House Party Research Articles

To Change or Not to Change Horses: The World War II Elections

Folk wisdom counsels voters to stick with leaders in time of a war, though recent experience suggests otherwise. Taking advantage of largely unexplored polls from the 1940s (Gallup and National Opinion Research Center), this research probes vote choices in the World War II elections. Of particular interest is a counterfactual question that asked respondents how they would have voted if there was no war. In addition, the aggregate vote in presidential contests over time is used to estimate how the White House party fares in wartime elections. President Roosevelt received a special premium in electoral support from the wartime condition in both 1940 and 1944. This premium was earned through popular support for war‐related issues. Hence, in wartime elections where such support is lacking voters may be inclined to change horses.

Learning from Generation Y: A new workplace, a new way of working

The newest and youngest members of workforces all over the world are making their presence known by forcing organisations to re-think their work practices and adapt their working environment to suit this generation of new employees and managers. Generation Y is invading the workplace, arriving like energetic guests at a quiet country house party, shocking the houseguests who are already there. They are bringing oversized luggage in the form of multiple digital technologies, social networks, a tech-savvy culture, new ways of approaching work, and new managerial styles. Who is this generation of ‘invaders’ and ‘transformers’? How will they — or won't they — modify the workplace? What are their expectations from their employer and work environment?The Oxygenz study, a research project led by Johnson Controls Global WorkPlace Innovation, gathered information from more than 5,000 Generation Y students and young employees to identify how important the workplace is in attracting, recruiting and retaining the next generation of workers.

Morris, Merce, Music, Movement

Morris, Merce, Music, Movement Jay Rogoff (bio) In summer, like many other city-dwellers, dance repairs to the country. For companies at the top of their form, however, such bucolic retreats provide not rest and relaxation, but athletic vigor and emotional intensity. Summer 2009 brought the Mark Morris Dance Group to upstate New York's Saratoga Performing Arts Center and to Tanglewood in the Berkshires, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Jacob's Pillow, the Berkshires dance mecca, offering pleasures both visceral and philosophical. Our two best modern dance troupes both gave thrilling performances, crash courses on the emotional heights Morris's dances attain in expressing their music, and the surprisingly deep satisfactions Cunningham's provide while barely minding the music at all. Morris became famous for turning traditional narrative and gender upside down. His 1991 The Hard Nut, for example, parodies Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker by setting Act I at a 1960s American Christmas house party, with drunken party guests and TV-addicted brats. Its "Waltz of the Snowflakes" pokes fun at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet production, with both men and women in silver tutus and Dairy Queen soft-serve wigs, flinging fistfuls of fake snow. At the same time, for all its gender silliness, its smart, graceful choreography pays loving homage to Balanchine, while immediately before, a pas de deux for Drosselmeyer and his bewitched nephew soars with gorgeous lifts at Act I's musical climax, a homoerotic apotheosis that nevertheless demonstrates how Morris reveres the music he sets. All nine dances Morris showed July 21 and 22 at Saratoga, and August 5 and 6 at Tanglewood, explored the expressive symbiosis of choreography and music, his precise, beautiful dancers perfectly enacting his designs. If anyone missed his notorious comic antics, these infinitely various confirmations of his status as the world's most musical choreographer since Balanchine more than made up for it, with works that look inevitable and surprising at the same time. Morris's wit and humor, however, had not gone on vacation. The world premiere of Empire Garden justly made the biggest splash at Tanglewood, [End Page 143] not only because it featured Colin Jacobsen, Emanuel Ax, and Yo-Yo Ma playing Charles Ives's Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano. This work for fifteen dancers brilliantly embodies in its variety of movement and mini-episodes Ives's palimpsest of American melodies woven into a darkly harmonious musical fabric. Elizabeth Kurtzman's eye-popping costumes, each unique, echo the musical interweaving by suggesting a tapestry of archaic national archetypes without literally representing them. We think of bandleaders, jockeys, ambassadors in operettas, bellhops, six-day cyclists, minstrel performers, sideshow musclemen, generals, magicians, and other citizens of Americana. In the opening movement, the dancers' slow calisthenics (out of some bygone, patriotic physical culture movement) mature into dazzling whirls, with arms and legs suddenly pulled in or extended, jazzy and classical at once. Dancers turn their backs on us to extend their arms to the moon, rotate on one foot, then strenuously stretch toward us, as if inviting us into their democratic project. At the movement's end, as seven parallel couples curve in a sinuous S like a strigil-patterned frieze, this parti-colored, polyglot crew becomes assimilated into the dance's melting pot. In the hectic central movement, when Ives's trio has three or even four melodies intersecting, Morris hears them and marshals his dancers accordingly, changing a step or motif as quickly as Ives transforms a rhythm or tune. While a trio dances to a folk violin melody, others start tromping to a march for the cello, and still others sway to the piano's lurching "Old Folks at Home." The layers of music keep unfolding and the dancers shift on a dime. Some roll ecstatically on the floor while others eagerly leap around a suddenly elevated tent preacher; then ever-varying groups rattle off a goofy bit of sailor's hornpipe, some vaudeville hoofing, boxers' sparring, a softshoe, brief ballroom partnering, and high music hall kicks punctuating "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay." Yet Morris has integrated these materials elegantly, overlapping his moves in Ives fashion, so instead of a hodgepodge...

Public Responsibility of Elected Officials in Israel: Crossing the Bounds of ReasonablenessOri Arbel-Ganz teaches in the Department of Political Science, Bar-Ilan University. David Nachmias teaches at The Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya, Israel.

Public Responsibility of Elected Officials in Israel: Crossing the Bounds of ReasonablenessOri Arbel-Ganz teaches in the Department of Political Science, Bar-Ilan University. David Nachmias teaches at The Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya, Israel.

Saturday Morning Cartoons Go MMOG

This paper traces the migration of North American children's television into the realm of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), and the issues this raises in terms of the commercialisation of children's (digital) play. Through a content analysis of three television-themed MMOGs targeted to children, Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis, Cartoon Network's Big Fat Awesome House Party and Corus Entertainment's GalaXseeds, I examine how this new development within children's online culture operates in relation to existing industry practices of cross-media integration and promotion. Dominant trends identified in the content analysis are compared with emerging conventions within the MMOG genre, which is generally found to contain numerous opportunities for player creativity and collaboration. Within the cases examined, however, many of these opportunities have been omitted and ultimately replaced by promotional features. I conclude that all three case studies operate primarily as large-scale advergames, promoting transmedia intertextuality and third-party advertiser interests.

Strategic Party Government: Party Influence in Congress, 1789–2000

Why does the influence of Congressional parties fluctuate over time? Building on prevailing answers, we develop a model, Strategic Party Government, which highlights the electoral motives of legislative parties and the strategic interaction between parties. We test this theory using the entire range of House and Senate party behavior from 1789 to 2000 and find that the strategic behavior of parties complements members' preferences as an explanation for variation in party influence. Specifically, the strongest predictors of one party's voting unity are the unity of the opposing party and the difference between the parties in the preceding year. Moreover, we find strong links between party behavior in Congress and electoral outcomes: an increase in partisan influence on legislative voting has adverse electoral costs, while winning contested votes has electoral benefits.

The Endless End of Frontier Mythology: PBS's Frontier House 2002

“The Endless End of Frontier Mythology:PBS’s Frontier House 2002” Leigh H. Edwards (bio) Depicting three families of modern-day "time travelers" who immerse themselves in the rough and tumble culture of 1883 Montana, PBS's Frontier House (2002) series provides a critical, self-reflexive interrogation of romanticized visions of the U.S. nineteenth-century life on the frontier. Not simply a melodramatic retelling of history as escapist fantasy, the series reflects on trends within public history to attempt to represent history with multiple viewpoints.1 As it portrays how modern participants experience discomfort with the gender, race, and familial norms of the Montana territory as they try to reenact, the series explicitly debunks the romance of "Wild West" Hollywood films or TV shows like Little House on the Prairie. Producer Simon Shaw notes these romantic media visions prompted him to launch the series and motivated some participants, and that the harsh living conditions forced everyone to abandon these fantasies.2 Yet at the same time, even while it tries to offer less idealized versions of history based on the cast's lived experiences of material conditions, the show nonetheless ends up reinforcing frontier mythology, specifically an on-going investment in the idea that the American West establishes American exceptionalism by fostering freedom, individualism, and opportunity (just as Frederick Jackson Turner theorized it in the 1890s).3 The series' narrative continually returns to a vision of liberal pluralism, one that privileges an Anglo-American cultural legacy even as it critiques the excesses of Manifest Destiny or the history of racism. The show thus offers an updated version of frontier mythology in the context of television's current dominant ideological mode of address, liberal pluralism, and in the context of recent popular culture versions of what critics have dubbed "corporate multiculturalism." The status of the American family is one of the main thematic cruxes where this process of demythologizing and simultaneously making new, updated mythologies is evident. Utilizing the techniques of literary analysis, specifically attention to text and context, or historicized textual analysis, this article examines these issues in the program's narrative, themes, and character development. The series' form and content both contribute to these ideological themes. Myths Debunked The show's production history and context illuminate the series' recurring narrative focus on debunking myths. The opening tag line of each episode promises to show viewers the "real frontier" behind the "romanticized mythologies." The concept for this most American version of an historical reality series followed upon the success of the British House series on the BBC, a suite of programs including The 1900 House (1999); The 1940s House (2001); The Edwardian Country House (2002), called Manor House when it aired stateside on PBS; and Regency House Party (2004). While those series were joint productions by Channel 4 and Wall to Wall Television, Wall to Wall came to the U.S. and partnered with the PBS station, Thirteen/WNET in New York to produce Frontier House and later Colonial House (2004). Other production companies have used this format, including a CBC series called Pioneer Quest: A Year in the Real West (2000) in Canada and a German series called Black Forest House, both about the nineteenth century. Going into production in 2001 and airing in 2002, the series followed three families for six months as they tried to survive and provide for themselves on their assigned homesteads in the Montana wilderness, securing food and shelter, caring for farm animals and growing crops, and making ready for the winter. The historical focus involves the Homestead Act of 1862, a bill Abraham Lincoln signed into law stating that public land belonged to the people and could be given free to citizens; homesteaders could claim up to 160 acres by filing a claim, living there at least half the year for five years, improving the land ("prove up"), and then getting the deed at the end of that period. The series notes that the filer has to be the head of the family, at least 21 years of age, and a citizen (or about to become one). It cites other restrictions that reflected the social hierarchies of the times, such as the...

Muzungu

Muzungu Namwali Serpell (bio) Isabella was nine years old before she knew what white meant. White in the sense of being a thing, as opposed to not being a thing. It wasn't that Isa didn't know her parents were white, although with her mother, this was largely a matter of conjecture. A layer of thick dark hair kept Sibilla's face a mystery. And even though as she aged, this blanket of hair turned grey then silver then white, a definite movement toward translucence, Isa never could properly make out her mother's features. More distinct were Sibilla's legs, tufts of fur running like a mane down each thick shin, and her strange laugh, like large sheets of paper being ripped and crumpled. Isa's father, the Colonel, was white but it often seemed as if pink and grey were battling it out on his face. Especially when he drank. Her parents had settled into life in Zambia the way most expats do. They drank a lot. Every weekend was another house party, that neverending expatriate house party that has been swatting mosquitoes and swimming in gin and quinine for more than a century. Sibilla floated around in a billowy Senegalese boubou, sending servants for refills and dropping in on every conversation, distributing laughter and ease amongst her guests. Purple-skinned peanuts had been soaked in salt water and roasted in a pan until they were grey; they cooled and shifted with a whispery sound in wooden bowls. There were Tropic beer bottles scattered around the veranda, marking the table and the concrete floor with their damp semi-circular hoof prints. Full or empty? Once the top is off a Tropic bottle, you can't tell because the amber glass is so dark. You have to lift it to check its weight. Cigars and tobacco pipes puffed their foul sweetness into the air. Darts and croquet balls went in loopy circles around their targets, loopier as the day wore on. The Colonel sat in his permanent chair just beyond the shade of the veranda, dampening with gin the thatch protruding from his nostrils, occasionally snorting at some private or overheard joke. His skin was creased like trousers that had been worn too long. Budding from his arms were moles so large and detached they looked ready to tumble off and roll away into the night. And as though his wife's hairiness had become contagious, his ears had been taken over—the calyx whorl of each had sprouted a bouquet of whiskers. The Colonel liked to drink from the same glass the entire day, always his favorite glass, decorated with the red, white, and green hexagons of a football. As his drunkenness progressed, the glass got misty from being so close to his open mouth, then slimy as his saliva glands loosened, then muddy as dirt and sweat mixed on his hand. At the end of the evening, when Isa was sent to fetch her father's glass, she often found it beneath his chair under a swarm of giddy ants, the football spattered like it had been used for a rainy day match. Isa had no siblings and when the other expatriate children were around she was frantic and listless in turns. Today, she began with frantic. Leaving the grownups outside propping [End Page 1081] their feet on wooden stools and scratching at their sunburns, Isa marched three of the more hapless children inside the house and down the long corridor to her bedroom. There, she introduced them to her things. First to her favorite book, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. Second to the live, broken-winged bird she'd found in the driveway. Third, and finally, to Doll. "And this is my doll. She comes from America. She has an Amurrican accent. Her name is Doll." Bird and Doll lived together in an open cardboard box. Isabella stood next to the box with her chin lifted, her hand pointing down to them. Due to the scarcity of imported goods in Lusaka, Isa was allowed only one doll at a time, and this one had gone the way of all dolls: tangled-haired–patchy–bald...

The PBS Historical House Series: Where Historical Reality Succumbs to Reel Reality

THE PBS HISTORICAL HOUSE SERIES: WHERE HISTORICAL REALITY SUCCUMBS TO REEL REALITY INTRODUCTION: When PBS aired first of British-themed and produced historical series, 1900 House, in June 2000, network described project as classy voyeurism and place where the sci-fi of time travel meets true-life drama.1 The success of 1900 House has since led other Anglo-American productions, including 1940s House (2000), Frontier House (2001), Manor House (2002), and Colonial House (2003), and even PBS 's own version of reality dating (albeit in corsets and wigs), Regency House Party (2004) and paying homage romantic ideal of American cowboy Texas Ranch House (2006). Determined distinguish series from other reality programs aired on commercial networks, PBS producer Beth Hoppe insists that this is only one something offer. We're exploring history. No one else is doing that.2 But these experiments in time travel involve much more than re-enacting particular moments in British and American past. As families and individuals who volunteer for these series quickly discover, they cannot leave behind their 21st century mindset, nor do producers want them to; after all, that is what makes these programs true life drama and entertaining and accessible TV for which critics have praised them. Indeed, as Hoppe explains, ensuing tensions between participants, as they struggle adapt unfamiliar living conditions and values, come[s] from modern people with modern ideas trying put themselves in a time in history when things were very different.3 The PBS reality house series (also described by Hoppe as hands-on-history) is part of an on-going trend of Heritage Industry in popular culture in which public can safely revisit, critique, and learn lessons of past. For example, tourists can explore 19th century industrial villages in England; sit in a trench or air raid shelter in London's Imperial War Museum, or witness how New England lived by touring Plimouth Plantation. For a few hours, history buffs can indulge their nostalgia for these sometimes hard but good old days. But these interactive museums also present a very distinct and tidied picture of these pasts, sans rats, smallpox epidemics, falling bombs, and other historical dangers. What makes PBS reality house experiments more authentic than such interactive museums is total immersion process and length of time volunteers spend in their historical contexts, ranging from three five months. In these televised experiments, volunteers do have struggle for their subsistence, submit authority, rely on older medical remedies, and abandon their modern dress for uncomfortable, and oftentimes dirty, period costuming. Despite these inconveniences, volunteers are surprised by ease with which they take up their assigned roles-the submissive lady's maid, class-conscious butler, domineering husband. Yet, volunteers never fully become their roles, as they adapt their historical identities their 21st century mentalities and experiences, as exhibited by servants of Manor House mouthing off their master or colonists in Colonial House refusing cheat their Native American trading partners. Heritage critic Robert Hewison argues that what is created by historical reenactment projects (and we can include historical House series in this category) is simulacra, i.e., image rather than reality.4 Similarly, David Lowenthal notes that more past is appreciated for its own sake, less relevant or real it becomes. In fact, ultimate goal of series is not revere past but rather to enlarge our sense of contemporary at expense of realizing its connection with past.5 Manor House producer, Caroline Ross-Perie, attests this intended outcome. …

So Sleepy Story (review)

Reviewed by: So Sleepy Story Deborah Stevenson Shulevitz, Uri So Sleepy Story; written and illus. by Uri Shulevitz. Farrar, 200632p ISBN 0-374-37031-1$16.00 R 2-4 yrs It's a sleepy world indeed in Caldecott Medalist Shulevitz's new picture book, or at least at first, when a "sleepy sleepy boy in a sleepy sleepy bed" dozes amid a panoply of slumbering housewares. When a strain of music floats through the window and gets increasingly louder, however, the house begins to stir, with dancing dishes, waking cat, and calling cuckoo clock awakening the boy; after an interval of wee-hour festivity, the music wafts away and boy and house settle back down to sleep. The text's constant reiteration of "sleepy" and careful patterning ensures that even the wakeful interlude isn't too electrifying for bed-bound listeners; this is just a bedtime book that slyly spirals its audience down rather than directly tucking them in. The art obligingly aids and abets, with everything personified in the moody, moony world: cabinet fronts, curtains, and windowsill cactus are as solidly conked out as the boy and cat. The music-induced frolic changes the palette from cool slates to warm, slant-shadowed ochres suggestive of incandescent light piercing the gloom; the revelry culminates in a four-page wordless sequence of hearty partying and incipient romance of furniture and china amid dancing musical notes (from [End Page 93] which the boy is, rather oddly, absent, so viewers may wonder what he's getting up to while all this goes on). Audiences will adore the rampant yet benevolent animism that essentially turns the world into a toy collection, and they might even hit the sack earlier in the hopes of participating in their own nighttime house party. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Party people: Personality and MDMA use of house party visitors

Personality characteristics have been linked to substance use, however research on the association between personality and MDMA use is scarce. This study examined differences on Big Five personality dimensions between a population sample of non-hard drug using Dutch adolescents and young adults ( n = 265), and a sample of young people visiting house parties, including both MDMA- and non-MDMA-users ( n = 541). Results showed that 71% of the party visitors indicated using MDMA. Group differences were found on conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism-emotional stability, but not on resourcefulness-openness to experience. Compared to the non-hard drug using National respondents, MDMA-using party visitors reported higher levels of extraversion and both MDMA and non-MDMA-using partygoers showed less conscientiousness. Non-MDMA-using partygoers reported less agreeableness and emotional stability than National Sample respondents. MDMA-users actually high on the drug at the moment of administration of the questionnaire did not differ from their non-high counterparts on any of the personality dimensions.

House Party Switchers and Committee Assignments: Who Gets “What, When, How?”

What are the political consequences for members of Congress who switch parties? Roll-call and electoral consequences of congressional party switching have been studied, but other implications of party defections have yet to be systematically explored. In this article, I examine the committee assignments of House party switchers and argue that party leaders seek to reward members of the opposing party who join their ranks. Using committee assignment data from the 94th House (1975�76) through the 107th House (2001�02), I show that party switchers are more likely than nonswitchers to be the beneficiaries of violations of the seniority norm. The findings from this article are of interest to students of political parties and legislative institutions, and fill a gap in the literature on party switching. When you joined the Republican Conference on August 6, 1995, the elected leadership �determined that your accumulated seniority in the Congress would be credited when you joined the Republican Conference�. Therefore, the Republican Steering Committee's Seniority List ranks you nineteenth in overall conference seniority and designates May 22, 1980, as the beginning of your tenure in the House for purposes of Republican seniority.

Leaving Liza

This is Chapter Thirteen of Leaving Liza, a novel about life, death, love, friendship, jealousy and lesbian ex-lovers. In the novel, six women are spending the weekend at a beach house in Long Island's Hamptons, where they have gathered to be with their friend Liza, who is battling terminal ovarian cancer. Liza's lover, Jill, has agreed to the house party and helped plan the guest list. But, as she smolders with resentment at the attention Liza is getting and the depth of the women's friendships, she begins to come unraveled. After a severe asthma attack that requires an emergency room visit the day before, Jill conducts a seance, purporting to have contacted another of Liza's ex-lovers, who died a few months earlier. Now, on this last night of the house party, she lets Liza and her friends know what she's really feeling. The editors have asked me to add some “commentary” on the questions this story raises about the roles of ex-lovers. I would hope the scene reflects some of the tensions that can occur when ex-lovers choose to remain friends, particularly when those bonds provoke profound jealousy in both current and ex-lovers. For many of us, the job of assuaging and reassuring the current lover while maintaining intimate friendships with an ex-lover is simply too exhausting and prickly to endure. For others, it is worth the struggle. Liza and her friends clearly think it is. But at what point, they all wonder at this house party, does their hunger for honesty and their anger at being insulted and manipulated become more important than keeping the peace, and possibly their friendship with Liza? Perhaps only Liza's death will free them from this compromising coexistence.

Party Caucuses and Coordination: Assessing Caucus Activity and Party Effects

Party caucuses are increasingly important to members' allocation of time. This article reports findings from new data on the minutes, frequency, timing, and attendance of House party caucus meetings. I argue that the party caucuses increasingly affect political and policy information flows to members. This growing party coordination has resulted in a greater bonding and shared strategic information among rank‐and‐file copartisans.This research also contributes to the party effects literature. Earlier research on congressional partisanship has used roll‐call data to measure both member preferences and party effects. I investigate whether or not members' attendance at party caucus meetings immediately prior to key congressional votes imposes partisan cohesion beyond members' preferences. The results indicate that party coordination contributes to greater congressional party unity on key floor votes at both the bill and member level controlling for members' ideological preferences. This party coordination effect occurs even during a period of high intraparty preference homogeneity.

Mississippi's Giant House Party: Being White at the Neshoba County Fair

Neshoba County, Mississippi, the basement of the past is not very deep. --Florence Mars, Witness in Philadelphia For more than one hundred years, Mississippians have braved their long hot summer to head to the eastern part of the state for the Neshoba County Fair. For one week in late July, thousands of men and women from Philadelphia (the county seat), the rest of the state, and even farther afield descend upon the fairgrounds to create Mississippi town of respectable size. Joined by well over fifty thousand additional visitors, including the occasional reporter from Washington or Boston newspaper, they gather to enjoy food, drink, horse racing, gospel singing, and political oratory--in short, as National Geographic accurately characterized it, to join in tribal rites of fellowship a whole way of life finds affirmation. This annual ritual is an assertion that one can go home again. It's place, as one admirer explained, where there is comfort in knowing that tomorrow will be little changed from today. (1) The fair's most striking feature is the cabins that fan out from centrally located Founder's Square. Over six hundred in all, these magnificent specimens of vernacular architecture are decorated and named--The Fox Den, Green Acres, and Ye Old King's Kastle among them; purists argue whether such conveniences as screened windows and air conditioning compromise the cabins' aesthetic integrity. In contrast to the SUVS and minivans parked outside, these two- and three-story structures are self-consciously spartan, in keeping with the fair's early history as camp meeting: iron bedsteads and homemade wood bunks stand in rows dormitory-style, their covers wilting in 99-degree heat. Coveted, but in limited supply, the cabins are practically medium of exchange. As one owner noted, It's common thing in Neshoba County to have divorce they would decide the child custody, alimony, cash settlement and who gets the house, but the only thing they can't resolve is who is going to get the fair cabin. (2) Jealously passed on from generation to generation, the cabins and the relaxed living they encourage--strangers may find themselves invited inside for supper, or at least drink--are seen by long-time fairgoers as key to the fair's meaning. They are correct, for each summer the cabins, all owned by white families, become the heart of Disneyesque Southland, racially segregated imagining of Mississippi town. In county almost one-third black, the fair remains, in the eyes of many Neshoba County residents, largely for whites only. It's for them, not for us, black Philadelphian told me matter-of-factly. The fair exemplifies the most critical development in race and public culture in Mississippi over the last generation: move from explicit public commemoration of whiteness to an implicit rhetoric of racial definition signaled obliquely in cultural practices and artifacts. This rhetoric of white identity is now, in some ways, even more tenacious in the state's public culture than it was in the 1950s and 1960s because it wields largely unspoken power. At the fair, whiteness and racially exclusive definitions of community are represented by the cabins themselves and encoded in the seemingly benign cultural practices of singing, visiting, and celebrating family life. In recent years, white Mississippians have been confronted with potent reminders of their state's defiant years: the release of the movie Mississippi Burning, the grudging opening of the State Sovereignty Commission's files, and the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers. But fairgoers, for all their obeisance to tradition and the past, display curious, even conscious, will to ignorance of the county's and the state's history of violent resistance to racial change. The fair represents paradox most white Mississippians have yet to grasp: their cherished celebrations of family and community cannot be separated from the state's racialist past. …

Moving On Up: Education in

In contemporary black films the pleasures and benefits of college education are modified by the power structures of the larger society. The depiction of the experiences of black students in films such as School Daze (Spike Lee, 1988), House Party 2 (Doug McHenry and George Jackson, 1991), and Higher Learning (John Singleton, 1995) reveals aspects of college life that American youth films commonly overlook, including law enforcement and poverty. These films are thus imbued with cultural authority, evident in the juxtaposition of didactic and entertainment modes of address and an emphasis on the importance of community. The displacement of educating functions that this entails is also manifested in the narrative positioning of black women and other youth as sources of authority.

The Strategic Context of Congressional Party Leadership

This article presents an argument that the dominant scholarly approach to studying congressional party leadership&generally referred to as principal-agent theory&should be redirected to better account for the strategic context within which leaders operate. We begin with a discussion of six related themes, which we believe capture major limitations in existing leadership studies. To further our argument, we then analyze the role of party leadership on two recent legislative initiatives&the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (S. 652) and the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (H.R. 3103). Based on interviews with top leadership and committee staff, we explore in depth the strategies employed by House and Senate party leaders at each stage of the legislative process on these measures. We conclude with summary observations about the importance of developing a fully strategic theory of congressional party leadership, especially for analyzing leadership behavior within the narrow partisan majorities of the 106th Congress.

Keith W. Miller

Keith W. Miller

Black Musicians from Slavery to Freedom: An Exploration of an African-American Folk Elite and Cultural Continuity in the Nineteenth-Century Rural South

During the nineteenth century, black instrumentalists enjoyed a special position in the rural black community of the American South. In the antebellum slave quarters, they earned the status of a folk elite because of their contribution to community life.(1) Like their sacred counterpart, the preachers, as their neighbors called them, provided opportunities for slaves to come together to recreate a sense of community in one of the few social outlets available to them - the frolic, the secular counterpart of the Sunday prayer meeting. Emancipation, however, brought new challenges to that community and the transition from a pre-political slave community to a freedmen's community that was acutely aware of the importance of political activity placed new demands on its leaders.(2) Musicianers did not respond to the political challenge of Reconstruction in ways that broke clearly with their old roles in African-American society. Consequently, they did not participate in any substantial way in the new political dimension of rural black life in which ex-slaves would attempt to define the parameters of freedom. Nevertheless, war, emancipation, and Reconstruction had not completely altered black community life in the rural South. Musicians, the community's secular ministers, continued to play a central role in African-American social and cultural life, a role that may have had a greater impact than politics on the continued strength of the African-American community prior to the era of the civil rights movement. The frolic became the fish fry, house party, or picnic. Reels, jigs, and ballads eventually made way for the more individualistic blues. Guitars replaced fiddles as the most popular instrument. But musicians remained at the center of their folk culture and rural black society by providing the southern black community with the opportunity to come together to revive its collective spirit on a regular basis. In this respect, well into the twentieth century, Virginia Piedmont, Mississippi Delta, Texas, and other blues musicians continued a tradition that had its roots in the slave quarters of the antebellum South.(3) Before the Civil War, slave musicianers, like other skilled slaves, were uniquely qualified to set themselves apart from most of their neighbors. Because of their talent, they could lay claim to privileges associated with freedom that ordinary field hands could not. Since the job of musician was a menial one by the standards of the upper orders of white southern society and since white Southerners needed musicians to entertain at their social functions, slave musicianers used their talents to their advantage much as any slave craftsman might have done. Consequently, musicians enjoyed more freedom of movement than the average slave, because they received passes to travel to and perform at various white social functions. While performing their art, they escaped constant white supervision, earned a steady if small source of income, gained confidence and self-respect, and generally loosened their personal bonds of slavery.(4) The rewards earned by serving the needs of their white masters clearly impressed fellow bondsmen, but they were only partially and secondarily responsible for the status of slave musicianers. More important than any privilege won from white society were the services that they performed for their own people.(5) In the antebellum slave quarters, musicianers claimed the status of a folk elite primarily because of their contributions to community life. As performers, slave musicians assumed an indispensible role in the frolic, one of the two most important widespread and regularly held social events in the slave South, the other being the prayer service. Interestingly, while there is some evidence of tension between the sacred and secular in the slave community, frolics coexisted peacefully with religious services. There are examples of slaves attending dances on Saturday night and prayer meetings on Sunday mornings. …

Surge and Decline, Negative Voting, and the Midterm Loss Phenomenon: A Simultaneous Choice Analysis

Campbell's surge and decline and Kernell's negative voting theories have been employed most frequently by researchers who seek to explain the invariable pattern of administration party vote loss in midterm House elections. Despite the original emphasis placed on voting as the act of selecting jointly from among the three options of abstention, Democratic choice, or Republican choice, all efforts to corroborate the theories have inappropriately treated the decisions of whether and how to vote as independent questions for investigation. Applying the more suitable technique of nested multinomial logit analysis, I find little support for negative voting's two key contentions that negative presidential evaluations hurt White House party candidates more than positive appraisals help, or that the president's backers have disproportionately low turnout; however, a rational basis for abstention emerges that differs from the one postulated by negative voting. In contrast, on-year defections to presidential party candidates by regular voters who normally favor the opposition do seem a cause of the biennial electoral cycle, as surge and decline indeed would have us to believe.