American Cultural Landscape Research Articles

Composing ourselves: the Little Theatre movement and the American audience

When movies replaced theatre as popular entertainment in the 1910s, the world of live drama was wideopen for reform. American advocates and practitioners founded theatres in a spirit of anticommercialism, seeking to develop an American audience for serious theatre, mounting plays in what would today be called alternative spaces, and uniting for the cause an eclectic group of professors, social workers, members of women's clubs, bohemians, artists, students, and immigrants. This rebellion, called the Little Theatre movement, also prompted and promoted the college theatre major, the inclusion of theatre pedagogy in K-12 education, prototypes for the nonprofit producing model, and the notion that theatre is a valuable form of self-expression. Composing Ourselves argues that the movement was a national phenomenon, not just the result of aspirants copying the efforts of the much-storied Provincetown Players, Washington Square Players, Neighborhood Playhouse, and Chicago Little Theatre. Going beyond the familiar histories of the best-known groups, Dorothy Chansky traces the origins of both the ideas and the infrastructures for serious theatre that are ordinary parts of the American cultural landscape today; she also investigates the gender discrimination, racism, and class insensitivity that were embedded in reformers' ideas of the universal and that still trouble the rhetoric of regional, educational, and community theatre. Chansky considers the achievements and failures of the Drama League of America, a network of women's clubs, to point out that theatre history has not fully realized the role of women in the Little Theatre movement. Chansky also considers a blackface production of a play about rural African Americans, which was a step towards sympathetic portrayals of minority characters yet still a reinforcement of a white, upper and middle class perspective.

Reviews of Books:The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape Denise von Glahn

Reviews of Books:The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape Denise von Glahn

‘Much unseen is also here’: John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s new western roadscapes

This article examines the legacy of John Brinckerhoff Jackson whose work on American cultural landscapes has had an immense direct and indirect influence on subsequent writers in a number of fields of American Studies. This article examines the western ‘roadscape’ in Jackson’s work as a hybrid, dialogical contact zone that offers a particularly relevant social vision of the New West as mobile and diasporic. In this respect, as in so many other aspects of his work, Jackson was both provocative and ahead of his time.

The sounds of place: music and the American cultural landscape

This study explores how the nation's landscapes have inspired American classical music composers over the centuries. Situating her study within the broader context of literary and visual arts traditions, the author examines how celebration of place in music reflects and defines America's identity.

Images of Race and Nation after September 11

September 11, 2001 is a moment in recent memory already loaded with images of historical significance. Indeed, the high discipline, the History of September 11, is already firmly established on the fertile terrain of the American cultural landscape. Some of the images of 9/11 became synonymous with the event itself; others are less well known. But these images, which began circulating almost instantly after the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center, tell important stories about more than just the event, and they require careful scrutiny.We looked at every photo in issues of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report in the six weeks following the terrorist attacks. The magazines from September and October were a collage of firefighters, vigils and schoolchildren; there were rescue workers, representatives and civilians. We considered several different variables upon which to focus our analysis-portrayals of profession, of crowd shots, of religion, of politicians-before ultimately settling on the 84 photos of perhaps the most obvious signifier of all: the American flag.The reason the flag is an “obvious” symbol is not its ubiquitousness; the recent prevalence of the national symbol is simply an illustration of a greater power. The flag is “obvious” because its meaning is taken for granted; it can be viewed without the effort of conscious interpretation. It reductively references “America.” By positioning the flag in various contexts, the newsmagazine photos simultaneously reference and construct a national definition. The flag is a symbol of national unity; it is the “idea” of the ideal nation, of the principles of its foundation, not the nation itself. In actuality, America emerges from a networkof relationships too complex to be diagramed in a simple rectangle of stripes and stars.

Ethnic Masculinity and Early Television's Vaudeo Star

This article discusses how the seemingly contradictory construction of many early television comedy stars bespeaks rather coherent symbolic constructions of ethnicity, masculinity, and anxieties over the changing demographics of the American cultural landscape.

Purified by fire: a history of cremation in America

Just one hundred years ago, Americans almost universally condemned cremation. Today, nearly one-quarter of Americans choose to be cremated. The practice has gained wide acceptance as a funeral rite, in both our private and public lives, as the cremations of icons such as John Lennon and John F. Kennedy Jr. show. This book tells the fascinating story of cremation's rise from notoriety to legitimacy and takes a provocative new look at important transformations in the American cultural landscape over the past 150 years. The author synthesises a wide array of previously untapped source material, including newspapers, consumer guides, mortician trade journals, and popular magazines such as Reader's Digest to provide this historical study of cremation in the United States. He describes many noteworthy events - from the much-criticised first American cremation in 1876 to the death and cremation of Jerry Garcia in the late 20th century. From Gilded Age to the Progressive Era to the baby boomers of today, this book takes us on a tour through American culture and traces our changing attitudes toward death, religion, public health, the body, and the environment.

New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction

"New Strangers in Paradise" offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II.Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. "New Strangers in Paradise" explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts.Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this "fourth wave" of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.

Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism.

Journal Article Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education, and Racial Discourse in American Modernism. By Chip Rhodes. (New York: Verso, 1998. vi, 218 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-85984-833-8. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 1-85984-200-3.) Get access Linda Wagner-Martin Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 4, March 2000, Pages 1835–1836, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567689 Published: 01 March 2000

New strangers in paradise: the immigrant experience and contemporary American fiction

New Strangers in Paradise offers the first in-depth account of the ways in which contemporary American fiction has been shaped by the successive generations of immigrants to reach U.S. shores. Gilbert Muller reveals how the intersections of peoples, regions, and competing cultural histories have remade the American cultural landscape in the aftermath of World War II.Muller focuses on the literature of Holocaust survivors, Chicanos, Latinos, African Caribbeans, and Asian Americans. In the quest for a new identity, each of these groups seeks the American dream and rewrites the story of what it means to be an American. New Strangers in Paradise explores the psychology of uprooted peoples and the relations of culture and power, addressing issues of race and ethnicity, multiculturalism and pluralism, and national and international conflicts.Examining the groups of immigrants in the cultural and historical context both of America and of the lands from which they originated, Muller argues that this fourth wave of immigration has led to a creative flowering in modern fiction. The book offers a fresh perspective on the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Sual Bellow, William Styron, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Bharati Mukherjee, Rudolfo Anaya, and many others.

The Banjo, from Its Roots to the Ragtime Era

The banjo, of African origin and African-American heritage, has come to be identified more closely with American popular music culture than perhaps any other musical instrument. This essay will attempt to trace the history of the banjo, following its trek across the American cultural landscape. The focus will be upon its origins as a black folk instrument, its adoption by the white minstrels in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to its diverging roles in the late nineteenth century as an instrument of both Northern white urban popular and high culture and Southern white folk culture. The essay will be followed by an annotated bibliography of secondary sources.

Rethinking the center from the margins

Rethinking the Center from the Margins K. Scott Wong (bio) Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. By Gary Y. Okihiro. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. 203 pages. $25.00 (cloth). $12.95 (paper). Since the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at Francisco State College and University of California-Berkeley, when Asian American studies emerged as part of the political/educational agenda of Ethnic studies, the field has attained a fair degree of respectability and maturity. 1 A number of universities and colleges now offer courses in Asian American studies, a variety of English department courses often include Asian American literature, and most recently, the University of California, Santa Barbara has established the nation’s first Asian American studies department. In addition, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) has grown into a nationally recognized academic association with an annual meeting, and the AAAS regularly sponsors a panel at the yearly American Studies Association conference. The maturity of the field, in terms of published scholarly work, was exemplified with the publication of Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991). These two survey texts of Asian American history marked the point at which enough research had already been published to warrant and sustain the writing of two synthetic, yet interpretive, studies of the histories of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South and Southeast Asian Americans. Utilizing primary and secondary sources, these two scholars summed up a whole generation of Asian American historical studies and thus provided the field with standards by which future synthetic historical work in the field will be measured. With [End Page 415] the publication of Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture, Asian American studies has been advanced again by Gary Okihiro’s adept blending of history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies, all of which come together to provide a provocative and insightful reading of the Asian American experience and how it fits into the larger themes of American history, Ethnic studies, American studies, and contemporary debates on what it means to be an “American.” This book is made up of six chapters, each originally presented as lectures (printed here with slight modification) at Amherst College in the spring of 1992 during Okihiro’s tenure there as the John J. McCloy ‘16 Professor of American Institutions and International Relations (Okihiro is an associate professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University). As he mentions in the preface, these lectures were written and presented during a time of cultural debates. During this period, there was a “fervent and oftentimes heated debate about the idea of a mainstream, about the core of American history and culture, about intellectual ‘ghettoization’ and ethnic ‘balkanization’“ (ix). Thus with debates of this nature in the background, these lectures take up the issues of where and when Asian Americans enter and become part of the larger American cultural and historical landscape. There is also a bittersweet irony that these lectures were commissioned by the John J. McCloy Distinguished Visiting Professorship. During the Second World War, McCloy served as the Assistant Secretary of War (and later as the High Commissioner to Germany and the president of the World Bank) and was a staunch supporter of the wartime internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans. Okihiro, one of the foremost historians of Japanese America, must have relished the opportunity to deliver these lectures under the auspices of McCloy’s legacy. 2 A general theme that reappears throughout these lectures is the contention that the core values and ideals of the nation emanate not from the mainstream but from the margins—from among Asian and African Americans, Latinos and American Indians, women, and gays and lesbians. In their struggles for equality, these groups have helped preserve and advance the principles and ideals of democracy and have thereby made America a freer place for all. (ix) Viewing American history in this way requires a recentering of our perspectives. Herein lies the book’s main contribution to the currrent discourse about race and ethnicity, gender studies, American studies, and [End Page...

Esky: the early years at Esquire

From its modest beginnings in the form of a 1933 pamphlet on men's tailoring, Esquire magazine has gone on to achieve incredible publishing success and cultural power. Its editors offered readers for the first time an unholy combination of highbrow literature by writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell, the bawdy cartoons of E. Simms Campbell and Varga, and articles on upper-class men's fashion. As Hugh Merrill points out, Esquire has since not only revolutionized the magazine industry, but also become part and parcel of substantial changes in American society: attitudes about sex, men's needs, pop and high culture, and the exploitation of an unexplored mass market - menswear. This book chronicles the first two decades of this publishing phenomenon with a keen eye on the American cultural landscape: the stories of the men who created Esquire - Arnold Gingrich, the founding editor, and David Smart, the first publisher - their battles with censorship, the history of a now-forgotten magazine empire that included Coronet and Ken, and how Esquire's formula for success became the basis for Playboy in the 1950s and even today's New Yorker.

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.

From its beginnings in hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as hip hop theorist, takes comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric Vietnam Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains vibrant force with its own aesthetic, a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw great deal of attention to itself.

The Shape of Culture: A Study of Contemporary Cultural Patterns in the United States.

1. Culture as structure and meaning 2. The American cultural landscape 3. Reproduction and decline 4. Co-ocurrence, tipping in, and bridging 5. Organizational assembly and disassembly 6. Increasing returns on diminishing artists 7. A little more on the hobby horse 8. Masses and classes 9. The transformation of American culture.

A Passion for Polka: Old-Time Ethnic Music in America

Not so long ago, songs by the Andrews Sisters and Lawrence Welk blasted from phonographs, lilted over the radio, and dazzled television viewers across the country. Lending star quality to the ethnic music of Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Jews, and Scandinavians, luminaries like Frankie Yankovic, the Polka King, and 'Whoopee John' Wilfart became household names to millions of Americans. In this vivid and engaging book, Victor Greene uncovers a wonderful corner of American social history as he traces the popularization of old-time ethnic music from the turn of the century to the 1960s. Drawing on newspaper clippings, private collections, ethnic societies, photographs, recordings, and interviews with musicians and promoters, Greene chronicles the emergence of a new mass culture that drew heavily on the vivid color, music, and dance of ethnic communities. In this story of American ethnic music, with its countless entertainers performing never-forgotten tunes in hundreds of small cities around the country, Greene revises our notion of how many Americans experienced cultural life. In the polka belt, extending from Connecticut to Nebraska and from Texas up to Minnesota and the Dakotas, not only were polkas, laendlers, schottisches, and waltzes a musical passion, but they shone a scintillating new light on the American cultural landscape. Greene follows the fortunes of groups like the Gold Chain Bohemians, illuminating the development of an important segment of American popular music that fed the craze for international dance music. And even though old-time music declined in the 1960s, overtaken by rock and roll, a new Grammy for the polka was initiated in 1986. In its ebullience and vitality, the genre endures.

Keeping fires night and day: selected letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women in America. Among the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Dorothy Canfield Fisher define literary taste in America for more than three decades. She shape the careers of such famous writers as Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen, and Richard Wright. A best-selling author herself, Fisher was also a deeply committed social activist. In Keeping Fires Night and Day, Mark J. Madigan collects much of Fisher's copious correspondence. With letters to Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead, James Thurber, and E. B. White, this volume documents Fisher's personal and professional life and career in a way that no biography could. Set against the American historical and cultural landscape from 1900 to 1958, these letters offer a firsthand account of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women. Fisher's life was anything but conventional. When her best-selling novels made her the chief breadwinner in her marriage, her husband, John Fisher, assumed the role of secretary and editor of her work. Fluent in five languages, Dorothy Canfield Fisher founded a Braille press in France and introduced the educational methods of Dr. Maria Montessori to the United States. She became a pioneering advocate of adult education and served as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education. In letters to friends, fans, and colleagues, Fisher discussed her homelife, her work, and the world around her. Her passions and concerns - revealed in her correspondence with wit and poignancy - include the New Woman and the suffrage movement, racial discrimination andthe emergence of the NAACP the development of a national education system, two world wars, the depression, and the influence of book clubs in the literary marketplace. Dorothy Canfield Fisher helped twentieth-century American literature to come of age, writes Clifton Fadiman i

The shape of culture: a study of contemporary cultural patterns in the United States

1. Culture as structure and meaning 2. The American cultural landscape 3. Reproduction and decline 4. Co-ocurrence, tipping in, and bridging 5. Organizational assembly and disassembly 6. Increasing returns on diminishing artists 7. A little more on the hobby horse 8. Masses and classes 9. The transformation of American culture.

Heresies: The Body of Pasolini's Semiotics

This essay offers a critical reconsideration of Pier Paolo Pasolini's theoretical writings on film, showing their links to current developments in critical theory. Though heavily criticized by his contemporaries, Pasolini appears today to have anticipated some of the crucial issues of post-structuralist thinking and of the condition of postmodernity. Showing these links, my essay aims to reassess the work of one of the most important intellectual and artistic figures of our times, one whose contribution has yet to be acknowledged fully in the U.S. In fact, only a very small portion of Pasolini's volcanic production has ever been translated into English. Even when translated, Pasolini's work has not made a real impact on the American cultural landscape, while for Italian, as well as French and German, culture, it holds a position of central importance. The recent translation of Heretical Empiricism, one of his many books of collected essays, published in Italy almost twenty years ago, is a step toward the entry of Pasolini's critical into the realm of American culture.' Finally available to English readers, this book enables a reconsideration by offering a sample of the range of Pasolini's cultural input and the expanse of his intellectual horizon. A true Renaissance man, Pasolini wrote extensively on a variety of topics and in diverse fields, and practiced in many different creative media. His engagement in critical claimed theory as a practice of To anyone who asked him whether he was a novelist, a theorist, a filmmaker, a critic, a polemicist, a playwright, a poet writing in dialect or in standard Italian language, he would answer, I am a writer, just as it says on my official ID. In any of its forms, the body of writing is the center of Pasolini's research. His multifaceted and eclectic creative trajectory was marked by civil activism, just as his position as a writer was characterized by a passionate engagement in the cultural and political debates of his time. Practicing a form of utopian thinking, he incessantly intervened with his scandalous work in socio-cultural praxis, and let his transgressive curiosity contaminate the separate areas and modes of professional writing. Outlined in the following pages are a few aspects of Pasolini's wide-ranging practice of writing. Over the years, as a critic and theorist, he collaborated with

The Old Order Amish Steering Committee: A Case Study in Organizational Evolution

The Old Order Amish Steering Committee: A Case Study in Organizational Evolution