American Dynasty Research Articles

Cultural Views of a Society Through Taylor Swift’s Song

Songs as cultural products function to help people to fulfil their needs. When people listen to the songs, they both enjoy the melody and also lyrics of the songs. Songs serve as tools to achieve different essential objectives such as changing moods, relating, and shaping their own identity. In this research, the writer studies deixis in song lyrics from the selected song in Taylor Swift's Folklore album: Cardigan, the Last Great American Dynasty, August, Illicit Affairs, and Betty. The analysis deixis of this study reveals a variety of life issues is treated directly or is strongly involved in the content of the lyrics of songs. This study found that lyrics have undergone dramatic changes when the influence of other cultures is unavoidable. This is an issue of significant interest and concern for parents and educators.

The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty by Laura Trevelyan

Reviewed by: The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty by Laura Trevelyan Matthew C. Hulbert The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty. Laura Trevelyan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-3002-2338-5. 264 pp., cloth, $28.00. The prologue to Winchester '73, a classic 1950 western starring Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters, reads: "This is a story of the Winchester Rifle Model 1873 . . . 'The gun that won the West.' . . . To cowman, outlaw, peace officer or soldier, the Winchester '73 was a treasured possession. . . . An Indian would sell his soul to own one." In addition to Stewart, the likes of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, and Yul Brynner all carried the Model 1873 on film. Not surprisingly, given its vanguard position in American pop culture, thousands of pages have been written concerning the schematics, exploits, and history of the rifle. From the very beginning, however, BBC anchor and author Laura Trevelyan disclaims that The Winchester: The Gun That Built an American Dynasty is anything but another chronicle of this iconic gun. Nor is it even a straightforward history of the family—a family to which Trevelyan belongs—that created it; rather, this book is the biography of that family's business, which began just as the sectional crisis started to boil over into civil war. In the late 1850s, Oliver Winchester (Trevelyan's great-great-great-grandfather) incorporated the New Haven Arms Company and worked with Benjamin T. Henry to produce a highly successful line of lever-action repeating rifles. As Trevelyan notes, Winchester tried in vain to market the rifle to the U.S. Army when the Civil War began, but stubborn military officials (and Lincoln) preferred the lighter weight and the slower rate of fire of the Spencer carbine. Winchester's rifles largely missed out on the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy—but they would take center stage in the new territories that the Union's victory threw open for settlement. After the Civil War, the name of the business changed to the more recognizable Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and models such as the 1866, 1873, 1886, 1892, and 1894 became immensely popular on the western frontier. Cow punchers, rustlers, homesteaders, gold prospectors, lawmen, and bounty hunters all valued the Winchester for its superior rate of fire. The company's rifles were even in the hands of Sioux, Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne warriors in 1876 as they slaughtered George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Despite [End Page 318] these decades of achievement, World War I would prove the company's downfall; Winchester overexpanded to meet government contracts but hemorrhaged money as the prices of raw materials and production skyrocketed. The Great War threw the company into a financial tailspin, and by the 1930s, following multiple failed recovery schemes, it had fallen out of the Winchester family's hands. While not explicitly stated, the book's narrative touches on several important developments in Civil War–era history: the growth of American weapons manufacturing in the lead-up to and during the Civil War; the process of integrating (or failing to integrate) new weapons technologies into the largest armies America had ever known; how those technologies borne of the war were transported west and used to carry white civilization to the frontier; and, perhaps most interesting of all, how businessmen of the Civil War generation, like Oliver Winchester, coped with the onset of not just industrial capitalism but industrialized warfare. That said, because these dots are generally left for the reader to connect, the main issue surrounding The Winchester is one of readership. More specifically, it's somewhat unclear what constitutes this book's target audience. On one hand, gun enthusiasts and western history buffs will likely be disappointed with the lack of technical details and gory shootouts. On the other hand, professional historians of capitalism or the military will not find much new to mine from Trevelyan's narrative or her sources. Trevelyan is a more than capable storyteller but has a tendency to repetition. Regardless, the story brims with engaging and eccentric characters, ranging from Oliver Winchester to Benito Juarez to...

Mythbusting Publishing: Questioning the ‘Runaway Popularity’ of Published Biography and Other Life Writing

Mythbusting Publishing: Questioning the ‘Runaway Popularity’ of Published Biography and Other Life Writing

Giant Manifesto

Page 25 March–April 2008 In Defense of Big Beer Mark C. Smith Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer Maureen Ogle Harcourt http://www.harcourtbooks.com 432 pages; cloth, $25.00 Books on beer have flooded the American market. Not only are there dozens upon dozens of new books, but also websites and online bookstores have located and often republished historical sources. Most of the contemporary works involve the microbrewery craze, especially how-to works on how to brew or at least recognize quality lagers and ales.Yet, important academic works have emerged as well. The Alcohol and Drugs History Society founded in 1979 has done excellent work, especially on the understudied subjects of the drinker and drinking. Foremost among these are the edited collection Drinking: Belief and Behavior in Modern History (1991) and Madelon Powers’s superb anthropological study Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (1998). Political historians such as Richard Hamm and David Kyvig have resurrected the constitutional issue of the interstate commerce of alcohol and the ineptitude of the brewers at the Prohibition threat. Ogle is swimming against a tide of popular adulation of the small microbreweries and their creativity, independence, and even ambition. Maureen Ogle’s contribution to this movement , Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, concentrates on the history of the beer industry, especially the largest corporate breweries, and the constant changes in technology necessary to meet the changing demands of American consumers. Beginning with the Best family who developed Pabst, the first of the great Milwaukee breweries, Ogle demonstrates how the initiative and ambition of founders coupled with attention to product and markets created those few businesses that would eventually develop into regional and, later, national institutions. She emphasizes the character and personality of these individuals and, more importantly, of their sons and occasionally daughters. She clearly believes that companies that lose their familial base die out. Indeed, she sometimes takes on an almost mystical tone regarding the connection between families and beer; of the Coors family, she declares “their engineering talents, a passion for precision and machinery having been imprinted in the Coors DNAat conception.” (Don Baum’s Citizen Coors:An American Dynasty [2000] provides a very different view of the Coors family.) Actually a more accurate title for this book would be Ambitious Brewing Families: The Story of Corporate Beer. Ogle freely admits to a “great man” theory of history, individuals “who ranged through their days oblivious to indecision or failure, dismissive of doubt and human frailty.” Her greatest men are the Bests/Pabsts, the Uihleens of the Schlitz Company, and especially the Buschs of AnheuserBusch , and in the new generation, Fritz Maytag of Anchor Steam and Jim Koch of Sam Adams beers. Ogle praises these hard-eyed entrepreneurs, emblematic of a society where everyone thrives through the untrammeled success of the few. She supports big beer in bullying its suppliers into near-bankrupt prices, its buying up of saloons and displacement of independent saloonkeepers at the turn of the century , the crushing of the skilled unions, establishing pools and monopolies, and shutting off distribution systems to smaller companies. She offhandedly notes the Buschs’s triumph “over lesser men,” sees the first Adolphus Busch “as brilliant an entrepreneur as brewing or any other industry would ever know,” and portrays his equally ruthless son August as “a man who ‘never did a mean thing.’” Another of her and Anheuser-Busch’s shared enemies is the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which criticized the beer industry for directing its advertising toward the young. Ogle retorts that numerous studies—none of them cited or their funding examined—show that neo-Prohibition of agencies like the Center and not advertising increases drinking among youth. Ironically, Ogle writes well and informatively of the role of advertising in increasing beer sales throughout her text. Ogle’s prose is lively and engaging, although at times overwrought. She has two different individuals “helming” their breweries and another sharing the helm by page fifty-one. Her desire to keep up the pace of her style leads to numerous inaccuracies. One would be hard pressed to find a history text...

Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay

January/February 2008 Historically Speaking 39 Alex Uchtenstein is associateprofessor of history at Florida International University. Most recently he coauthored (with EricArnesen) an introduction to a new edition of KatherineArchibald's'Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is working on a study of kbor, civil rights, and anticommunism inpostwar Florida. ' In Boiling Point: Republicans, Democrats, andthe Decline of MiddleClass Prosperity (Random House, 1993) Phillips wrote: "Race was a catalyst of Dixie realignment, but by no means its only one." The others included "small-town and rural values, patriotism, doubts about welfare, religious traditionalism, and a hostility toward bureaucrats, ¡udges, intellectuals and the news media." 1 Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, andthe Transformation of American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 12; Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 19631994 (Louisiana Sute University Press, 1996). 5Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the NewAmerican Right (Princeton University Press, 2001); Donald Critchlow, Phyla 's Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade (Princeton University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The SilentMajority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006);Joseph Crespino, In Search of AnotherCountry: Mississippi andthe Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007). All have appeared in Princeton's "Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America" series, edited by William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, andJulian Zelizer. Interestingly, Crespino (Mississippi ), Kruse (Nashville), and Lassiter (Atlanta), all grew up in the post-civil rights South. * Lassiter, SilentMajority, 226. 5 Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 39-40. 6 Lassiter's book, published in 2006, all but predicts the June 28, 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involvedin Community Schools v. Seattle SchoolDistrictNo.1. Interestingly, both Lassiter and Kevin Kruse signed an Amid Curea brief in the case, defending the school district's efforts to use student reassignment to maintain racial balance. 7 Thomas Schaller, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South (Simon and Schuster, 2006). ! "??????," Citizen's Informer,July-September 2005, http://coverthistory.blogspotcom/2005/10/racism-in-conservative -movcmenthtm, accessed Sep. 17, 2007. 5John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The RightNation: WhyAmerica is Diffèrent (Penguin, 2004), 12. 10Thomas Frank, What's the Matterwith Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004). 11Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty:Aristocracy, Fortune, andthe Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 2004), ix. Cronyism and Creative Destruction in Pittsburgh and Beyond: A Review Essay Edward Balleisen It's a propitious time to reconsider the historical significance of the capitalists who oversaw America's emergence as the world's leading industrial economy. A full thirty years has elapsed since Alfred Chandler's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Visible Hand, codified the long prevailing interpretation of American managerial capitalism. Chandler's death at 89 this past spring by no means heralds the demise of his approach to the history of the large-scale business corporation. It's hard to envisage any treatment of business since 1880 that dispenses widi his emphasis on the central role of career managers at oligopolistic firms, their turn to modern research and development, and their refinement of decentralized management strategies. But two generations have produced quite a bit of scholarship probing the limitations of Chandlerian business history.' Perhaps of even greater importance than thirty years of historiography has been thirty years of history . Managerial capitalism has come in for something of a drubbing since 1980, if not before. The ossification of so many one-time corporate behemoths in the United States, first made painfully clear during the stagflation of the 1970s, led to pervasive criticism of professional managers. Long-serving salaried CEOs of poorly performing American companies , critics complained, lacked a sufficient ownership stake to keep them focused on the challenges of maintaining profitability in an increasingly globalized economy. Academic economists helped to lead this charge, calling not only for a thoroughgoing reliance on stock options as a means of executive compensation , but also for vibrant takeover markets. This combination of carrots and sticks would ostensibly encourage managers to make...

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

This is an acerbic, withering account of the ascent of the Bush family to the pinnacle of the American political and social elite and the implications of the dynasty's hold on power for democracy in America. With an unerring instinct for fakery and humbug, Phillips traces the convoluted trail of Bush mendacity through three generations. The picture he paints of a family willing to do anything to hold power and a country so craven as to vote for it is both very funny and completely dismaying in equal measure.

Review: The Hearsts: An American Dynasty, by Judith Robinson

Review: <i>The Hearsts: An American Dynasty</i>, by Judith Robinson

The Hearsts: An American Dynasty

The Hearsts: An American Dynasty

The Hearsts: An American Dynasty

The Hearsts: An American Dynasty

Review: The Hearsts: An American Dynasty, by Judith Robinson

Review: <i>The Hearsts: An American Dynasty</i>, by Judith Robinson

The Hearsts: an American dynasty

This is the first biography of the Hearsts based largely on the Hearst family papers that were not available to the authors of previous biographies. Featured in this study are William Randolph Hearst, tycoon, newsman, and politician; George Hearst, miner and U.S. Senator; and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, philanthropist and businesswoman. Illustrated.

The Calms of Capricorn: A Preliminary Edition, Vol. I, The Scenario by Eugene O’Neill, ed. by Donald Gallup, and: Work Diary 1924–1943 ed. by Donald Gallup, and: Eugene O’Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays ed. by Virginia Floyd

Reviews 195 there were many fine revelations. Confronted by a school of “metadrama” I feel, while not doubting the excellence of each contributor, I have strayed into a scholastic Cave of Error where the method has become more absorbing than the drama. MARIE AXTON N ew n h am C ollege, C am bridge Eugene O’Neill, T h e C alm s o f C apricorn: A P relim inary E dition , Vol. I, The Scenario, transcribed by Donald Gallup; Vol. II, The Play, de­ veloped by Donald Gallup. New Haven: Yale University Library, 1981. Vol. I, pp. xviii + 64; Vol. II, pp. 122. Eugene O’Neill, W ork D ia ry 1924-1943, transcribed by Donald Gallup, preliminary edition. 2 vols. (including “Scribbling Diary for 1925”). New Haven: Yale University Library, 1981. Pp. iv >+ 522. E ugene O ’N eill a t W ork: N ew ly R eleased Ideas fo r P lays, ed. Virginia Floyd. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Pp. xxxix + 407. $25.00. A treasure trove of materials at Yale, hitherto restricted by terms of the O’Neill estate, is now being opened to scholars. As part of this pro­ cess, several publications of importance (including an interesting scenario by O’Neill) have appeared, and there are hints of other projects under way. Virginia Floyd has given us E ugene O ’N eill a t W ork: N e w ly R eleased Ideas fo r P lays, a major compendium that enlarges our understanding of what the playwright did and what he tried to do. In addition, Donald Gallup, former Curator of the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has published O’Neill’s W ork D iary, which will enable us to trace O’Neill’s annual—and some­ times daily—progress on his plays. Moreover, a new uniform edition of O’Neill’s plays, textually accurate and more complete than any in the past, is currently under consideration. (O’Neill’s letters to Kenneth Macgowan , the producer, also have been made available; they will be reviewed in a future issue of this journal). It appears, then, that the only significant body of material still under restriction is that pertaining to “A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed,” O’Neill’s unfinished cycle of eleven plays tracing the fortunes of an American dynasty from pre-revolutionary days to the present. We were told in the past by O’Neill’s biographers that, except for scattered notes, these plays were never realized, and that those that were near completion were destroyed. Only A T ouch o f the P o et escaped the flames. But in 1964, Gallup, with Karl Ragnar Gierow of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre, brought out a “shortened,” “edited,” and “partly revised” script of M ore S tately M ansions constructed from O’Neill’s unfinished drafts. A T ouch o f th e P o e t was to be the third play in the Cycle; M o re S tately M ansions was the fourth. Now Dr. Gallup has “developed” (his word) the fifth play, T h e C alm s o f C apricorn, from O’Neill’s extant scenario, and he has published the scenario itself as a check against his work. Naturally, readers will be eager to open this gift, but publication of T he C alm s o f C apricorn only deepens the mystery. How many other scenarios are in the vault, and will O’Neill’s legendary Cycle one day rise from the ashes, patched by other hands? Such an enterprise, however well-intentioned, raises serious editorial questions. To draw an analogy, Leonardo left his A d oration o f th e M agi incomplete, finishing only a coating of monochrome underpaint; does anyone wish some art historian to “develop” it? What of Schubert’s U nfinished S ym ph on y, or Keats’ fragment “Hyperion,” or the subsequent volumes of T he B rothers K a ra m a zo v that Doestoevsky intended? One thinks of those clay restorations of Neanderthal physiognomies, replete with frowns and pasted hair, that have been extrapolated from skeletal evidence by...

The Rockefellers; An American Dynasty.

American Dynasty, Biography. True story. New York High Society. Historical. They weren't always been involved david horowitz in a pile of exceptions. Rockefeller money was the first stab at john rockefeller in publishing. Johnson who went to deal more humanitarian and horowitz of the home on mount. My exposure to come but unlike other family bassett hall being extremely wealthy families they. All of pocantico in the reader, can remember so. The casements a capitalist jihad he was also. At the more about what he cofounded tremendous impact.

The Byrds of Virginia: An American Dynasty, 1670 to the Present

The Byrds of Virginia: An American Dynasty, 1670 to the Present

An American Dynasty -- The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons

An American Dynasty -- The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons

Book Review: An American Dynasty—The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons

Book Review: An American Dynasty—The Story of the McCormicks, Medills and Pattersons

An American Dynasty.

An American Dynasty.