The entire Italian American experience-from America's earliest days through the present-is now available in a single volume. This wide-ranging work relates the entire saga of the Italian-American experience from immigration through assimilation to achievement. The book highlights the enormous contributions that Italian Americans-the fourth largest European ethnic group in the United States-have made to the professions, politics, academy, arts, and popular culture of America. Going beyond familiar names and stories, it also captures the essence of everyday life for Italian Americans as they established communities and interacted with other ethnic groups. In this single volume, readers will be able to explore why Italians came to America, where they settled, and how their distinctive identity was formed. A diverse array of entries that highlight the breadth of this experience, as well as the multitude of ways in which Italian Americans have influenced U.S. history and culture, are presented in five thematic sections. Featured primary documents range from a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus announcing his discovery to excerpts from President Barack Obama's 2011 speech to the National Italian American Foundation. Readers will come away from this book with a broader understanding of and greater appreciation for Italian Americans' contributions to the United States. Hundreds of annotated entries give brief histories of the people, places, and events associated with Italian American history A-to-Z organization within five thematic sections facilitates ease of use An extensive collection of primary documents illustrates the Italian American experience over the course of American history and helps meet Common Core standards Sidebars and an array of illustrations bring the material to vivid life Each entry includes cross-references to other entries as well as a list of suggested further readings

Comedy is often held to be incompatible with trauma and suffering; it triggers anxiety and moral disquiet around the pleasure we take in reading or watching another's pain. Such concern is particularly acute in relation to suffering that has assumed the status of a cultural trauma, such as that caused by the Holocaust and the Second World War. This long overdue study explores the significance of the comical in German and Austrian postwar cultural representations of suffering. It analyses how the comical challenges the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and trauma. It does so, moreover, by critically examining the conceptions of trauma and victimhood which currently enjoy so much status - such as that of trauma and the nowadays automatic validity and universal applicability of victim identity. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Kluger. Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell. Comedy is often held to be incompatible with trauma and suffering; it triggers anxiety and moral disquiet around the pleasure we take in reading or watching another's pain. Such concern is particularly acute in relation to suffering that has assumed the status of a cultural trauma, such as that caused by the Holocaust and the Second World War. This long overdue study explores the significance of the comical in German and Austrian postwar cultural representations of suffering. It analyses how the comical challenges the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and trauma. It does so, moreover, by critically examining the conceptions of trauma and victimhood which currently enjoy so much status - such as that of trauma and the nowadays automatic validity and universal applicability of victim identity. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Kluger. Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell.

Advances in Food Security and Sustainability takes a scientific look at the challenges, constraints, and solutions necessary to maintain a healthy and accessible food supply in different communities around the world. The series addresses a wide range of issues related to the principles and practices of food sustainability and security, exploring challenges related to protecting environmental resources while meeting human nutritional requirements.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

Taste is recognized as one of the most evocative senses. The flavors of food play an important role in identity, memory, emotion, desire, and aversion, as well as social, religious and other occasions. Yet despite its fundamental role, taste is often mysteriously absent from discussions about food. Now in its second edition, The Taste Culture Reader examines the sensuous dimensions of eating and drinking and highlights the centrality of taste in human experience. Combining both classic and contemporary sources from anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, science, and beyond, the book features excerpts from texts by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Bourdieu, Brillat-Savarin, Marcel Proust, Sidney Mintz, and M.F.K. Fisher as well as original essays by authors such as David Sutton, Lisa Heldke, David Howes, Constance Classen, and Amy Trubek. This edition has been revised substantially throughout to include the latest scholarship on the senses and features new introductions from the editor as well as 10 new chapters. The perfect introduction to the study of taste, this is essential reading for students in food studies, anthropology, sensory studies, philosophy, and culinary arts.

Inside the complex and misunderstood world of professional street skateboarding On a sunny Sunday in Los Angeles, a crew of skaters and videographers watch as one of them attempts to land a "heel flip" over a fire hydrant on a sidewalk in front of the Biltmore Hotel. A staff member of the hotel demands they leave and picks up his phone to call the police.Not only does the skater land the trick, but he does so quickly, and spares everyone the unwanted stress of having to deal with the cops. This is not an uncommon occurrence in skateboarding, which is illegal in most American cities and this interaction is just part of the process of being a professional street skater. This is just one of Gregory Snyder's experiences from eight years inside the world of professional street skateboarding: a highly refined, athletic and aesthetic pursuit, from which a large number of people profit. Skateboarding LA details the history of skateboarding, describes basic and complex tricks, tours some of LA's most famous spots, and provides an enthusiastic appreciation of this dangerous and creative practice. Particularly concerned with public spaces, Snyder shows that skateboarding offers cities much more than petty vandalism and exaggerated claims of destruction. Rather, skateboarding draws highly talented young people from around the globe to skateboarding cities, building a diverse and wide-reaching community of skateboarders, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and entrepreneurs. Snyder also argues that as stewards of public plazas and parks, skateboarders deter homeless encampments and drug dealers. In one stunning case, skateboarders transformed the West LA Courthouse, with Nike's assistance, into a skateable public space. Through interviews with current and former professional skateboarders, Snyder vividly expresses their passion, dedication and creativity. Especially in relation to the city's architectural features-ledges, banks, gaps, stairs and handrails-they are constantly re-imagining and repurposing these urban spaces in order to perform their ever-increasingly difficult tricks. For anyone interested in this dynamic and daunting activity, Skateboarding LA is an amazing ride.

Through interviews with developers, gamers, and journalists examining the phenomena of bedroom coding, arcade gaming, and format wars, mapped onto enquiry into the seminal genres of the time including driving, shooting, and maze chase, Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames examines how 1980s Britain has become the culture of work in the 21st century and considers its meaning to contemporary society. This crucial and timely work fills a lacuna for students and researchers of sociology, media, and games studies and will be of interest to employees of the videogames and media industries. Research into videogames have never been greater, but exploration of their historic drivers is as elided as the technology is influential, giving rise to a range of questions. What were the social and economic conditions that gave rise to a billion dollar industry? What were the motivations of the early 'bedroom coders'? What are the legacies of the seminal videogames of the 1980s and how do they inform the current social, political and cultural landscape? With a focus on the characteristics of the UK videogame industry in the 1980s, Wade explores these questions from perspectives of consumption, production and leisure, outlining the construction of a habitus unique to this time.

This book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing. Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self. The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.

Multisensory Flavor Perception: From Fundamental Neuroscience Through to the Marketplace provides state-of-the-art coverage of the latest insights from the rapidly-expanding world of multisensory flavor research. The book highlights the various types of crossmodal interactions, such as sound and taste, and vision and taste, showing their impact on sensory and hedonic perception, along with their consumption in the context of food and drink. The chapters in this edited volume review the existing literature, also explaining the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms which lead to crossmodal perception of flavor. The book brings together research which has not been presented before, making it the first book in the market to cover the literature of multisensory flavor perception by incorporating the latest in psychophysics and neuroscience.

Today's highly industrialized and technologically controlled global food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us, human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost, increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.

This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirees, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology and visual culture.

This text comprehensively covers the rituals, traditions and receipts of ancestral processes of bread making from multiple countries, including the scientific and technological character of the science of bread making and sourdough biotechnology. Individual chapters cover the scientific aspects of bread making in different cultures and traditions as well as the technological phenomena occurring during the bread making process, utilizing the full network of SOURDOMICS from the COST initiative. Pictures and illustrations are used to explain the science behind bread making processes and the cultural, historical and traditional elements associated with bread making in multiple countries. Authored by bread making experts from the breadth of Europe, the process of bread fermentation in each country and region is covered in detail. The traditions surrounding bread making are simply the empirical know-how passed between generations, and this book's main purpose is to perpetuate these traditions and know-how. Provides a description of the culture of European peoples with respect to the technology of bread making and sourdough biotechnology; Explains the process of bread fermentation using simple language combined with scientific rigor; High quality pictures and illustrations enrich the scientific and cultural elements mentioned in each chapter.

How would our understanding of museums change if we used the Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples - rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK, Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains focused almost exclusively on major institutions. In this ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere. The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential reading for students and researchers in museum studies, anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.

The reign of Queen Victoria witnessed a spectacular rise in the visibility, wealth, and prestige of English artists and designers. Leading this resurgence was a group of artists who established their studios in and around the new, fashionable district of London's Holland Park. This book -- the first major study of the Holland Park Circle of artists, architects, and their patrons -- is both an engrossing narrative of their lives, works, and influence and a perceptive analysis of the subtle relationships between high Victorian taste and mercantile values.

The circle was formed around G. F. Watts, who lived at Little Holland House; the handsome and accomplished Frederic Leighton; and their friend Valentine Prinsep. The artists who followed included Luke Fildes, Hamo Thomycroft, William Burges, Marcus Stone, James Jebusa Shannon, and Holman Hunt. Their studio-houses, designed by prominent architects of the era, were featured in architectural journals and society magazines, influencing the external and internal appearance of London's buildings. Caroline Dakers also describes how the artists posed "at home" for society photographs and how their "Show Sundays, " when the public was invited into the studios, became part of the London Season. She presents a fresh perspective on a period when art in England, in the words of Henry James, had become "a great fashion."

This book enriches the discourse around Global Citizenship Education in teacher education through the example of a teacher's experience in a Canada-China Sister School reciprocal learning landscape. Instead of positioning global citizenship teaching and learning as a set of fixed goals to be attained by teachers alone, this book approaches global citizenship teaching and learning as unfinished lifework in progress and as situated curriculum problems to be inquired together by university researchers, school teachers, and students under the spirit of reciprocity and community. This reimagination of narratives, theory, and action start from collaborative and reciprocal learning partnerships among Chinese and Canadian researchers and teachers in the practicality of re-searching and re-enacting the purpose and meanings of twenty-first century education in a Canada-China Sister School setting.

This is the first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936-42) and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938-56). The two intentional communities drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor. In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment - across two communities - in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism. Robert Hunt Ferguson recalls the genesis of Delta and Providence: how they were modeled after cooperative farms in Japan and Soviet Russia and how they rose in reaction to the exploitation of small- scale, dispossessed farmers. Although the staff, volunteers, and residents were very much everyday people - a mix of Christian socialists, political leftists, union organizers, and sharecroppers - the farms had the backing of such leading figures as philanthropist Sherwood Eddy, who purchased the land, and educator Charles Spurgeon Johnson and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as trustees. On these farms, residents developed a cooperative economy, operated a desegregated health clinic, held interracial church services and labor union meetings, and managed a credit union. Ferguson tells how a variety of factors related to World War II forced the closing of Delta, while Providence finally succumbed to economic boycotts and outside threats from white racists. Remaking the Rural South shows how a small group of committed people challenged hegemonic social and economic structures by going about their daily routines. Far from living in a closed society, activists at Delta and Providence engaged in a local movement with national and international roots and consequences.

This edited book demonstrates how love both unites and separates academic thinking across the arts and humanities, and beyond: from popular romance studies to border criminology, from sexology to peace studies, and into the fields of health, medicine, and engineering. This book is both a reflection and a call for a greater understanding of the complexity and importance of love in our lives, and in our world.

Behind the stereotype of a solitary meditator closing his eyes to the world, meditation always takes place in close interaction with the surrounding culture. Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context explores cases in which the relation between meditative practice and cultural context is particularly complex. The internationally-renowned contributors discuss practices that travel from one culture to another, or are surrounded by competing cultures. They explore cultures that bring together competing practices, or that are themselves mosaics of elements of different origins. They seek to answer the question: What is the relationship between meditation and culture? The effects of meditation may arise from its symbolic value within larger webs of cultural meaning, as in the contextual view that still dominates cultural and religious studies. They may also be psychobiological responses to the practice itself, the cultural context merely acting as a catalyst for processes originating in the body and mind of the practitioner. Meditation and Culture gives no single definitive explanation, but taken together, the different viewpoints presented point to the complexity of the relationship.

This book discusses the pivotal role of African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) in promoting, enhancing, and sustaining livelihoods in Africa. The authors argue that AIKS are of central importance in the development of sustainable livelihoods, particularly in rural communities. In their analysis, they draw on interdisciplinary research in the fields of agriculture, cultural and indigenous studies, development studies, education, geography, political science, and sociology. The objective is to make AIKS more applicable to mainstream educational and development agendas in Africa, a pressing issue in areas where Eurocentric scientific practices are cost prohibitive. The Dynamic of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems will be of interest to development professionals, policy makers, academics, students, and anyone interested in the field of AIKS and sustainable development in rural communities.