers 317.018 acres, including the former location of the Sulphur Creek Trestle Bridge, the Union rifle pits located outside the fort site, the Confederate artillery positions, and the probable location of Forrest’s campsite the night before the attack on the fort. The expanded historic context helps to place the events of the battle of Sulphur Creek Trestle within the larger narrative of the Civil War in north Alabama and middle Tennessee. Through the development of battlefield maps, story maps, and a [End Page 288] website, the research team has made significant contributions to the documentation of the battle and the dissemination of this information to the public. The expanded National Register nomination helps historians understand how the landscape and topography of the battle site contributed to a Confederate victory. The original 1973 nomination does not explain how and why the Union troops were overwhelmed during the battle. What the original nomination tells us is that in 1864, the fort sat on a hilltop that is extremely steep on the north, east, and west sides, which would have made it difficult for enemy troops to launch a linear attack from any of these directions. The southern edge of the fort faced an open field on a plateau, which would have given Union forces a clear line of fire on advancing enemy troops. Rifle pits surrounded the fort’s perimeter, approximately 400 yards of which remain intact. Additional rifle pits were...

Are Batman and Superman the Barometer of Our Times? A Review of ‘Superheroes in Crisis’

The WWII historian Jeffrey K. Johnson studies how the two comic book legends Superman and Batman have adapted successfully to American cultural and social landscapes through time. This is a book review of ‘Superheroes in Crisis’, a monograph that details some decisive moments from their creation in the late 30’s up to the 70’s in which both characters have transformed in order to maintain their relevance as what Johnson calls ‘cultural barometers’

Extra! Extra! Read All About It

Research revealing the continued dominance of narrative texts in primary-grade classrooms, coupled with shifts in the American cultural and textual landscape, have prompted educational policy urging teachers to increase the variety of informational texts students read and the authenticity with which students use those texts. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how one first-grade teacher scaffolded students’ meaningful engagement with a nontraditional classroom text, a local newspaper, through daily interactive read-alouds. Data sources including expanded field notes, transcripts of naturalistic observations, and teacher interviews were analyzed inductively using methods of constant comparison and discourse analysis. Purposefully selected topical episodes highlighted the characteristic of newspapers as dynamic texts that privilege real-time information. Analysis identified that the teacher scaffolded engagement through thoughtful selection of content, improvisation aimed at creating connections, acknowledgment of uncertainty, and positioning of students as members of the community of people who follow current events.

Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960sJohnHughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s John Hughes. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.Perhaps no American musician has been so scrutinized or difficult to scrutinize as Bob Dylan who, even after all these years, continues to confound. subject of countless books, biographies, documentaries, interviews, essays, articles, and reviews spanning more than five decades of American history, arguably no American popular culture icon has elicited so much discussion from so many sides of the American cultural, social, and political landscape. For all of his time in the spotlight, Dylan remains a mystery to many-a master of words who, over a lifetime of and productions, is still as tricky to decipher as ever. Of course, this hasn't prevented a multitude of admirers and detractors from trying, producing a rich body of scholarly work in Dyanalysis over the years with John Hughes's Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s providing the latest addition to this collection.Focusing on Dylan's development as an artist during the pivotal decade of the Hughes's analysis of that development sidesteps many of the more familiar trappings of Dylan's personal life and legacy to present, instead, a portrait of Dylan in the Sixties as an evolving, experimenting, improvising, self-discovering performer who used his performances to create a persona that wouldn't and, therefore, couldn't be pinned down. Splitting his book into two parts, Themes and The 1960s, Hughes first lays out his major premises in a series of short interpretive readings of Dylan's many distinctive, yet elusive, presentations of in the Sixties addressing, specifically, his voice, humor, mannerisms, interviews, photographs, press conference and concert appearances before turning, in the second half of his book, to a more lengthy, yearby-year, critical chronological analysis of Dylan's songs and albums from 1961 to 1969.By any scholarly standards, this is a carefully researched, meticulously documented, thoroughly informed piece of academic work that is, at times, both illuminating and obscuring. On the plus side, Hughes does a outstanding job of introducing and linking the changing nature of Dylan's presentations, appearances, arrangements, and productions in the 1960s to the progressions in Dylan's sense of self and self-meaning, and, in so doing, he provides readers with many insightful explanations and motivations for these progressions. Empirically backing up his close readings and interpretive analyses with an abundance of source material while critically drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives including, among others, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology, Hughes convincingly lays out his book's major contention that Dylan's transformations and vagaries as a person, personality, and performer from 1961 to 1969 were neither chameleon-like nor indefinable. If the essential Bob Dylan was always hard to see, Hughes argues, it was because that essence-forever emerging, inventing, and becoming-was continually leaving behind to move on.Juxtaposing the transitory and the emancipatory, Hughes methodically lays out the linkages between Dylan's temporality and essentiality in page after page of scholarly analyses. …

Educating Children in Rural Schools: Does Nutrition Really Matter?

Citation: Laub JD. Educating Children in Rural Schools: Does Nutrition Really Matter?. J Child Dev Disord. 2015, 1:1. Public education in America is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that is funded almost exclusively by tax dollars. As an emerging part of this picture, rural public schools have been an integral part of the American cultural landscape for over 200 years. Rural public school districts are defined as a school or district that is located in a place outside of a metropolitan statistical area and has a population of fewer than 2,500 persons (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2015).

‘Mellow out or you will pay!’: The society of the spectacle in Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and other late Cold War literature

Abstract In Fresh Fruit, Dead Kennedys, like Joan Didion in Democracy (1984) and Thomas Pynchon in Vineland (1990), examine the American cultural landscape through the lens of an exaggerated and victorious totalitarian political regime as a way to investigate the failures of past cultural protest movements. Though Dead Kennedys and these authors may disagree on whether resistance to such a regime is futile, they can agree that recognizing the methods by which the society of the spectacle operates is the first step towards dismantling it. Fresh Fruit enters into a literary dialogue taking place throughout the last official decade of the Cold War, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, continuing throughout Reagan’s re-election in 1984, and ending after his presidency. Seeing Fresh Fruit in dialogue with these literary traditions, I propose that what the album adds to the cultural conversation taking place between these mediums is how it subverts the society of the spectacle. While Vineland (1990) and Democracy (1984) contend with the threat of gradually becoming a part of the society of the spectacle, Fresh Fruit seeks to arm its audience against that threat with the tools of resistance in the form of musical performance, lyrics and album artwork.

Getting Free

I employ Marshall Berman’s and Stephen Kern’s cultural analyses of modernity in late 19th-and early 20th-century Europe and the United States to examine basketball’s invention, rules, and technical and institutional development. This yields two overlapping images of basketball. First, I situate basketball within the broader context of 19th-century modernization, where, as an effect of and response to modernization, I view it as a specimen of 19th-century modernism. Second, zooming in to this first image of basketball as a 19th-century modernism, I examine basketball as a semi-autonomous modern world of its own. Within this world, I identify the appearance of a new subject—the basketball player—who engaged and transformed the spatio-temporal experiences of modernity by inventing artistic “varieties of basketball modernism,” which achieved significant popularity in the American cultural landscape of the first half of the 20th century. I therefore also track the consolidation of an institutional network—the “modern basketball state”—arising to control the basketball player’s creativity and capitalize on the sport’s popularity, and I critique the myth the modern basketball state generated to obscure its own real history and to promote the belief that the sport could not exist without it.

A Comparative Study of Urban Cultural Landscape

This study is aiming to understand differences between approaches, organizations and applications of urban cultural landscape in different places. As a comparative study, this article is focusing on the American and Turkish urban cultural landscape features and patterns. In this paper, it was examined how Schein focuses on cultural landscape in his study area, Ashland Park, Kentucky. It is also attempting to find out how Schein incorporates historical and social development of Ashland Park, as a unique neighborhood, with its urban cultural landscape? Characteristics of urban cultural landscape, its developing stages and approaches were given in the study as selected genealogy of landscape. After the part of Schein’s interpretations about insurance mapping, zoning, historical preservation and neighborhood associations related to cultural landscape, comparisons between American and Turkish urban cultural landscapes, built and preservation processes in both of those countries were discussed through examples from different part of Turkey.

“A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism”: Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age

AbstractSoprano Emma Juch (1860–1939), famous in the 1880s and 1890s, combined singing in concerts and festivals with a short English-language operatic career. Because Juch exemplifies a typical prima donna of the late nineteenth century, her life provides a perspective on the American cultural landscape that a focus on star performers cannot capture. Like all female singers, she had to negotiate between competing stereotypes about divas and the nineteenth-century distrust of women who led public lives. In response to these pressures, she constructed an image of a vigorous American singer who nevertheless understood her expected role in society. During the Gilded Age, opera's place in American culture was changing. Foreign-language opera became increasingly associated with wealth, the highest performance quality, and sometimes even cultural and moral uplift, whereas English-language opera suggested popular entertainment for the middle class and mediocre performance standards. The American Opera Company and Juch's own Emma Juch English Grand Opera Company attempted to fight against these assumptions and center opera in English performed by native singers as an important component of a distinctly American musical tradition. She was unsuccessful, however, and Juch's career, which began with great promise, lost momentum after her opera troupe folded and she slid into obscurity.

A living exhibition: the Smithsonian and the transformation of the universal museum

Since its founding in 1846 for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution has been an important feature of the American cultural landscape. In A Living Exhibition, William S. Walker examines the tangled history of cultural exhibition at the Smithsonian from its early years to the chartering of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989. He tracks the transformation of the institution from its original ideal as a intended to present the totality of human experience to the variegated museum and research complex of today. Walker pays particular attention to the half century following World War II, when the Smithsonian significantly expanded. Focusing on its exhibitions of cultural history, cultural anthropology, and folk life, he places the Smithsonian within the larger context of Cold War America and the social movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Organized chronologically, the book uses the lens of the Smithsonian's changing exhibitions to show how institutional decisions become intertwined with broader public debates about pluralism, multiculturalism, and decolonization. Yet if a trend toward more culturally specific museums and exhibitions characterized the postwar history of the institution, its leaders and curators did not abandon the vision of the universal museum. Instead, Walker shows, even as the Smithsonian evolved into an extensive complex of museums, galleries, and research centers, it continued to negotiate the imperatives of cultural convergence as well as divergence, embodying both a desire to put everything together and a need to take it all apart.

Mojo workin': the old African American Hoodoo system

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines culture and history by tracing its emergence from traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that emerged first in three distinct regions she calls clusters and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the African Religion Complex, eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the ethnic groups in the United States. The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of culture, Mojo Workin': The American System lays out the movement of against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines material culture, particularly the High John the Conquer root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the walking boy and the Ring Shout, a sacred dance of tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

Youth, Science, and the Future

AbstractThe Roosevelt Administration's New Deal social programs, designed to provide employment for out-of-work Americans during the Great Depression, included a number of projects which created jobs for artists. New Mexico, a state with significant and recognized art colonies, greatly contributed to the New Deal programs by enhancing public buildings with murals, paintings, sculpture, weaving, furniture, and pottery. A further goal of the art programs was to create a national style representing the American cultural landscape in all its diversity. At the University of New Mexico, three sets of New Deal-era murals, created by artists Willard Nash, Raymond Jonson, and Kenneth Adams, document 1930s student life and local culture.

Buddhism as Orientalism on American Cultural Landscape: The Cinematic Orientalization of Tibetan (Tantric) Buddhism

In this paper I will just cite two American movies—Little Buddha and Music and Lyrics—to illustrate how (Tibetan) Buddhism (or Dharma) has long been misrepresented and Orientalized on American cultural landscape. Since its spread to the West in the 19th century, Buddhism has long been a target or source in the Westerners’ creation of Orientalism in the arts or even mass media. In mass media, Buddhism (especially Tibetan Buddhism) has long been a source for commercial films (e.g. The Little Buddha, directed by Bertrolucci in 1993). Some of them may have been an attempt to present Buddhism as some Oriental spiritual practice or an Oriental mysticism that looks appealing to the American/Western audience and thus satisfies the Westerners’ exotic taste. Reasons of the Americanization or secularization of Buddhism may be caused by Buddhist diasporas that lead to the alienation and contestation of Dharma in a Christian context. Hence, misinterpretation is the way of understanding/interpreting a new culture. On the other hand, the misrepresentation is an inevitable phenomenon when an idea or object is translated into a foreign culture in which there is no equivalent to the idea/object. Since cinema is a main medium for public entertainment and commercial profit in the contemporary postmodern world, it could easily reflect the mass consensus of some cultural phenomenon. Hence, the misinterpretations or stereotypes of Buddhism revealed on the American cinema at least highlight the emerging need and popularity of the Dharma/Buddhism in western spiritual practice as well as its decline.

Beauty-ful Inferiority: Female Subservience in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

The ubiquity of Disney movies has certainly transformed the American cultural landscape. The Disney zeitgeist manifests itself as generations of children actively seek Prince Charmings, unrealistic fairy tale relationships and the omnipotent, happily-ever-after. One such Disney favorite, Beauty and the Beast (1991), reveals typical Disney themes such as the power of altruism, the transformation of the anthropomorphic, and the catharsis of true love. Yet, under these benevolent-seeming Disney themes lurk more sinister, subliminal messages. Beauty and the Beast promotes female subservience and subjugation in addition to the glorification of abusive relationships. Belle, the female protagonist, embodies these gendered disparities and remains objectified by the film’s masculine characters. At first glance, Belle seems as if an assertive, valiant heroine; however, a closer examination belies this understanding of Belle. Thus, my analysis intends to unearth these unexamined messages and also reveals the effect of these messages as consumed by Disney’s target audience: children. Ultimately, the animated Disney cartoon landscape conceals its more sobering, implicit messages. Unveiling these messages reveals the true nature of Disney films, and acknowledges the troubling damage inflicted by the pervasiveness of Disney and its ability to mold American culture.

Dockside Landings and Threshold Spaces: Reckoning Architecture's Place in Marine Environmental History

For centuries, American architecture and, more broadly speaking, American cultural landscapes, have been both instruments and emblems of the modern environmental temperament that Europeans brought to the New World. This legacy—one where North American settlement has simultaneously used architecture to mythologize relationships with the continent's natural endowments and to exert economic and political dominion over them—would appear to be a fundamental component of the matrix that has driven the continent's environmental history. Yet most of the field's scholarship does not situate architecture, nor use it adequately as source material, in a manner commensurate with this standing. This essay is a call to invigorate the nexus that links marine environmental history with our broadest definitions of what constitutes architectural history—in short, giving due consideration to the subtle and overt ecological standing of built environments. To advance marine environmental history from this vantage point, fisheries architecture needs to be scrutinized as environmental threshold (conduit, portal, flow) and environmental agent (ecologically dynamic, transformational). This discussion first explores a number of issues that seek to clarify how we might place buildings, boats, infrastructure, and cultural landscape more centrally in our work. Such perspectives, shaped by gradual strides in architecturally driven approaches to marine contexts, empower environmental history's capacity to reckon visually and spatially how architecture geographically organizes fisheries on land and water.

That's Entertainment

Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism By Joshua Yumibe Rutgers University Press, 2012 230 pp./$72.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb) Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity By Lauren Rabinovitz Columbia University Press, 2012 256 pp./$82.50 (hb), $27.50 (sb) Oftentimes the study of earl silent cinema is more akin to archeology than it IS to traditional modes of cinema studies. Most (roughly eighty percent) of the films of the era are gone; many primary records have long been destroyed. What remains for researchers are fragments, traces, and gleanings from other media. It is not surprising, then that historians and cultural critics have still only scratched the surface of both the cinema and other popular entertainments of the turn of the last century: a lot of deep digging and careful piece work is required. Two new books, Mating Color: Early Film, Mass. Culture, Modernism and Electric. Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, are vital contributions to our understanding or the American cultural landscape a century ago. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At first glance, they are concerned with disparate subjects the use of color in early silent film and the relationship between early cinema and amusement parks but, both are ultimately about the complex connections between silent film, popular culture, technology., and questions of modernity. Joshua Yumibe's Moving Color explores the use of applied color techniques hand coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning) in silent film. Yumibe frames his subject with considerations of changes in color theory and beliefs about the nature of visual perception in the nineteenth century and with a broader look at the increasing prevalence of color in daily life in advertising, postcards, wallpaper, etc.) Thanks to technological and chemical improvements. He positions color cinema as part of a larger popular assimilation of color in society cinema, and especially color cinema, was an acclimatizing agent to the rapid transformations wrought on society by modernism, whether it be a new sense of urban spaces, growing understandings of the body as a gendered and sexual site, or new moral and behavioral codes. Yurnibe intertwines these social and cultural consequences of color cinema and other concomitant popular entertainments.) With impressive research into the history and technology of these varied color processes. He explores not only how they were used, but why they were used--again, drawing upon newly developed nineteenth-century ideas about color theory, psychological and therapeutic uses of color, and color as a tool for moral uplift. …

Postmodernism and Language in Sam Shepard’s True West and Tooth of Crime

Sam Shepard has gained a reputation as one of America's foremost living playwrights. In over forty plays, Shepard has broken down traditional notions of dramaturgy in combining both modernist notions of the absurd and familiar icons from the American cultural landscape with an energy tinged by anarchy and violence. Moreover, Shepard has been considered by many critics as a postmodern dramatist. Hassan (1987) piles up a lengthy list of artists from various disciplines whose names epitomize postmodernism for him. The playwrights are: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and only Sam Shepard and August Wilson from America. One characteristic of postmodern literature in general, is a focus on the instability of meaning and the inadequacy of language to completely and accurately represent truth, along with an irony and playfulness in the treatment of linguistic constructs. In other words, there is a questioning of language as a medium of perception and communication. Language can name the pain but it can’t be the pain; language cannot reach the actual individual feeling. Language is not strong enough to convey the intense emotion. In postmodern poetics, there is a paradigmatic shift from the idea that language is transparent to the disclosure of its physicality, its intimacy, its obdurate persistence, and its paradoxical fragility. Thus, language is an insufficient means for transforming the ideas that exist in one's mind. The aim of the present article would be to present the ways in which the dramatic language of Sam Shepard, as a postmodern drama, demonstrates inadequacy of language in communication. In order to reach this goal, however, a number of his early dramas will be brought under scrutiny with regard to their language and style from the postmodern point of view.

Not yet a placeless land: tracking an evolving American geography

Challenges the widespread belief that the American cultural landscape has lost its diversity

Situating banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion: governing localized geographies of national identity in Indiana

Various material forms of national identity have become ubiquitous features of the post-9/11 American cultural landscape. This research specifically examines the ‘In God We Trust’ (IGWT) license plate in the state of Indiana as a material expression and territorialized form of national identity. While conceptually anchored in banal nationalism research, exploring the spatial patterns of adoption or non-adoption of IGWT license plates by Indiana residents is only possible through situating this research through the mediating lens of the culture wars and civil religion. Although the IGWT license plate project legislatively materialized through the localized spatial networks of non-state actors in the context of a new and conservative state–citizen relationship firmly anchored in the culture wars, adoption behavior is also mediated through the much broader influence of civil religion. We conduct a quantitative analysis to determine license plate spatial distribution by county, but more importantly to explore the sociodemographic dimensions of IGWT license plate adoption and non-adoption. While our results generally mirror the sociodemographic findings of social issue-based electoral geography, the imbrication of banal nationalism, the culture wars, and civil religion as materially expressed by the IGWT license plate yields an ideologically different and broader dynamic when compared to culture wars defined by national identity.

The Many Faces of International Adoption

Adoption is an old story with a new twist: international adoptions are reshaping American families and cultural landscape. In the long view, the authors believe international adoption is an immigration story that must be contextualized within research not only on individual adoptees, but within the waves of immigration that have altered American history.