The general store in late-nineteenth-century America was often the economic heart of a small town. Merchants sold goods necessary for residents' daily survival and extended credit to many of their customers; cash-poor farmers relied on merchants for their economic well-being just as the retailers needed customers to purchase their wares. But there was more to this mutual dependence than economics. Store owners often helped found churches and other institutions, and they and their customers worshiped together, sent their children to the same schools, and in times of crisis, came to one another's assistance.

For this social and cultural history, Linda English combed store account ledgers from the 1870s and 1880s and found in them the experiences of thousands of people in Texas and Indian Territory. Particularly revealing are her insights into the everyday lives of women, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities, especially African Americans and American Indians.

A store's ledger entries yield a wealth of detail about its proprietor, customers, and merchandise. As a local gathering place, the general store witnessed many aspects of residents' daily lives--many of them recorded, if hastily, in account books. In a small community with only one store, the clientele would include white, black, and Indian shoppers and, in some locales, Mexican American and other immigrants. Flour, coffee, salt, potatoes, tobacco, domestic fabrics, and other staples typified most purchases, but occasional luxury items reflected the buyer's desire for refinement and upward mobility. Recognizing that townspeople often accessed the wider world through the general store, English also traces the impact of national concerns on remote rural areas--including Reconstruction, race relations, women's rights, and temperance campaigns.

In describing the social status of store owners and their economic and political roles in both small agricultural communities and larger towns, English fleshes out the fascinating history of daily life in Indian Territory and Texas in a time of transition.

After the State and the Church, the most well organized membership system of medieval and early modern Europe was the confraternity. In cities, towns, and villages it would have been difficult for someone not to be a member of a confraternity, the recipient of its charity, or aware of its presence in the community. In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, Konrad Eisenbichler brings together an international group of scholars to examine confraternities from various perspectives: their origins and development, their devotional practices, their charitable activities, and their contributions to literature, music, and art. The result is a picture of confraternities as important venues for the acquisition of spiritual riches, material wealth, and social capital. Contributors to this volume: Alyssa Abraham, Davide Adamoli, Christopher F. Black, Dominika Burdzy, David D'Andrea, Konrad Eisenbichler, Anna Esposito, Federica Francesconi, Marina Gazzini, Jonathan Glixon, Colm Lennon, William R. Levin, Murdo J. MacLeod, Nerida Newbigin, Dylan Reid, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas Terpstra, Paul Trio, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Beata Wojciechowska, and Danilo Zardin.

This gripping book considers the history, techniques, and goals of child-targeted consumer campaigns and examines children's changing perceptions of what commodities they "need" to be valued and value themselves. In this critique of America's consumption-based society, author Jennifer Hill chronicles the impact of consumer culture on children-from the evolution of childhood play to a child's self-perception as a consumer to the consequences of this generation's repeated media exposure to violence. Hill proposes that corporations, eager to tap into a multibillion-dollar market, use the power of advertising and the media to mold children's thoughts and behaviors. The book features vignettes with teenagers explaining, in their own words, how advertising determines their needs, wants, and self-esteem. An in-depth analysis of this research reveals the influence of media on a young person's desire to conform, shows how broadcasted depictions of beauty distort the identities of children and teens, and uncovers corporate agendas for manipulating behavior in the younger generation. The work concludes with the position that corporations are shaping children to be efficient consumers but, in return, are harming their developing young minds and physical well-being. Features content from across disciplines including sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and social work Introduces the idea that corporations exert a powerful-and largely negative-influence over children and childhood Offers a theoretical explanation of the current state of consumer capitalism Presents findings based on original research conducted by the author

Current demographic developments and change due to long life expectancies, low birth rates, changing family structures, and economic and political crises causing migration and flight are having a significant impact on intergenerational relationships, the social welfare system, the job market and what elderly people (can) expect from their retirement and environment. The socio-political relevance of the categories of 'age' and 'ageing' have been increasing and gaining much attention within different scholarly fields. However, none of the efforts to identify age-related diseases or the processes of ageing in order to develop suitable strategies for prevention and therapy have had any effect on the fact that attitudes against the elderly are based on patterns that are determined by parameters that or not biological or sociological: age(ing) is also a cultural fact. This book reveals the importance of cultural factors in order to build a framework for analyzing and understanding cultural constructions of ageing, bringing together scholarly discourses from the arts and humanities as well as social, medical and psychological fields of study. The contributions pave the way for new strategies of caring for elderly people.

Under the Big Top challenges the utility of the fundamentalist-modernist dichotomy in understanding turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Protestantism. Through an examination of the immensely popular big tent revivals, the book develops a new framework to view Protestantism in this transformative period of American history. Contemporary critics of the revivalists often depicted them as anachronistically anxious and outdated religious opponents of a new urban, modern nation. Early historical accounts followed suit by portraying tent revivalists as Victorian hold-outs bent on re-establishing nineteenth-century values and religion in a new modern America. Josh McMullen argues that rather than mere dour opposition, big tent revivalists participated in the shift away from Victorianism and helped in the construction of a new consumer culture in the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s. McMullen also seeks to answer the question of how the United States became the most consumer-driven and yet one of the most religious societies in the western world. Early critics and historians of consumer culture concluded that Americans' increasing search for physical, mental, and emotional well-being came at the expense of religious belief, yet evangelical Christianity grew alongside the expanding consumer culture throughout the twentieth century. A study of big tent revivalism helps resolve this dilemma: revivalists and their audiences combined the Protestant ethic of salvation with the emerging consumer ethos by cautiously unlinking Christianity from Victorianism and linking it with the new, emerging consumer culture. This innovative, revisionist work helps us to understand the continued appeal of both the therapeutic and salvific worldviews to many Americans as well as the ambivalence that accompanies this combination.

The Outcast Majority invites policymakers, practitioners, academics, students, and others to think about three commanding contemporary issues-war, development, and youth-in new ways. The starting point is the following irony: while Africanyouth are demographically dominant, many act as if they are members of an outcast minority. The irony directly informs young people's lives in war-affected Africa, where differences separating the priorities of youth and those of international agencies are especially prominent. Drawing on interviews with development experts and young people, Marc Sommers shines a light on this gap and offers guidance on how to close it. He begins with a comprehensive consideration of forces that shape and propel the lives of African youth today, particularly those experiencing or emerging from war. They are contrasted with forces that influence and constrain the international development aid enterprise. The book concludes with a framework for making development policies and practices significantly more relevant and effective for youth in areas affected by African wars and other places where vast and vibrant youth populations reside.

This title offers an insight into key contemporary global issues relating to the lives and experiences of young Muslims. Many Muslim societies, regardless of location, are displaying a 'youth bulge', where more than half their populations are under the age of 25. An increasingly globalized western culture is rapidly eroding 'traditional' ideas about society, from the family to the state. At the same time, there is a view that rampant materialism is creating a culture of spiritual emptiness in which demoralization and pessimism easily find root. For young Muslims these challenges may be compounded by a growing sense of alienation as they face competing ideologies and divergent lifestyles. Muslim youth are often idealized as the 'future of Islam' or stigmatized as rebelling against their parental values and suffering 'identity crises'. These experiences can produce both positive and negative reactions, from intellectual engagement and increasing spiritual maturity to emotional rejectionism, narrow identity politics and violent extremism. This book addresses many of the central issues currently facing young Muslims in both localized and globalized contexts through engaging with the work of academics, youth work practitioners and those working in non-governmental organizations and civic institutions.

Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four 'narrative modes' elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.

Showcasing the work of more than 200 women writers of African descent, this major international collection celebrates their contributions to literature and international culture.

Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking anthology Daughters Of Africa illuminated the “silent, forgotten, underrated voices of black women” (Washington Post). Published to international acclaim, it was hailed as “an extraordinary body of achievement… a vital document of lost history” (Sunday Times). New Daughters Of Africa continues that mission for a new generation, bringing together a selection of overlooked artists of the past with fresh and vibrant voices that have emerged from across the globe in the past two decades, from Antigua to Zimbabwe with numerous South African contributors. Key figures join popular contemporaries in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them. Each of the pieces in this remarkable collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honours the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles women writers of colour face as they negotiate issues of race, gender and class, and confront vital matters of independence, freedom and oppression.

Custom, tradition, friendships, sisterhood, romance, sexuality, intersectional feminism, the politics of gender, race, and identity—all and more are explored in this glorious collection of work from over 200 writers. New Daughters Of Africa spans a wealth of genres—autobiography, memoir, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humour, politics, journalism, essays and speeches—to demonstrate the diversity and remarkable literary achievements of black women.

New Daughters Of Africa features a number of well-known South African contributors including Gabeba Baderoon, Nadia Davids, Diana Ferrus, Vangile Gantsho, Barbara Masekela, Lebogang Mashile and Sisonke Msimang.

In Patriotic Cooperation, Diana Junio offers an account of a cooperative venture between the Nationalist government and the Church of Christ in China, known as the Border Service Department, that carried out substantial social programs from 1939 to 1955 in China's Southwestern border areas. Numerous scholars have argued that Chinese state-religion relations have been characterized primarily by conflict and antagonism. By examining the history of cooperation seen in the Border Service Department case, Diana Junio contends that these relations have not always been antagonistic; on the contrary, under certain conditions the state and the church could achieve a mutually beneficial goal through successful cooperation, with a strong degree of sincerity on both sides.

Spatial development is a discipline aimed at the protection of specific values and rational development by stimulating economic processes. Modern practices challenge developers to minimize the negative impact of urban development on the environment. In order to adhere to this policy, bioeconomical solutions and investments can be utilized. Bioeconomical Solutions and Investments in Sustainable City Development is an essential source that explores the development of sustainable city models based on investments in eco-oriented solutions by protecting and making publicly available green areas and by innovative investments with the use of bioeconomical solutions. Featuring research on topics such as bioeconomy vision, environmental education, and rural planning, this book is ideally designed for architects, urban planners, city authorities, experts, officers, business representatives, economists, politicians, academicians, and researchers.

Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down & Out on the Silver Screen explores how American movies have portrayed poor and homeless people from the silent era to today. It provides a novel kind of guide to social policy, exploring how ideas about poor and homeless people have been reflected in popular culture and evaluating those images against the historical and contemporary reality. Richly illustrated and examining nearly 300 American-made films released between 1902 and 2015, Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens finds and describes representations of poor and homeless people and the places they have inhabited throughout the century-long history of U.S. cinema. It moves beyond the merely descriptive to deliberate whether cinematic representations of homelessness and poverty changed over time, and if there are patterns to be discerned. Ultimately, the text offers a preliminary response to a handful of harder questions about causation and consequence: Why are these portrayals as they are? Where do they come from? Are they a reflection of American attitudes and policies toward marginalized populations, or do they help create them? What does this all mean for politics and policymaking? Of interest to movie buffs and film scholars, cultural critics and historians, policy analysts, and those curious to know more about homelessness and American poverty, Ghettoes, Tramps, and Welfare Queens is a unique window into American politics, history, policy, and culture - it is an entertaining and enlightening journey.

Within Western Buddhism, practitioners are often assumed to be white and middle-class. Based in ground-breaking empirical research, Cosmopolitan Dharma: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in British Buddhism explores the stories of Buddhists from minority communities, through a rich analysis of their lived experiences. Smith, Munt and Yip explore their various contestations of dominant white and heteronormative cultures in Western Buddhism. Using cosmopolitanism as the theoretical lens, Cosmopolitan Dharma argues convincingly that the Buddhist ethos of human interconnectivity needs to be further developed to truly embrace the 'Other' of different kinds (not least Western Buddhism's own internal 'Others'). Cosmopolitan Dharma, through Buddhists' own narratives, explores how cultural politics from the ground up can offer a more inclusive philosophy and lived experience of spirituality.

What if neoclassical economics addressed the question of class? This accessible overview of economic theory launches this investigation The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society-- and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. A mere nine months into the lockdown, the net worth of the infamous Forbes 400 increased by one trillion dollars; In a single year the US poverty rate rose by the largest amount ever since record-keeping began sixty years ago. At the same time, mass unemployment imperiled or erased the fragile right to quality health care for a substantial number of people living in states without Medicaid. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illumines the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times-- and reveals them as the very same structures of power at the foundations of the class system under today's capitalism. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics offers prescriptions that can genuinely address the steepening and hardening of class boundaries. This book pushes past economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last.