1840 research outputs found
Sort by
Technology as freedom: the New Deal and the electrical modernization of the American home
No full textBefore 1930, the domestic market for electrical appliances was segmented, but New Deal policies and programs created a true mass market, reshaping the electrical and housing markets and guiding them toward mandated social goals. The New Deal identified electrical refrigeration as a key technology to reform domestic labor, raise family health, and build family assets. New Deal incentives led to nearly fifty percent of Title I National Housing Act loans being used to buy electric refrigerators in the 1930s. New Deal policies ultimately created the mass commodity culture of home-owning families that typified the conservative 1950s
University of California Press eScholarship editions
No full textFew twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings.The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction
Women and the war story
No full textIn a book that radically and fundamentally revises the way we think about war, Miriam Cooke charts the emerging tradition of women's contributions to what she calls the "War Story," a genre formerly reserved for men. Concentrating on the contemporary literature of the Arab world, Cooke looks at how alternatives to the master narrative challenge the authority of experience and the permission to write. She shows how women who write themselves and their experiences into the War Story undo the masculine contract with violence, sexuality, and glory. There is no single War Story, Cooke concludes; the standard narrative - and with it the way we think about and conduct war - can be changed.As the traditional time, space, organization, and representation of war have shifted, so have ways of describing it. As drug wars, civil wars, gang wars, and ideological wars have moved into neighborhoods and homes, the line between combat zones and safe zones has blurred. Cooke shows how women's stories contest the acceptance of a dyadically structured world and break down the easy oppositions - home vs. front, civilian vs. combatant, war vs. peace, victory vs. defeat - that have framed, and ultimately promoted, war
American literary realism and the failed promise of contract
No full textIn law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order - one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters
Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan
No full textThis book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written
The ford
No full textMary Austin's 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history - the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and feminist organizing of the time, exemplified in the successful efforts of an independent young woman to buy back her family's Owens Valley ranch
Female subjects in black and white: race, psychoanalysis, feminism
No full textThis landmark collaboration between African American and white feminists goes to the heart of problems that have troubled feminist thinking for decades. Putting the racial dynamics of feminist interpretation center stage, these essays question such issues as the primacy of sexual difference, the universal nature of psychoanalytic categories, and the role of race in the formation of identity. They offer new ways of approaching African American texts and reframe our thinking about the contexts, discourses, and traditions of the American cultural landscape. Calling for the racialization of whiteness and claiming that psychoanalytic theory should make room for competing discourses of spirituality and diasporic consciousness, these essays give shape to the many stubborn incompatibilities - as well as the transformative possibilities - between white feminist and African American cultural formations.Bringing into conversation a range of psychoanalytic, feminist, and African-derived spiritual perspectives, these essays enact an inclusive politics of reading. Often explosive and always provocative, Female Subjects in Black and White models a new cross-racial feminism
Back story 2
No full text"Backstory" is the screenwriter's term for what happens in a plot before the screen story begins. In this companion volume to McGilligan's widely praised Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age , fourteen studio scribes active in later decades rail and reminisce about their fifty-plus years of inventing and scripting movies. Richard Brooks, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Arthur Laurents, Ben Maddow, Stewart Stern, Daniel Taradash, and Philip Yordan are among the distinguished figures included.The 1940s were a period of transition for the motion picture industry, from an era of hope and glory and the upheavals of World War II to a postwar era of caution and confusion. The 1950s brought a great decline in the number of films produced and led to the extinction of that peculiar creature, the contract writer.The survivors of Hollywood's most productive years remain wonderfully talkative, however. In this lively collection of interviews they contribute useful writing tips, radical correctives to screen history and industry folklore, and just plain fascinating gossip. As a whole, the interviews provide a compelling biographical close-up of an entire generation of men and women whose talent, vision, and tenacity were critical to the institution we know as "Hollywood.
On the Jews
No full textDebate over the authenticity of "On the Jews" has persisted for nearly 1,900 years. Bezalel Bar-Kochva attempts to overcome this stalemate in his finely detailed and convincingly argued study that proves the forgery of the book and suggests not only a source for the text, but also a social, political, and cultural setting that explains its conception.Bar-Kochva argues that the author of this treatise belonged to the moderate conservative Jews of Alexandria, whose practices were contrary to the contemporary trends of Hellenistic Judaism. They rejected the application of Greek philosophy and allegorical interpretations of the Holy scriptures and advocated the use of Pentateuch Hebrew as the language for educating and for religious services. They showed a keen interest in Judea and identified themselves with the Jews of the Holy Land. "On the Jews," then, was the manifesto of this group and was written at the peak period of the Hasmonean kingdom. Its main purpose was to legitimize Jewish residence in Egypt, despite being explicitly prohibited in the Pentateuch, and to justify the continued residence of Jews there in a time of prosperity and expansion of the Jewish independent state
Judgement in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist century
No full textSimon Agranat (1906-1992) was the third chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court and a founding father of Israeli law. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Chicago, Agranat brought U.S. progressivism and constitutionalism to Israeli legal soil. Agranat laid the foundation for Israel's bill of rights and took part in nearly every important Israeli legal and political issue of this century. Pnina Lahav's rewarding study of Simon Agranat portrays Israeli history through the lens of judicial opinions. It is based on her extensive interviews with the justice before his death and a close examination of his papers. A major theme in her book is the relationship between Agranat's world view and landmark Israeli Supreme Court opinions, and she tells the compelling story of a visionary jurist and an American pursuing his Zionist dream in Palestine. Here, too, is an illuminating view of Israeli history and legal culture that includes the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Holocaust, the symbiosis between religion and the Jewish state, and the tensions within Zionism itself. Lahav also details the thinking behind Agranat's 1962 decision to convict Adolph Eichmann and the justice's dissent in the "Who Is a Jew?" case in 1970.This is the first biography of the man who made both a geographical and a psychological journey from the United States to Jerusalem. In demonstrating the influences of one culture on another, Judgment in Jerusalem provides important insights into Israeli law and politics and into the complex processes that form a national identity