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Between 1935 and 1943, a group of photographers under the direction
of Roy Emerson Stryker set out to photograph the United States for
the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information.
Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included
Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker
Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent
years, however, their work has been reproduced with little
discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its
creation. "Documenting America" takes a fresh look at these
remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by
Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central
to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the
pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing
scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of
life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read
photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands
between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both
essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition
of a photographic record of America, about the 'ways of seeing'
that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and
about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the
conventions of realism. The images themselves are presented in
series selected from groups of pictures created by single
photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of
exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment
with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a
process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to
the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming
community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation
Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled
Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of
the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise
to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between
government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly
three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last
bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the
Second World War.
In this book the author aims to revolutionize our understanding of
Afro-American material culture. Bringing to the essays his
extensive research into the written, oral and material sources of
Afro-American culture as well on his scholarly knowledge of
folklife, social history, anthropology, and art history, Vlach
presents the evidence of African influence on Black American
folklife, both past and present. The 9 essays in the book are
divided into three categories: folk arts and crafts, artisan's
lives, and black buildings. They encompass a broad range of
folklife, bringing together the fragmented pieces of African as
well as Caribbean influence. From South Carolina to Texas, and from
Louisiana to Virginia, Vlach provides both general surveys and
specific case studies, and focuses not only on artifacts, but on
the artisan's role as designer and maker. He examines various
manifestations of African culture form direct retentions of African
items to stylistic influences inherent in the creative philosophy,
in the intellectual premises on which the artifact is designed. The
noted stonecarver William Edmonson of Tennessee and contemporary
blacksmith Philip Simmons of Charleston are featured, as well as
countless other artisans from both past and present. The last 20
years have brought an increased awareness of black America's
African heritage, but the lasting influences of African tradition
in material culture has been largely overlooked or denied by
scholars claiming that slave owners had succeeded in divesting
black people of all tangible aspects of the life they had lost.
Using multidisciplinary means, Vlach has broken much new ground in
this complex cross-cultural experience. He uses unconventional
documents to create an alternative history and to demonstrate just
how much of African culture was remembered and how rich and vibrant
the tradition is.
"My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of
the United States about banking." So began the first of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's famous Fireside Chats, which came on the heels of his
decision, two days after his inauguration, to close all American
banks. During this address, Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio to
share his hopes and plans directly with the people. He concluded by
encouraging Americans to "tell me your troubles." Roosevelt's
invitation was unprecedented, and the enormous public response it
elicited signaled the advent of a new relationship between
Americans and their president. In this indispensable book, Lawrence
W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine illuminate the period from 1933 to
1938 by setting each of the Fireside Chats in context and
reprinting a moving selection of the letters that poured into
Washington from an extraordinary variety of ordinary Americans. In
his foreword, Michael Kazin examines the achievements and limits of
the New Deal and the reasons that FDR remains, for many Americans,
the exemplar of a good president. He also highlights the
similarities of the 1930s to our era, with its deep recession and a
new progressive administration in the White House.
David Grimsted's "Melodrama Unveiled" explores early American drama
to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so
popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic
settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions
of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and
stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and
directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the
least common denominator of social values and concerns. In
considering both the context and content of popular culture,
Grimsted's book suggests how theater reflected the rapidly changing
society of antebellum America.
Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city
only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making.
Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the
city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic
Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias.
Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates
discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient
tyranny, "the greatest sickness of the soul." He thereby is able to
"foresee" their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty
Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the
Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this
physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily
translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular
favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of
self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling
ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom.
Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast,
shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way,
the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of
the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the
process, Levine brings us to see Plato's extended apologia or
defense of Socrates as "a teacher of tyrants" and his
counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its
leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought
to see how such "value judgments" are possible, how Plato conceives
the prospects for practical judgment (phronesis). In addition we
witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating
diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further,
is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger
significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author's
inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates.
The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our
ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne
needs to be resumed.
In this book, 19 prominent representatives of each side in the
basic division among Strauss's followers explore his contribution
to political philosophy and Jewish thought. The volume presents the
most extensive analysis yet published of Strauss's religious
heritage and how it related to his work, and includes Strauss's
previously unpublished 'Why We Remain Jews, ' an extraordinary
essay concerned with the challenge posed to Judaism by modern
secular thought. The extensive introduction interrelates the major
themes of Strauss's thought
Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city
only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making.
Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the
city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic
Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias.
Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates
discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient
tyranny, "the greatest sickness of the soul." He thereby is able to
"foresee" their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty
Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the
Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this
physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily
translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular
favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of
self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling
ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom.
Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast,
shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way,
the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of
the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the
process, Levine brings us to see Plato's extended apologia or
defense of Socrates as "a teacher of tyrants" and his
counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its
leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought
to see how such "value judgments" are possible, how Plato conceives
the prospects for practical judgment (phronesis). In addition we
witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating
diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further,
is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger
significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author's
inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates.
The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our
ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne
needs to be resumed.
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