Author Of America Research Articles

How to Study Religion? Notes on Research Methodology in the Context of Latin American Religions

The aim of this paper is to discuss on the main methodological procedures used in Anthropology and Sociology and applied in studies of Latin American religions, particularly in the context of diasporic Brazilian Protestantism-Pentecostalism. After introduce the two principal categories (quantitative and qualitative) – which include various types of procedures, such as the case study, interdisciplinary, historical, comparative and cross-cultural—and based on ethnographic experiences of the author in America, Europe and Asia, examine the world scale and ‘glocal’ multi-situated ethnography and the traditional localized participant-observation, including the ‘outsider-insider dichotomy’ and Asia, the article examines. However, today, with new digital technologies and the broad cultural and religious manifestations in the Internet, the researcher can complement the search for information (ethnographic data)—and accompany of the daily life of the group, of the community under study—using the Internet, the various social networks, namely, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. The principal contribution of this work is to present the specificities of the ethnographic field in the studies of religious movements, evangelical churches, in particular, where issues and problems posed to researchers requiring appropriate ethical and methodological procedures for overcoming them.

Katharine Lee Bates and Chaucer's American Children

ABSTRACT Katharine Lee Bates, most famous as the author of America the Beautiful, was also a field-changing scholar of American literature whose early training was as a medievalist. To a widely ignored early-twentieth-century children's edition of Chaucer (The Story of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, 1909), she brought both her originality and democratic instincts as a scholar and her considerable talents as a poet. This edition deserves close inspection as both a skillful popularization and a strategic intervention in the history of Chaucer scholarship and translation. It was unusual for its time in rendering Chaucer in verse rather than prose, in representing the best contemporary scholarship about the Middle Ages, and in stressing the novelistic aspects of the Canterbury Tales, as well as in the liberties it took with the original, laying an American claim to Chaucer. It thus reflected the middle way that Bates took in much of her writing between traditionalism and innovation.

Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1836 doctorate dissertation and his journey in medicine

Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1836 hand written doctorate dissertation on acute pericarditis was discovered in the archives of the Boston Medical Library 101 years after it was successfully defended. It was then printed as an unabridged monograph with an explanation of its provenance. The dissertation has received little scrutiny since then. Holmes gathered materials for the scholarly work while he was a third and fourth year student at Ecole de Medecine in Paris. His mentor, Pierre-Charles-Alexandre- Louis insisted on the meticulous gathering and recording of every patient’s history and findings. Each category of data was given a weighted numerical value of diagnostic importance and the information was placed in a registry. Holmes became a disciple of Louis in gathering data by direct observation and measuring outcomes in a “statistical” fashion. Holmes dissertation on acute pericarditis describes the state of knowledge about the illness in the 1830s. When Holmes and other students who had studied in Paris returned to the United States, they helped turn American Medicine from opinion and strong personal bias toward scientific objectivity. Oliver Wendell Holmes eventually became both a professor of anatomy/physiology and a dean at Harvard Medical School. He is recognized as a leader in medicine and a popular author in America and beyond. In his late and infirmed years, Holmes questioned the wisdom of his unswerving advocacy for the scientific underpinnings of medicine. In retrospect he had overlooked the importance of also advocating that each patient be approached with comforting compassion.

Editor's Column: Musings on America: Highway 31, Steinbeck, and the Future

Editor's Column: Musings on America: Highway 31, Steinbeck, and the Future

Review: From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast: A Settlement History Across Time and Place, by Samuel M. Otterstrom

Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast: A Settlement History Across Time and Place, by Samuel M. Otterstrom Samuel M. Otterstrom. From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast: A Settlement History Across Time and Place (Reno: University of Nevada Press), 2017. $44.95. Julia Bricklin Julia Bricklin julia bricklin is the author of America's Best Female Sharpshooter: The Rise and Fall of Lillian Frances Smith and the forthcoming title Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West. She is an adjunct professor of history at Glendale Community College. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2018) 95 (2): 73–75. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2018.95.2.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Julia Bricklin; Review: From California's Gold Fields to the Mendocino Coast: A Settlement History Across Time and Place, by Samuel M. Otterstrom. California History 1 May 2018; 95 (2): 73–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2018.95.2.73 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

"The Reign of Nature"; or, Mr Bryant's Wordsworth

In 1825, William Cullen Bryant arrived in New York as reviews editor for New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine, already with mission. Seven years earlier, at twenty-four, he had informed The North Review that poetry in New World was hopelessly moribund; Timothy Dwight's ponderous The Conquest of Canaan (1785) was remarkable for its unbroken monotony, Joel Barlow's Columbiad (1807) was utterly destitute of interest, and Philip Freneau was dismissed as a writer of inferior verse. All three exemplified poetic culture addled by sickly and affected imitation (Bivant 5: 50, 51, 54) As indeed (in all candour) they did. Now, aged thirty-one, Bryant delivered four authoritative lectures on poetry at New York Athenaeum, lauding new poetry of Old World. His mission was reformation of poetry and campaign theme, in effect, close thy Pope, open thy Wordsworth. The poetry of Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Shelley and others, he told audience, is bold, varied, impassioned, irregular, and impatient of precise laws, beyond that of any former age. It exhibits the freshness, vigor, and perhaps also disorder, of new literature (Bryant, 5: 31-2). Twelve years later, Emerson's belated American Scholar lecture will demand new poetry with original relation to universe, which (Emerson implies) would necessarily be American. Bryant by contrast, candidly acknowledged--at least in private--how Lyrical Ballads had already liberated him from what Emerson would call courtly muse. I shall never forget, Richard Henry Dana famously writes, in Hazlittian vein:with what feeling my friend Bryant, some years ago, described to me effect produced upon him of meeting for first time with Wordsworth's ballads. He said that upon opening book, thousand springs seemed to gush up at once in heart, and face of Nature, of sudden, to change into strange freshness and life. He had felt sympathetic touch from an according mind, and ... instantly powers and affections shot over earth and through kind (Dana, 148) Bryant's father gave him copy of Lyrical Ballads in 1810, year or so before Bryant Jr. began to produce and first authentically Romantic poems. When some of these--including Thanatopsis, Inscription for entrance to wood and Waterfowl were published together in North Review in 1817, effect of new language was comparable to that of debut of Ted Hughes with Hawk in Rain in 1957. One editor told another: you have been imposed upon; no one on this side of Atlantic is capable of writing such verses. (1) Bryant who candidly adopted Wordsworth as what he called a sort of poetical master (Letters 1: 235) (2) absorbed more thoroughly than anyone principles of Prefaces, and went on to formulate emost succinct of Romantic manifestos: the elements of poetry, he decided retrospectively in 1876, lie in natural objects, in vhicissitudes of human life, in emotions of human heart, and relations of to man and what characterised Romantic renovation of poetry was that learned to go directly to nature for their imagery, instead of taking it from what had once been regarded as common stock of poets (Bryant 5: 158). He read Wordsworth voraciously, read him with recurring sense of awe, and defended aspects of own poetic practice by appealing to Wordsworth's example. Rhyming blossom and bosom, he tells Dana in 1833, is acceptable because Wordsworth does so, and his rhymes are generally exact (Letters 1: 385; touchstone in this case is Foresight, one of least regarded poems in Poems, in Two Volumes). According to Fenimore Cooper, while some writers reaped some praise once in while, Bryant was lauded as author of America (not quite, as title of Gilbert Muller's admirable biography seems to suggest, author of America). …

America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform

This contribution is a recording of the CAMRI research seminar held at the University of Westminster on November 19, 2014, in which Victor Pickard presented his book "America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform": http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/americas-battle-media-democracy-triumph-corporate-libertarianism-and-future-media-reformWhy do American media have so few public interest regulations? How did the American media system become dominated by a few corporations, and why are structural problems like market failures routinely avoided in media policy discourse? By tracing the answers to many of these questions back to media policy battles in the 1940s, Victor Pickard explains how this happened and why it matters today. Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system’s historical roots and normative foundations. His book charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken. As much about the present and future as it is about the past, the book proposes policies for remaking media based on democratic values for the digital age. Victor Pickard is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously he taught media studies at NYU and the University of Virginia, and he worked on media policy in Washington, D.C. as a Senior Research Fellow at the media reform organization Free Press, the public policy think tank the New America Foundation, and Congresswoman Diane Watson’s office. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on the history and political economy of media institutions and media reform activism. His op-eds on media policy debates and the future of journalism have appeared in news outlets like The Guardian, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the editor (with Robert McChesney) of Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights, and the author of America’s Battle for Media Democracy. He tweets at @VWPickard.

I don't sound like nobody: remaking music in 1950s America

In J. Zak III's highly original study, phonograph records are not just the medium for disseminating songs but musical works unto themselves. Fashioned from a mix of copyright law, recording studios and techniques, the talent of musicians and disc jockeys, the ingenuity and avarice of producers, and the appetites of record buyers, the all-powerful marketplace Zak describes is an unruly zone where music of, by, and for the people is made and anointed.---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: HistoryWrestling clarity from the exuberant chaos of early rock 'n' roll, Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody redefines our understanding of the record in the shaping of the postWorld War II soundscape. Zak tracks the story which extends from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra through Elvis and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and Bob Dylan with excursions into dozens of lesser known, but crucial, players in a game with few established rules. crucial addition to the bookshelf.---Craig Werner, author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of AmericaI Don't Sound Like Nobody is a superb account of the transformation of American popular music in the 1950s. Zak insightfully explores what recording actually means in terms of the process of making and consuming music. His discussion of the legal, aesthetic, and industrial ramifications of changes in the recording process over the course of the 1950s will make popular music scholars and record collectors reconsider what they think they know about the period.---Rob Bowman, author of Soulsville, U.S.A.: Story of Stax RecordsInformative, original, and entertaining. Through a narrative that is not only enlightening but also compelling, I Don't Sound Like Nobody probes the sources and mechanisms of change within post-war American popular music, shedding a cultural and historical light on the convergence of musical idioms that created '50s rock and roll.---Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop ScoreFrom the birth of the record industry through the legacy of Presley, the development of rock and roll, and the Beatles 'stunning arrival on the world's stage, ' Zak takes us on a journey of exceptional scholarship. breadth of coverage and deep examination of recordings and repertoire reveal the author's reverence and sensitivity to the many dimensions and origins of this complex musical soundscape.---William Moylan, author of Understanding and Crafting the Mix: Art of RecordingThe 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, I don't sound like nobody, a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans---all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.Written in engaging, accessible prose, Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll. Albin J. Zak III is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist. Jacket design by Paula NewcombJacket photograph (c) Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Author of America

Author of America

American Transcendentalism: A History; Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman; William Cullen Bryant: Author of America; Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples

American Transcendentalism: A History; Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman; William Cullen Bryant: Author of America; Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples

McGuffey's Oxford (Ohio) Shakespeare

James Fenimore Cooper regarded Shakespeare as “the great author of America.” For most frontier readers, this distinctly American Shakespeare was disseminated within the pages of the ubiquitous McGuffey Rhetorical Readers, and Hamlin Garland speaks for several generations across the Ohio frontier when he writes, “I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” This Oxford (Ohio) canon draws generously from the Roman and English history plays, including scenes from the surprisingly popular King John and Henry VIII, and students were encouraged to memorize, and read aloud, classic orations such as “Antony's Oration over Dead Caesar's Body” and “Henry V. to His Troops.” The tragedies were most frequently represented by “The Hamlet Soliloquy,” and the more problematic comedies were virtually ignored, with the exception of brief appearances by a much sanitized John Falstaff. By the close of the century, the McGuffey canon had contributed to an American belief in Shakespeare's authority as second only to the Bible's, a point of view reflected in Emerson's judgment that Shakespeare is “inconceivably wise.”

William Cullen Bryant: author of America

William Cullen Bryant: author of America

Carlos Bulosan, Filipino Writer-Activist: Between a Time of Terror and the Time of Revolution

Carlos Bulosan, Filipino Writer-ActivistBetween a Time of Terror and the Time of Revolution E. San Juan Jr (bio) No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction. —Salud Algabre, leader of the 1935 Sakdal revolt1 The bourgeois revolution has not been completed and left the feudal system almost untouched. . . . We are doing everything to arouse the class consciousness and revolutionary spirit of the masses, especially the peasants. —Pedro Abad Santos, founder of the Socialist Party of the Philippines2 The spirit, strength and intelligence of the people are miraculous. But truth should be their beacon and guide at all times. —Amado V. Hernandez, labor union leader3 [End Page 103] On and after September 11, 2001, Carlos Bulosan, like thousands of Filipinos, felt the impact of that disaster. Not because he was caught in the Twin Towers or in the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Iraq. Nor was he in Basilan or Zamboanga when thousands of U.S. Special Forces landed in 2002 allegedly in pursuit of the Abu Sayyaf, welcomed by the sycophantic Arroyo regime. Bulosan died on September 11, 1956, 48 years ago; he was beyond the reach of imperial terror (San Juan 1994). But even the dead are not safe from the enemy—witness how Jose Rizal, the national hero, was co-opted by the American colonizers to suppress the underground resistance after Aguinaldo’s surrender (Constantino 1978). Witness how the figure of Andres Bonifacio has been attacked by American scholars eager to debunk the prestige of the hero and prove how leading Filipino historians have failed, like the comprador and bureaucratic elite, to measure up to Western neo-liberal standards (San Juan 2000a). In an analogous manner, Bulosan has also been co-opted and taken for granted. Since the 1960s, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart (1946) has become institutionalized as a harmless ethnic icon (Guillermo 2002). Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is, and don’t care. Obviously times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine attitudes, choices, and inclinations. The current war on what Washington and the Pentagon regard as the foes of democracy and freedom, just like the fight against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with the neo-colonial masters to suspend antagonism, rendering Bulosan’s cry for equality and justice superfluous. How do we avoid siding with, and serving, our oppressors? Almost everyone who has read Bulosan—I am speaking chiefly of those who matured politically in the 1970s and 1980s, after which Bulosan suffered the fate of the “disappeared” of Argentina, Nicaragua, the Philippines—cannot help but be disturbed and uneasy over the ending of America Is in the Heart (AIH). Clearly the American dream failed. Why then does the Bulosan persona or proxy glorify “America” as the utopian symbol of happiness and liberation [End Page 104] when the reality of everyday life—for his compatriots and people of color in the narrative—demonstrates precisely the opposite? Does some transcript or subtext hide behind the wish-fulfilling rhetoric? Various commentators, including myself, have offered ways of reconciling the paradox, flattening out the incongruities, disentangling the ironies and discordances. The reconfigured solution may be to say that life itself is full of contradictions that, in spite of the dialectical fix underwritten by the historical process, will not completely vanish; that these contradictions, perhaps sublimated in other forms, will continue haunting us until we face the truth of the overdetermining primal scenario. Absent this confrontation, we easily succumb to the seductive malaise of the politics of identity, in which the consumerist postcolonial subaltern constructs identity as a pastiche, a hybrid concoction, a hyper-real performance in the interstitial “third space” of the global marketplace. Reality Check What is the reality today? Possibly the largest of what is denominated the Asian group in the United States, Filipinos number 3 to 4 million of which 106,000 to 700,000 are undocumented owing...

Thomas Jefferson: author of America

Thomas Jefferson: author of America

Remembering Hisham Sharabi (1927--2005)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsLawrence DavidsonLawrence Davidson, professor of history at West Chester University, is the author of America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University Press of Florida, 2001).

Carlos Bulosan in a Time of the Wars on Terror

Bulosan has also been co-opted and taken for granted. Since the sixties, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart has become institutionalized as a harmless ethnic icon. Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is and don't care. Obviously, times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine attitudes, choices, inclinations. The current war on what Washington and the Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the war against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with the neocolonial masters, for suspending antagonisms, rendering Bulosan's cry for equality and justice superfluous.

More Sinned Against Than Sinning

Eighteen years ago, Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli scientist working at Dimona nuclear facility, revealed that Israel had an atomic bomb project, a secret that had clouded US—Israeli relations since the days of Kennedy and Ben Gurion, and might have involved collusion between the countries. Vanunu was kidnapped in Italy, returned to Israel and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, nearly 12 of which he spent in solitary confinement. In April this year, James Thackara went to Israel for Index on Censorship to greet Vanunu on his release from Ashkelon Prison. Ursula Owen interviewed Thackara on his return.James Thackara has had a long involvement in nuclear issues and the Vanunu case, and is the author of America's Children (Chatto & Windus, 1984), a novel dealing with the Manhattan Project and the fate of Robert Oppenheimer

Margaret Fuller in Italy

On July 19, 1848, the day when the first women's rights convention began in Seneca Falls, New York, Margaret Fuller, the author of America's only full-length feminist tract, was far away, in the midst of a life-changing sojourn in Italy. As a Transcendentalist, her vocation was to understand and live out her challenging, unusual, complex “nature,” a task complicated by being the lone woman among America's first indigenous intellectual circle. The challenge of being true tohernature, to unite a mind understood as male with feelings understood as female, was a task for which there were few precedents. To the degree that Fuller ever resolved that tension, Italy was where she was able to do so. The article explores Fuller's motivations for going to Italy and her transformations there, and speculates – inasmuch as she never returned – what she might have brought back to the emerging women's rights movement in the USA as a result.

The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation

Political Science QuarterlyVolume 117, Issue 1 p. 1-17 The Post September 11 Debate Over Empire, Globalization, and Fragmentation WALTER LaFEBER, WALTER LaFEBER WALTER LaFEBER is a professor of government at Cornell University. He is the author of America, Russia, and the Cold War whose just-published 9th edition has a chapter explaining more fully the September 11 aftermath in U.S. foreign relations.Search for more papers by this author WALTER LaFEBER, WALTER LaFEBER WALTER LaFEBER is a professor of government at Cornell University. He is the author of America, Russia, and the Cold War whose just-published 9th edition has a chapter explaining more fully the September 11 aftermath in U.S. foreign relations.Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 February 2013 https://doi.org/10.2307/798091Citations: 5 AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume117, Issue1Spring 2002Pages 1-17 RelatedInformation

America's Working Man

What's on the worker's mind? The urgency of this question for socialists, for business executives, for politicians, for advertisers, and for trade unionists has produced a steady flow of journalistic reports, fictional portrayals, legislative investigations, scholarly studies, and accounts one who put on overalls to find out, from the 1830s to the present. David Halle, the author of America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners; and a British-born sociologist who now teaches at Fordham University, insists that the question cannot be answered today (if it ever could be) by examining working people in only one setting: on the job or in their kitchens or at a ball game or as they leave the voting booth. All aspects of their lives must be considered together. Moreover, he warns against envisaging at work as the sole source of 'real' consciousness, because this is offset by the media, consumerism, or other forms of imposing the hegemony of ruling-class ideas. Marxists who have reasoned in that way, Halle writes may have abandoned materialism too easily, or at least not applied it in as thorough a manner as they should have. Position at work is only one of the material spheres that influence ideology. The other spheres are life outside the workplace and life as a 'citizen' of a nation-state.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.