Browse

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black-and-white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region? This book considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one's race. Even such practices as cutting one's hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

This book traces how disabled people came to be viewed as biologically deviant. The eugenics era pioneered techniques that managed “defectives” through the application of therapies, invasive case histories, and acute surveillance techniques, turning disabled persons into subjects for a readily available research pool. In its pursuit of normalization, eugenics implemented disability regulations that included charity systems, marriage laws, sterilization, institutionalization, and even extermination. Enacted in enclosed disability locations, these practices ultimately resulted in expectations of segregation from the mainstream, leaving today's disability politics to focus on reintegration, visibility, inclusion, and the right of meaningful public participation. The book reveals cracks in the social production of human variation as aberrancy. From our modern obsessions with tidiness and cleanliness to our desire to attain perfect bodies, notions of disabilities as examples of human insufficiency proliferate. These disability practices infuse more general modes of social obedience at work today. Consequently, this study explains how disabled people are instrumental to charting the passage from a disciplinary society to one based upon regulation of the self.

This book explores the American cycling city of the 1890s. It is a city lost in history, but one in which bicycles and their champions influenced urban design and city life. Paved roads, bicycle paths, and reconceived traffic laws signaled what many believed to be was the beginning of a new era. The millions of people who called themselves cyclists envisioned that the bicycle would usher in a city that was cleaner, easier to navigate and would give residents shorter commutes, new recreational outlets, and improved health, both mental and physical. What they did not anticipate was that bicycles would fall out of favor so suddenly. Ultimately, the cycling city crashed, and along with it, the future of cycling in the United States.

This work seeks to understand why the temporary flowering of government funding of the arts for needy artists and intellectuals during the Great Depression was both so robust and so fleeting. It outlines five views of art that became especially prominent at the time: art as grandeur, art as enrichment, art as a weapon, art as experience, and art as subversion. Classically-trained artists, architects, and urban planners, who since the early nineteenth century had held a monopoly on public art, continued to imagine a small cadre of artists using grand and monumental art and architecture to inspire citizens. In contrast, the Treasury’s art administrators contended that government art should subsidize more diverse artists who were competitively selected to beautify public spaces with murals and sculptures that celebrated the nation. Artists on the left, many of whom were hired by the WPA’s arts projects for destitute artists, considered art a weapon that could engage citizens in political debates and efforts toward social change. Still other art administrators focused less on the lessons taught by finished works of art than on participation in the creative process. Ultimately, the federal art projects engendered a backlash, shifting the creative locus from public sponsorship to universities, museum, and other private organizations. By tracing the range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s and what New Deal art meant for its creators, administrators, and audiences, this work outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.

This book reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, the book explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as the book delves deeply into this little-known—yet surprisingly persistent—aspect of American history. Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, this book reminds us that the stories of American history do not always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle—over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves—is often just beginning.

The Forgotten Sense: Meditations on Touch is a collection of essays that revolve around conceptions and depictions of the sense of touch throughout the cultural history of the West, from antiquity to the 21st century. Touch is the vastest, most complex of the senses. It is the external sensation of the outside world, and the intimate experience of our inner body. It is the sense of pleasure and pain. It allows us to perceive the outside world not only as texture, but also as pressure and temperature. It collaborates with the other senses to orient us in space and grants us the perception of our own bodies as living organisms. And it is also the sense that governs affect. Everything that moves, thrills, agitates and inflames us, everything that causes in us even the slightest affective movement, is ultimately experienced as a form of touch. Whereas the history of the senses, and in particular, of the “lower senses” (touch, taste, smell) has been the object of sustained attention in the past fifteen years, this book offers an essayistic approach to the subject that was long overdue. A sense as intimate as touch calls for such an approach. Far from aspiring to provide a history of touch, these essays hover over the cultural, literary, and intellectual history, lingering on moments that are especially revealing of the ways in which the many variants of what we call the sense of touch are engaged with, imitated, explored, or incorporated as formal elements.

As anyone who has watched television in recent years can attest, we live in the age of Viagra. From Bob Dole to Mike Ditka to late-night comedians, our culture has been engaged in one long, frank, and very public talk about impotence—and our newfound pharmaceutical solutions. But as this book shows, the failure of men to rise to the occasion has been a recurrent topic since the dawn of human culture. Drawing on a range of sources from across centuries, the book demonstrates how male sexuality was constructed around the idea of potency, from times past when it was essential for the purpose of siring children, to today, when successful sex is viewed as a component of a healthy emotional life. Along the way, the book enlightens with tales of sexual failure and its remedies—for example, had Ditka lived in ancient Mesopotamia, he might have recited spells while eating roots and plants rather than pills—and explanations, which over the years have included witchcraft, shell-shock, masturbation, feminism, and the Oedipal complex. The book also explores the surprising political and social effects of impotence, from the revolutionary unrest fueled by Louis XVI's failure to consummate his marriage to the boost given the fledgling American republic by George Washington's failure to found a dynasty. Each age, it shows, turns impotence to its own purposes, using it to help define what is normal and healthy for men, their relationships, and society.

In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. This book relates the story of Evans's excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle. Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, the book paints a portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.

For more than a century commentators have referred to San Francisco's Mission District as a “city within a city.” This book demonstrates that it was no accident that the neighborhood came to be thought of this way. In the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Mission residents (“Missionites,” as they proudly referred to themselves) organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood. Mission-based groups mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong identity, one that was explicitly white. Organizations like the Mission Promotion Association wielded decisive influence in planning debates through the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Local power waned through the New Deal and immediate post-World War II period, but institutions like the Mission Merchants' Association and the Catholic parish church of St. Peter's carried on the neighborhood planning tradition. In the 1960s, the federal urban renewal program and Great Society programs, particularly Model Cities, would give neighborhood residents the impetus to organize anew. The resulting groups, like the Mission Coalition Organization and the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation, mobilized a politics of multiethnicity and again asserted the right of the neighborhood to plan for itself. The book concludes with the dissolution of the Mission Coalition Organization in 1973. But it also demonstrates that the neighborhood's recent anti-gentrification organizing cannot be explained without reference to the Mission's longstanding tradition of community-based planning, a tradition that dates back at least as early as the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.

Was it an omen that Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913? As this book relates, Nixon and the movies have shared a long and complex history. Some of that history—the president's multiple screenings of Patton before and during the invasion of Cambodia, or Oliver Stone's Nixon—is well known. Yet much more is not. How many are aware, for example, that Nixon was an enthusiastic filmgoer who watched more than five hundred movies during his presidency? This book takes an often revelatory approach to looking at Nixon's career—and Hollywood's. From the obvious (All the President's Men) to the less so (Elvis Presley movies and Nixon's relationship to 1960s youth culture) to several onscreen “alternate” Nixons (Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success, Gene Hackman in The Conversation), the book sees aspects of Nixon's character, and the nation's, refracted and reimagined in film. Conversely, it argues that Nixon can help us see the movies in a new light, making a strong case for Nixon as the movies' tutelary deity during the early 1970s, playing a role in Hollywood's Silver Age comparable to FDR's during its Golden Age. The book draws on biography, politics, cultural history, and film criticism.

This book explores the folk customs of adolescent males in the Boy Scouts of America during a summer encampment in California's Sierra Nevada. Drawing on more than twenty years of research and extensive visits and interviews with members of the troop, the author uncovers the key rituals and play events through which the Boy Scouts shapes boys into men. He describes the campfire songs, initiation rites, games, and activities that are used to mold the Scouts into responsible adults. The themes of honor and character alternate in this new study as we witness troop leaders offering examples in structure, discipline, and guidance, and teaching scouts the difficult balance between freedom and self-control. What results is a probing look into the inner lives of boys in our culture and their rocky transition into manhood. This book provides a provocative, sometimes shocking glimpse into the sexual awakening and moral development of young men coming to grips with their nascent desires, their innate aggressions, their inclination toward peer pressure and violence, and their social acculturation. This book ultimately shows how the Boy Scouts of America continues to edify and mentor young men against the backdrop of controversies over freedom of religious expression, homosexuality, and the proposed inclusion of female members. While the organization's bureaucracy has taken an unyielding stance against gay men and atheists, real live Scouts are often more open to plurality than we might assume. In their embrace of tolerance, acceptance, and understanding, troop leaders at the local level have the power to shape boys into emotionally mature men.

Much has been written about how social groups construct, exploit, or erase memories of their past, but little about how they compete to shape future memories of their present. This book investigates a pervasive yet understudied manifestation of this impulse: the time capsule. Although objects have been ritually deposited since antiquity, the idea of specifying an opening date surfaced during the US centennial of 1876. It was a product, the book claims, of expanded horizons of communication in the telegraphic and telephonic age, but also of growing doubts about traditional vehicles of memory such as paper-based records, libraries, monuments, and the built environment. Over the ensuing half-century, at least thirty communities—from colleges and congregations to cities—bequeathed some kind of safe or chest to their successors. In their (moderately) inclusive, collaborative approach, their attempt to evoke everyday life, and their embrace of artifacts, photographs, phonograph records, and films, they constitute an early form of public and multimedia history. The book further examines how time capsules engendered visions of the future. Diverse campaigners—from eugenicists and teetotalers to suffragettes, socialists, and anti-imperialists—imagined the utopia their belief would realize by the container’s target date. Utopian fantasies are often criticized as abstract and compensatory. Yet this book shows how encapsulation could render them concrete. Contributors addressed prospective individuals and imagined reaching out to touch or embrace them. Such an embodied and intimate relationship, the book concludes, is crucial to any attempt to promote a sense of duty to posterity.

This book isolates a narrative that lies very close to the core of the American character. From colonial times to the present day, Americans have always had a deep-rooted belief in the “fresh start”—a belief that still has Americans moving from place to place faster than the citizens of any other nation.

In the past century, numerous social critics have observed the rise of therapeutic culture, a loosely aligned network of assumptions, practices, and institutions that tout the importance of individual happiness, emotional fulfilment, and self-actualization. While the United States has proved to be especially receptive to it, this culture has spread across the globe. According to the accounts produced by its early critics, therapeutic culture represents a destructive trend—one that spells the death of civic engagement and communal activity, undermining the republican traditions of hard work and self-reliance, and turning those who embrace its premises into shallow, quiescent narcissists. While indebted to these critics for making the phenomena of therapeutic culture visible and underscoring some of the legitimate dangers that it poses, this collection seeks to complicate their description by calling attention to the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways that therapeutic practices operate in everyday life. The book’s introduction offers a history of therapeutic culture’s emergence in Europe and the United States and of the schools of criticism that have traced its growth, while also pointing to more recent developments that demand new theoretical approaches. The individual essays, which are organized around particular key words, such as “pain,” “privacy,” and “narcissism,” focus on specific historical examples, theoretical, legal, and political debates, and narratives produced by individual consumers, in order to construct a more nuanced, more empirically grounded picture of therapeutic culture than the one popularized in earlier critical accounts.

This book explores conflict over everyday gambling in urban America from the 1950s through the 1980s. The popular illegal games "numbers" and "policy" thrived in African American communities in New York, Chicago and other cities for much of the twentieth century, providing an important source of both leisure and employment. Black political and civic leaders resisted police corruption and mafia incursions as they attempted to preserve these games as autonomous black economic institutions. As a series of gambling related cases led the Supreme Court to curtail police practices, and as urban reformers sought to curb police corruption, state governments attempted to replace these forms of gambling with state lotteries beginning in the late 1960s. Much of the black political leadership in the major northern cities insisted that if numbers gambling were to be legal, then it should be the basis for jobs and profits in black communities. This vision of legal gambling lost out to a system of government lotteries oriented towards extracting revenue from poor and working class areas. This book traces the conflict over gambling, and the path from illegal numbers to government lottery, as it plays out in the street, the courts, and in the halls of government.

This book reveals the many ways that the Salem witch trials loomed over the American collective memory from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond. Schoolbooks in the 1790s, for example, evoked the episode to demonstrate the new nation's progress from a disorderly and brutal past to a rational present, while critics of new religious movements in the 1830s cast them as a return to Salem-era fanaticism, and during the Civil War, southerners evoked witch burning to criticize Union tactics. Shedding light on the many, varied American invocations of Salem, the author ultimately illuminates the function of collective memories in the life of a nation.

The emergence of Sun Ra and his Arkestra in 1950s Chicago is seen today as a foundational moment for Afrofuturist modes of cultural expression. Sun Ra's Chicago investigates how the bandleader's musical cosmology first developed and, in particular, why it came to flourish in Chicago. Focusing on his early years in Birmingham, Alabama and his time in post-World War II Chicago, the book argues that the relationship between Sun Ra and his cities offers new insight into his music and philosophy as well as the role of everyday black urban experience in the development of Afrofuturism as a cultural ideal. The book employs a historical and spatial lens to situate Ra's evolving sensibility within the material and imagined spaces of his cities. From Birmingham's black downtown and swing-band "territory" to Chicago's South Side music outposts and Washington Park religious forums, these spaces illuminate the unruly mix of African American commercial self-help, Ethiopianist religious thought, show-club theatricality and jazz-based musical experimentation that came to define the Arkestra as a performance ensemble as well as the broader cultural project pursued by Ra and his key associate, Alton Abraham. In the process, this historical account also examines Sun Ra's own early re-imaginings of the city as a vehicle for the musical exploration of utopian worlds where mythologies of Africa and outer-space futures collide. By investigating the creative interplay between the bandleader and his cities, this book uncovers a different, often-veiled postwar Chicago where the historical pathways of black futurist culture converged and flourished.

In a detailed analysis that ranges from Aaron Burr to O. J. Simpson, this book traces the legal meaning and cultural implications of prominent American trials across the history of the nation. This investigation examines courtroom transcripts, newspaper accounts, and the work of such imaginative writers as Emerson, Thoreau, William Dean Howells, and E. L. Doctorow. The book shows how courtrooms are forced to cope with unresolved communal anxieties and how they sometimes make legal decisions that change the way Americans think about themselves. Burning questions control the narrative. How do such trials mushroom into major public dramas with fundamental ideas at stake? Why did outcomes that we now see as unjust enjoy such strong communal support at the time? At what point does overexposure undermine a trial's role as a legal proceeding? Ultimately, such questions lead the book to look at the issue of modern press coverage of courtrooms. While acknowledging that media accounts can skew perceptions, the book argues forcefully in favor of full television coverage of them—and it takes the Supreme Court to task for its failure to grasp the importance of this issue. Trials must be seen to be understood, but this book reminds us that we have a duty, currently ignored, to ensure that cameras serve the court rather than the media.

Truth-spots lend credibility to beliefs and claims about natural and social reality, about the past and future, about identity and the mystical. Such ideas or accounts inevitably have a place of provenance, a geographic location where they were found or made, a spot built up with material stuff and endowed with cultural meaning and value. For Greeks long ago, temples and statues clustered on the side of Mount Parnassus affirmed their belief that predictions from the oracle at Delphi were accurate. Today, selectively reconstructed and expertly annotated ruins convince tourists at Delphi that Archaic Greeks really did, in fact, believe in oracular truth. The trust we have in Thoreau's wisdom depends on how skillfully he made Walden Pond into a perfect place for discerning transcendent truth about the universe. Courthouses and laboratories are designed and built to exacting specifications so that the architectural conditions of rendering justice and discovering natural facts are perceived as legitimate. On-site commemoration of birthplaces where struggles for civil rights began--Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall--reminds people of slow but significant political progress and of unfinished business. These kinds of places--and also botanical gardens, naturalists' field-sites, Henry Ford's open-air historical museum, sacred buildings along the pilgrimage way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain--would seem at first to have little in common. But each is a truth-spot, a place that makes people believe. Truth may well be the daughter of time, but it is also the son of place.

American ruins have become increasingly prominent, whether in discussions of “urban blight” and home foreclosures, in commemorations of 9/11, or in post-apocalyptic movies. This book argues that the association between American cities and ruins dates back to a much earlier period in the nation's history. Recovering numerous scenes of urban desolation—from failed banks, abandoned towns, and dilapidated tenements to the crumbling skyscrapers and bridges envisioned in science fiction and cartoons—it challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. This book, the first to document an American cult of the ruin, traces its deviations as well as derivations from European conventions. Unlike classical and Gothic ruins, which decayed gracefully over centuries and inspired philosophical meditations about the fate of civilizations, America's ruins were often “untimely,” appearing unpredictably and disappearing before they could accrue an aura of age. As modern ruins of steel and iron, they stimulated critical reflections about contemporary cities, and the unfamiliar kinds of experience they enabled. Unearthing evocative sources everywhere from the archives of amateur photographers to the contents of time capsules, this book exposes crucial debates about the economic, technological, and cultural transformations known as urban modernity. The result is a fascinating cultural history that uncovers fresh perspectives on the American city.