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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Other public performances & spectacles
All We Say is the story of the United States through fifteen speeches – some iconic, others long forgotten, all pivotal – from its founding to the intense divisions of our times, from one of President Obama's former speechwriters.
For 250 years, America has debated what it means to be American. The question shaped the compromises in the Constitution and the arguments they’ve had ever since, spawning abolitionism, secession and civil war; populism, mass migration and global leadership; movements for reform and the backlashes to them.
Through riveting accounts of the people, movements and moments that produced these speeches, Rhodes traces the history of America's battle over identity. The result is a singular and revealing portrait of the United States: a nation divided between two stories – one of inheritance, power, and exclusion, the other of equality, striving, and belonging.
Drawing on a decade writing for Barack Obama, Rhodes also reveals how words can redirect a nation, what makes a speech enduring, and why oratory is a unique form of persuasion in a democracy.
These speeches remind us that history is a living argument. At a time when American identity – and truth – is contested, All We Say offers a fresh and powerful look at who America really is, and who it could still become.
By the end of America s Golden Age of Magic, Chicago had taken
center stage in front of an American audience drawn to the craft by
the likes of Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston. Cashing in on a
craze that rivaled big-band mania, magic shops and clubs sprang up
everywhere across the Windy City, packed in customers and put down
roots. Over the last century, for example, Magic, Inc. has
outfitted magicians from Harry Blackstone Sr. to Penn and Teller to
David Copperfield. Magic was an integral part of Chicago s culture,
from its earliest venture into live television to the card sharps
and hucksters lurking in its amusement parks and pool halls. David
Witter keeps track of the shell game of Chicago s fascinating magic
history from its vaudeville circuit to its contemporary resurgence.
Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and
marketing beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands
of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus
beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The
cultural power of beauty pageants continues today as campus beauty
pageants, especially racial and ethnic pageants and pageants for
men, have soared in popularity. In Queens of Academe, Karen W. Tice
asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and
body business and with what effects on student bodies and
identities. She explores why students compete in and attend
pageants such as "Miss Pride" and "Best Bodies on Campus" as well
as why websites such as "Campus Chic" and campus-based etiquette
and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and
interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors
as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on
predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus
pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and,
sometimes, racial and political agendas to resolve the
incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on
stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to
illuminate the shifting terrain of class, race, religion,
sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life.
Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice
offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of
education, feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity,
class, and popular culture have on students, idealized
masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher
education itself.
This study explores the dynamic relations between cultural forms
and political formations in some urban cultural movements. The
analysis is based on a detailed study of the structure and
development of the London Notting Hill Carnival, widely described
as Europe's biggest street festival. Started in 1966 as a
small-scale, multi-ethnic local festival, it grew into a massive
West-Indian dominated affair that over the years occasioned violent
confrontations between black youth and the police. The carnival
developed and mobilized a homogenous and communal West-Indian
culture that helped in the struggle against rampant racism. The
celebration is contrasted with other carnival movements, such as
California's 'Renaissance Pleasure Faire'. Analytically, this is a
follow-up to Cohen's earlier studies of the relations between drama
and politics in some urban religious, ethnic and elitist movements
in Africa. The conclusion focuses on the processes underlying the
transformation of rational political strategies into non-rational
cultural forms.
In the cool, pre-dawn hours on a June night in 1918, a train
engineer closed his cab window as he chugged toward Hammond,
Indiana. He drifted to sleep, and his train bore down on the idle
Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Train. Soon after, the sleeping engineer's
locomotive plowed into the circus train. In the subsequent wreckage
and blaze, more than two hundred circus performers were injured and
eighty-six were killed, most of whom were interred in a mass grave
in the Showmen's Rest section of Chicago's Woodlawn Cemetery. Join
local historian Richard Lytle as he recounts, in the fullest
retelling to date, the details of this tragedy and its role in the
overall evolution and demise of a unique entertainment industry.
The information of this book could be of use for the students,
researcher any person willing to know about the subject of
nutritional management of livestock, poultry and other animal
species. Information is presented in a simple, lucid manner and
concise form for the wide range of readers, academicians and
researchers.
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