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This brief history of America will span the earliest migrations to the present, reflecting Paul S. Boyer's interests in social, intellectual, and cultural history, including popular culture and religion. It will reflect his personal view of American history, in which a sense of paradox and irony loom large. While noting positive achievements-political, economic, social, and cultural-he will also discuss the United States's failures to live up to its oft-stated ideals; although America has figured in the world's imagination (and its own self-image) as a "land of opportunity" offering "liberty and justice for all," the reality has often fallen short. For example, the establishment of the North American colonies had very different meanings for colonists from the British Isles and Europe, for Native peoples, and for enslaved Africans brought against their will. The late nineteenth century saw not only impressive industrial expansion and the creation of vast fortunes but also appalling conditions in urban-immigrant slums and a degraded, exploited labor force. The twentieth-century emergence of a suburban society of consumer abundance meant a better life for many and laid the groundwork for impressive cultural creativity, yet left behind crime-ridden inner cities and spawned a stultifying mass culture. The immigrants who have renewed and revitalized the nation have also stirred hostility and resentment. While American popular culture has demonstrated global appeal, the projection of U.S. military power abroad, from the Philippines early in the twentieth century to Iraq early in the twenty-first, has sometimes failed in its purpose and damaged the nation's international standing. Although this book will not be a muckraking expose or anachronistic moral tract, neither will it be a celebratory panegyric or a bland recital of facts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Today a tourist mecca, the area now known as the Wisconsin Dells was once wilderness--and a gathering place for the region's Native peoples, the Ho-Chunk, who for centuries migrated to this part of the Wisconsin River for both sustenance and spiritual renewal. By the late 1800s their numbers had dwindled through displacement or forcible removal, and it was this smaller band that caught the attention of photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett. Having built his reputation on his photographs of the Dells' steep gorges and fantastic rock formations, H. H. Bennett now turned his camera upon the Ho-Chunk themselves, and thus began the many-layered relationship unfolded by Steven D. Hoelscher in "Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells." The interactions between Indian and white man, photographer and photographed, suggested a relationship in which commercial motives and friendly feelings mixed, though not necessarily in equal measure. The Ho-Chunk resourcefully sought new ways to survive in the increasingly tourist-driven economy of the Dells. Bennett, struggling to keep his photography business alive, capitalized on America's comfortably nostalgic image of Native peoples as a vanishing race, no longer threatening and now safe for white consumption. Hoelscher traces these developments through letters, diaries, financial records, guidebooks, and periodicals of the day. He places Bennett within the context of contemporary artists and photographers of American Indians and examines the receptions of this legacy by the Ho-Chunk today. In the final chapter, he juxtaposes Bennett's depictions of Native Americans with the work of present-day Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones, who documents the lives of his own people with a subtlety and depth foreshadowed, a century ago, in the flickers of irony, injury, humor, and pride conveyed by his Ho-Chunk ancestors as they posed before the lens of a white photographer. Winner, Book Award of Merit, Wisconsin Historical Society, Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
Mingling God and Mammon, piety and polemics, and prescriptions for this world and the next, modern Americans have created a culture of print that is vibrantly religious. From America's beginnings, the printed word has played a central role in articulating, propagating, defending, critiquing, and sometimes attacking religious belief. In the last two centuries the United States has become both the leading producer and consumer of print and one of the most identifiably religious nations on earth. Print in every form has helped religious groups come to grips with modernity as they construct their identities. In turn, publishers have profited by swelling their lists with spiritual advice books and scriptures formatted so as to attract every conceivable niche market." Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America" explores how a variety of print media--religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary "Bible-zines"--have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War. Edited by Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, whose comprehensive historical essays provide a broad overview to the topic, this book is the first on the history of religious print culture in modern America and a well-timed entry into the increasingly prominent contemporary debate over the role of religion in American public life. Within these essays are Jewish college students, medical missionaries, Mormon savants, the eccentric, and the mainstream, all of whom illuminate the manifold and sometimes surprising ways religious groups interact with the written word. This volume invites readersto discover connections that are sometimes readily apparent, sometimes obscure, but always fascinating and informative.
During World War I it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America's entry into the conflict. In ""Unsafe for Democracy"", historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further - paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence. At times going undercover, investigators tried to elicit the unguarded comments of individuals believed to be a threat to the prevailing social order. In this massive yet largely secret campaign, agents cast their net wide, targeting isolationists, pacifists, immigrants, socialists, labor organizers, African Americans, and clergymen. The unemployed, the mentally ill, college students, schoolteachers, even schoolchildren, all might come under scrutiny, often in the context of the most trivial and benign activities of daily life. Delving into numerous reports by Justice Department detectives, Thomas documents how, in case after case, they used threats and warnings to frighten war critics and silence dissent. This early government crusade for wartime ideological conformity, Thomas argues, marks one of the more dubious achievements of the Progressive Era - and a development that resonates in the present day.
Best known for his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond in
Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau is often considered a recluse
who emerged from solitude only occasionally to take a stand on the
issues of his day. In "Thoreau's Democratic Withdrawal," Shannon L.
Mariotti explores Thoreau's nature writings to offer a new way of
understanding the unique politics of the so-called hermit of Walden
Pond. Drawing imaginatively from the twentieth-century German
social theorist Theodor W. Adorno, she shows how withdrawal from
the public sphere can paradoxically be a valuable part of
democratic politics.
Realizing the century-old dream of a passage to India, the building
of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions,
a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with
interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal's
"Seaway to the Future" unfolds a cultural history of the Panama
Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era's
policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists,
travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its
environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian
management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and
consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States,
the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for
the future--images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915
Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal's
completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama
Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as
Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and
anticipation. Like most utopian visions, this one aspired to
perfection at the price of exclusion. Overlooking the West Indian
laborers who built the Canal, its admirers praised the white elite
that supervised and administered it. Inspired by the masculine
ideal personified by President Theodore Roosevelt, writers depicted
the Canal Zone as an emphatically male enterprise and Chief
Engineer George W. Goethals as the emblem of a new type of social
leader, the engineer-soldier, the benevolent despot. Examining
these and other images of the Panama Canal project, "Seaway to the
Future" shows how they reflected popular attitudes toward an
evolving modern world and, no less important, helped shape those
perceptions.
In such popular television series as "The West Wing" and "24," in
thrillers like Tom Clancy's novels, and in recent films, plays,
graphic novels, and internet cartoons, America has been led by an
amazing variety of chief executives. Some of these are real
presidents who have been fictionally reimagined. Others are
"might-have-beens" like Philip Roth's President Charles Lindbergh.
Many more have never existed except in some storyteller's
mind.
Mingling God and Mammon, piety and polemics, and prescriptions for this world and the next, modern Americans have created a culture of print that is vibrantly religious. From America's beginnings, the printed word has played a central role in articulating, propagating, defending, critiquing, and sometimes attacking religious belief. In the last two centuries the United States has become both the leading producer and consumer of print and one of the most identifiably religious nations on earth. Print in every form has helped religious groups come to grips with modernity as they construct their identities. In turn, publishers have profited by swelling their lists with spiritual advice books and scriptures formatted so as to attract every conceivable niche market.""Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America"" explores how a variety of print media - religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary ""Bible-zines"" - have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War. Edited by Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, whose comprehensive historical essays provide a broad overview to the topic, this book is the first on the history of religious print culture in modern America and a well-timed entry into the increasingly prominent contemporary debate over the role of religion in American public life.
Chapter outline and summary, key terms and definitions, identification questions, multiple choice questions, short-answer questions, essay questions and skill-building activities such as map exercises.
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