2501 results for "American History"

Call it English: the languages of Jewish American literature

Wirth-Nesher, Hana
Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.
Princeton University Press 2008-11-09 224 pages

City of promises: a history of the Jews of New York

Deborah Dash Moore,Howard B. Rock,Annie Polland,Jeffrey S. Gurock,Daniel Soyer
Volume 1: Haven of Liberty chronicles the arrival of the first Jews to New York in 1654 and highlights the role of republicanism in shaping their identity and institutions. Rock follows the Jews of NewYork through the Dutch and British colonial eras, the American Revolution and early republic, and the antebellum years, ending with a path-breaking account of their outlook and behavior during the Civil War. Overcoming significant barriers, these courageous men and women laid the foundations for one of the world’s foremost Jewish cities.
New York University Press 2012-09-10 1000 pages

Contemporary Native American Architecture Cultural Regeneration and Creativity

Carol Herselle Krinsky
A lavishly illustrated look at the Native American architectural renaissance during the past 30 years. The Native nations are planning the buildings they need: including office & commercial buildings, schools, clinics, religious & community structures, urban cultural centers, houses, & museums. They want to make sure that the buildings are culturally appropriate or focus on collective decisions that embody community values brought from the past to the present. Examines the historical & legal background of this movement of cultural regeneration through the medium of architecture.
DIANE Publishing Company 1999-11 277 pages

Jewish American and Holocaust literature: representation in the postmodern world

Alan L. Berger,Gloria L. Cronin
Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.
State University of New York Press 2004-09-22 255 pages

Taking back the Constitution: activist judges and the next age of American law

Tushnet, Mark V.
"The Supreme Court has never simply evaluated laws and arguments in light of permanent and immutable constitutional meanings, and social, moral, and yes, political ideas have always played into Supreme Court justices' impressions of how they think a case should be decided. Mark Tushnet traces the ways constitutional thought has evolved from the liberalism of the New Deal and Great Society to the Reagan conservatism that has been dominant since the 1980s. Looking at the current crossroads in the constitutional order, Tushnet explores the possibilities of either a Trumpian entrenchment of the most extreme ideas of the Reagan philosophy, or a dramatic and destabilizing move to the left. Wary of either outcome, he offers a passionate and informed argument for replacing judicial supremacy with popular constitutionalism-a move that would restore the other branches of government's role in deciding constitutional questions"--Provided by the publisher.
Yale University Press 2020 308 pages

Friendly Tyrants An American Dilemma

Adam Garfinkle,Daniel Pipes
What do the South Vietnamese government, the Shah and Ferdinand Marcos have in common? All were allied to the United States; all defied democratic and liberal norms; and all three fell in a blaze, creating problems for the United States. These three cases - and another eighteen more - are the subject of Friendly Tyrants, the first study ever to survey the contentious, persistent problem of U.S. government relations with pro-American authoritarian rulers.
Palgrave Macmillan UK 1991-01-01 542 pages

Speak Truth to Power: a Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence: a Study of International Conflict

American Friends Service Committee.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Hassell Street Press 2021-09-09 88 pages

Holocaust denial

Stern, Kenneth S.
Surveys Holocaust denial activities and publications around the world, with a separate chapter on the United States (pp. 10-24), referring to the penetration of Holocaust denial propaganda in American universities and in the media. Focuses on concrete ways of refuting specific claims made by the deniers. The four appendices (pp. 100-152) include propagandistic material published by Bradley R. Smith (from the Institute for Historical Review), a transcript of a TV talk show on Holocaust denial (30 April 1992), a list of Holocaust-denying books and pamphlets (only author and title given), and articles from the "Journal of Historical Review."
American Jewish Committee 1993 193 pages

The gift of fire: On the head of a pin

Mosley, Walter
New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley delivers two speculative tales, in one volume, of everyday people exposed to life-altering truths. The Gift of Fire In ancient mythology, the Titan Prometheus was punished by the gods for bringing man the gift of fire—an event that set humankind on its course of knowledge. As punishment for making man as powerful as gods, Prometheus was bound to a rock; every day his immortal body was devoured by a giant eagle. But in The Gift of Fire , those chains cease to be, and the great champion of man walks from that immortal prison into present-day South Central Los Angeles. On the Head of a Pin Joshua Winterland and Ana Fried are working at Jennings-Tremont Enterprises when they make the most important discovery in the history of this world—or possibly the next. JTE is developing advanced animatronics editing techniques to create high-end movies indistinguishable from live-action. Long dead stars can now share the screen with today's A-list. But one night Joshua and Ana discover something lingering in the rendered footage...an entity that will lead them into a new age beyond the reality they have come to know.
Tor 2013-03-26 283 pages

Coming Out of the Ice An Unexpected Life

Victor Herman
This astonishing true story is the tale of a young American man who was sent to the Soviet Union with his parents by the Ford Motor Company to set up an auto plant. He was eventually thrown into Soviet prisons and could not return to America until forty-five years later. During his life in and out of Russian prisons, he met and fell in love with a beautiful Russian gymnast who followed him into exile and lived with him and their child for a year in Siberia, in a caved chopped out under the ice. Theirs is the compelling story of a romance destined to thrive under even the most desperate conditions. It was 1938 when Victor Herman was inexplicably thrown into prison, after he had become a celebrity in the Soviet Union, having won acclaim as "the Lindbergh of Russia" for his flying and world-record-breaking parachute jumps. But what happened to him was a common nightmare during the Stalin years: those who survived imprisonment and torture were sent north to hard labor in the icy forests an
Freedom Press 1983 369 pages

Slow Fire Jewish Notes from Berlin

Susan Neiman
Berlin--"East" and "West," day and of course night--throughout the 80s before the Wall came down. In the eyes of an American philosophy student. And Jewish, which makes for moments at once awkward, poignant, resonant, unspoken, crass, funny, and always lurking. Most of all, Susan Neiman can write, as borne out again by her books to follow this debut. Here, we live the Reagan years with her--when a city was divided, America the occupier, and the cigarettes not named "Salem" because it sounds too Jewish. Peter Becker folded an easel in the corner to make a table. He brought cold cuts and bread and asked me what I thought of his paintings. Later I would learn that people here always ask you what you think of their paintings, and that it's wrong just to say you find them interesting, but perfectly alright to say you find them awful. . . . You come from a Jewish family, don't you?" asked Becker. "Yes," I said. "It doesn't matter," said the other painter. Doesn't matter? To whom?
Quid Pro, LLC 2010-08-23 224 pages

The culture of the Cold War

Whitfield, Stephen J.
"Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American?" As if in answer to this poignant question from John Updike's Rabbit at Rest , Stephen Whitfield examines the impact of the Cold War—and its dramatic ending—on American culture in an updated version of his highly acclaimed study. In a new epilogue to this second edition, he extends his analysis from the McCarthyism of the 1950s, including its effects on the American and European intelligensia, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond. Whitfield treats his subject matter with the eye of a historian, reminding the reader that the Cold War is now a thing of the past. His treatment underscores the importance of the Cold War to our national identity and forces the reader to ask, Where do we go from here? The question is especially crucial for the Cold War historian, Whitfield argues. His new epilogue is partly a guide for new historians to tackle the complexities of Cold War studies.
Johns Hopkins University Press 1996-05-19 275 pages

Contesting tears: the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman

Cavell, Stanley
What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness . With Contesting Tears , Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies. Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman , Gaslight , Now Voyager , and Stella Dallas . The women in these melodramas, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility. "Film is an interest of mine," Stanley Cavell has written, "or say a love, not separate from my interest in, or love of, philosophy." In Contesting Tears Cavell once again brilliantly unites his two loves, using detailed and perceptive musings on melodrama to reflect on philosophical problems of skepticism, psychoanalysis, and perfectionism. As he shows, the fascination and intelligence of such great stars as Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck illuminate, as they are illuminated by, the topics and events of these beloved and enduring films.
University of Chicago Press 1996 255 pages

Tropicana Nights The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub

Rosa Lowinger,Ofelia Fox
Tropicana is to Cuba what the Bolshoi is to Russia, the Moulin Rouge to Paris, or the Blue Note to New York--an enduring cultural mecca. This definitive biography of the place that was known as Paradise Under the Stars, vividly describes the 1950s nightclub that was part casino, part cabaret and was the only club owned and run by Cubans rather than the American mob. Nat "King" Cole, Liberace, and Carmen Miranda performed there before audiences that included Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, and Ernest Hemingway. The book portrays the cultural richness and roiling social problems of pre-Revolutionary Cuba and takes the reader on a tour of one of the world's most glamorous venues at its most brilliant moment.
Coralstone Press 2016-07 438 pages