2501 results for "American History"

The calling of sociology and other essays on the pursuit of learning

Shils, Edward
This third volume of the Selected Papers of Edward Shils brings together ten essays, three of which have never been published before and all the others of which have been completely revised and elaborated. They deal with the history of American and European sociology as an intellectual undertaking and as a means to the attainment of practical ends. Professor Shils's main themes are the influence of ethical and practical intentions on scholarly study in the social sciences, the autonomy of the intellectual tradition of sociology, and the significance of the institutional organization of sociological teaching and research.
University of Chicago Press 1980 498 pages

The Oxford handbook of American folklore and folklife studies

Simon J. Bronner
"This handbook surveys the materials, approaches, contexts, and applications of American folklore and folklife studies to guide students and scholars of American folklore, culture, history, and society in the future. In addition to longstanding areas in the 350-year legacy of the subject's study and applications such as folktales and speech, the handbook includes exciting fields that have emerged in the twenty-first century such as the Internet, bodylore, folklore of organizations and networks, sexual orientation, neurodiverse identities, and disability groups. These studies encompass cultural traditions in the United States ranging from bits of slang in private conversations to massive public demonstrations, ancient beliefs to contemporary viral memes, and a simple handshake greeting to festivals encompassing multiple genres and groups. Folklore and folklife studies include material traditions such as buildings and crafts as well as oral and social genres of dance, ritual, drama, and play. Whereas the use of lore often emphasizes speech, song, and story that all people express, the rhetoric of life draws attention to tradition-centered communities such as the Amish and Hasidim, occupational groups and their workaday worlds, and children and other age groups. Significant to the American context has been the cultural diversity and changing national boundaries of the United States, relative youth of the nation and its legacy of mass immigration, mobility of residents and their relation to an indigenous and racialized population, and a varied landscape and settlement pattern. The handbook is a reference, therefore, to American studies as well as the global study of tradition, folk arts, and cultural practice"--
Oxford University Press 2019 1010 pages

Ismo, ismo, ismo: cine experimental en América Latina = Ism, ism, ism : experimental cinema in Latin America

Jesse Lerner,Luciano Piazza
Ism, Ism, Ism / Ismo, Ismo, Ismo is the first comprehensive, United States-based film program and catalogue to treat the full breadth of Latin America's vibrant experimental film production. The exhibition features key historical and contemporary films from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the United States. From innovative works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica and Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo to the breathtaking yet practically unknown ouevre of queer Ecuadorian filmmaker Eduardo Sola Franco, the exhibition takes both the aficionado and the open-minded viewer on a journey into a wealth of materials culled from the forgotten corners of Latin American film archives. Equally unprecedented in its approach and scope, the accompanying fully bilingual catalogue features major scholars and artists working across nationalities, mediums, and time periods. Lerner and Piazza assemble a mix of original content authored by key curators, scholars, and archivists from Latin America: eighteen essays and articles translated for the first time pertaining to the history of Latin American experimental film, historical image-documents that are fundamental to the history of experimental film in Latin America, and program notes from the exhibition's programs. Published in association with the Los Angeles Filmforum, and as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
University of California Press 2017-10-10 400 pages

Invisible stars: a social history of women in American broadcasting

Halper, Donna L.
"Invisible Stars was the first book to recognize that women have always played an important part in American electronic media. The emphasis is on social history, as the author skillfully explains how the changing role of women in different eras influenced their participation in broadcasting. This is not just the story of radio stars or broadcast journalists, but a social history of women both on and off the air. Beginning in the early 1920s with the emergence of radio, the book chronicles the ambivalence toward women in broadcasting during the 1930s and 1940s, the gradual change in status of women in the 1950s and 1960s, the increased presence of women in broadcasting in the 1970s, and the successes of women in broadcasting in the 1980s and 1990s. The second edition is expanded to include the social and political changes that occurred in the 2000s, such as the growing number of women talk show hosts; changing attitudes about women in leadership roles in business; more about minority women in media; and women in sports and women sports announcers. The author addresses the question of whether women are in fact no longer invisible in electronic media. She provides an assessment of where progress for women (in society as well as broadcasting) can be seen, and where progress appears totally stalled." -- Publisher's website.
M.E. Sharpe, Inc 2014 369 pages

Invisible stars: a social history of women in American broadcasting

Halper, Donna L.
Invisible Stars was the first book to recognize that women have always played an important part in American electronic media. The emphasis is on social history, as the author skillfully explains how the changing role of women in different eras influenced their participation in broadcasting. This is not just the story of radio stars or broadcast journalists, but a social history of women both on and off the air. Beginning in the early 1920s with the emergence of radio, the book chronicles the ambivalence toward women in broadcasting during the 1930s and 1940s, the gradual change in status of wo
M.E. Sharpe, Inc 2014 369 pages

Blood of the Liberals

George Packer
An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.
Macmillan 2001-08 405 pages

Kwakiutl Ethnography

Boas, Franz
Presents an unfinished Boas manuscript and selected publications in which the renowned anthropologist records his observations of such aspects of Kwakiutl culture as social and economic organization, religion, and art. Franz Boas, a German-born American anthropologist, became the most influential anthropologist of his time. He left Germany because of its antiliberal and anti-Semitic climate. As a Columbia University professor for 37 years (1899-1936), he created both the field of anthropology and the modern concept of culture. Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as an umbrella organization for the emerging field. At both Columbia and the AAA, Boas encouraged the "four field" concept of anthropology; he personally contributed to physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, as well as cultural anthropology. His work in these fields was pioneering. Both directly and through the influence of such students as Ruth Benedict, Melville J. Herskovits, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Margaret Mead, he set the agenda for all subsequent American cultural anthropology. In His lifetime Boas had many leadership roles Assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History; editor of The Journal of American Folklore; president of the New York Academy of Sciences, and founder of the International Journal of American Linguistics. Boas is the author of hundreds of scientific monographs and articles. He died in 1942.
University of Chicago Press 1975 439 pages

The American democracy: a commentary and an interpretation

Laski, Harold J.
This is Laski's most important book after A Grammar of Politics . It discusses, on a grand scale, every aspect of American public life. Laski surveys American traditions and the American spirit, political institutions, the entire educational, religious, economic and social scene, America as a world power, and Americanism as a principle of civilisation. Laski's unsurpassed knowledge of American constitutional, social and cultural history is set in the perspective of his deep study of comparative constitutional history and political theory. He was one of very few people to see U.S. politics from the inside, as a result of his friendships with Roosevelt, Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Routledge 2014-10-29 794 pages

Slavery, resistance, freedom

G. S. Boritt,Scott Hancock
Americans have always defined themselves in terms of their freedoms--of speech, of religion, of political dissent. How we interpret our history of slavery--the ultimate denial of these freedoms--deeply affects how we understand the very fabric of our democracy. This extraordinary collection of essays by some of America's top historians focuses on how African Americans resisted slavery and how they responded when finally free. Ira Berlin sets the stage by stressing the relationship between how we understand slavery and how we discuss race today. The remaining essays offer a richly textured examination of all aspects of slavery in America. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger recount actual cases of runaway slaves, their motivations for escape and the strains this widespread phenomenon put on white slave-owners. Scott Hancock explores how free black Northerners created a proud African American identity out of the oral history of slavery in the south. Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas III, and Anne Sarah Rubin draw upon their remarkable Valley of the Shadow website to describe the wartime experiences of African Americans living on both borders of the Mason-Dixon line. Noah Andre Trudeau turns our attention to the war itself, examining the military experience of the only all-black division in the Army of the Potomac. And Eric Foner gives us a new look at how black leaders performed during the Reconstruction, revealing that they were far more successful than is commonly acknowledged--indeed, they represented, for a time, the fulfillment of the American ideal that all people could aspire to political office. Wide-ranging, authoritative, and filled with invaluable historical insight, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom brings a host of powerful voices to America's evolving conversation about race.
Oxford University Press 2009 165 pages

Antisemitism: an American tradition

Nadell, Pamela Susan
"Jews experienced antisemitism the moment they landed on what would become the United States. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, Peter Stuyvesant tried but failed to deport them. As historian Pamela S. Nadell tells in Antisemitism, an American Tradition, this was only antisemitism's beginning on our shores, as negative European stereotypes about Jews rooted into American soil. Compared with the Old World, with its expulsions, Inquisitions, ghettos, and Holocaust, America's Jews have a different history -- but one where antisemitism, even if it has had fewer dramatic eruptions, is deeply embedded. Jews in America faced restrictions on holding office and getting financial credit. Universities set quotas to limit the number of Jews attending and businesses refused to hire them. Jews endured verbal and physical attacks, and their synagogues and cemeteries, continuing to this day, were vandalized and desecrated. Antisemitism, an American Tradition investigates the depths of this fraught history and its recent manifestations: white nationalists chanting "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a gunman murdering eleven worshipers of Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue building. Nadell also shows Jews responding to prejudice and hate. America's Jews created advocacy organizations. They turned to the courts to safeguard their constitutional rights. They made common cause with allies to confront all types of hate. They even used their fists when needed. At a time when prejudice, discrimination, and hate against Jews is flaring across the country, Antisemitism, an American Tradition argues that we must understand the past. This momentous work reveals how antisemitism -- and resistance to that hatred -- endures, representing not a rupture from America's history, but a centuries-old legacy." -- Book jacket.
W. W. Norton & Company 2025-10-14 332 pages

The Acadians In Search of a Homeland

James Laxer
An evocative and beautifully written history of some of Canada's earliest settlers, and their search for a definitive home. In 1604, a small group of migrants fled political turmoil and famine in France to start a new colony on Canada's east coast. Their roughly demarcated territory included what are now Canada's Maritime provinces, land that was fought over by the British and French empires until the Acadians were finally expelled in 1755. Their diaspora persists to this day. The Acadians is the definitive history of a little-known part of the North American past, and the quintessential story of a people in search of their identity. In the absence of a state, what defines an Acadian is elusive and while today's Acadian community centred in New Brunswick is more confident than ever, it is entering a contentious debate about its future. James Laxer's compelling book brilliantly explores one of Canada's oldest and most distinct cultural groups, and shows how their complex, often tragic history reflects the larger problems facing Canada and the world today.
Anchor Canada 2007-06-12 336 pages

Liberty of conscience: in defense of America's tradition of religious equality

Nussbaum, Martha C.
The founders of the United States overcame religious intolerance in favor of a constitutional order dedicated to fair treatment for people's deeply held conscientious beliefs. This respect for religious difference, scholar Nussbaum writes, formed our democracy. Yet today there are signs that this legacy is misunderstood. The prominence of a particular type of Christianity in our public life suggests the unequal worth of citizens who hold different religious beliefs, or no beliefs. Others, meanwhile, seek to curtail the influence of religion in public life in a way that is itself unbalanced and unfair. Such partisan efforts, Nussbaum argues, violate the spirit of our Constitution. This is a historical and conceptual study of the American tradition of religious freedom. Weaving together political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases, it is a chronicle of an ideal of equality that has always been central to our history but is now in danger.--From publisher description.
BasicBooks 2010-01-05 406 pages

The unfinished election of 2000

Rakove, Jack N.
The Unfinished Election of 2000 gathers an outstanding group of constitutional and political scholars to address key facets of the most recent election and to show how the events of 2000 fit into a larger historical narrative of American politics and law. Perhaps no other election in U.S. history has left so many disturbing questions about how our political system works--from the very basic mechanics of vote casting to the conclusion, which many believe to have been the result of a politicized U.S. Supreme Court. The Unfinished Election of 2000 is the first book to attempt a true historical judgement and to give readers a better understanding of the election that confused and infuriated the country.
BasicBooks 2001-10-17 266 pages

Prophets of the past: interpreters of Jewish history

Brenner, Michael
Prophets of the Past is the first book to examine in depth how modern Jewish historians have interpreted Jewish history. Michael Brenner reveals that perhaps no other national or religious group has used their shared history for so many different ideological and political purposes as the Jews. He deftly traces the master narratives of Jewish history from the beginnings of the scholarly study of Jews and Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany; to eastern European approaches by Simon Dubnow, the interwar school of Polish-Jewish historians, and the short-lived efforts of Soviet-Jewish historians; to the work of British and American scholars such as Cecil Roth and Salo Baron; and to Zionist and post-Zionist interpretations of Jewish history. He also unravels the distortions of Jewish history writing, including antisemitic Nazi research into the "Jewish question," the Soviet portrayal of Jewish history as class struggle, and Orthodox Jewish interpretations of history as divinely inspired. History proved to be a uniquely powerful weapon for modern Jewish scholars during a period when they had no nation or army to fight for their ideological and political objectives, whether the goal was Jewish emancipation, diasporic autonomy, or the creation of a Jewish state. As Brenner demonstrates in this illuminating and incisive book, these historians often found legitimacy for these struggles in the Jewish past.
Princeton University Press 2010-08-22 301 pages

The international human rights movement: a history

Neier, Aryeh
A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its founders During the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in the struggle against totalitarian regimes, cruelties in wars, and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement , Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives a unique insider's perspective on the movement's goals, the disputes about its mission, and its rise to international importance. Discussing the movement's origins, Neier looks at the dissenters who fought for religious freedoms in seventeenth-century England and the abolitionists who opposed slavery before the Civil War era. He pays special attention to the period from the 1970s onward, and he describes the growth of the human rights movement after the Helsinki Accords, the roles played by American presidential administrations, and the astonishing Arab revolutions of 2011. Neier argues that the contemporary human rights movement was, to a large extent, an outgrowth of the Cold War, and he demonstrates how it became the driving influence in international law, institutions, and rights. Throughout, Neier highlights key figures, controversies, and organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and he considers the challenges to come. Illuminating and insightful, The International Human Rights Movement is a remarkable account of a significant world movement, told by a key figure in its evolution.
Princeton University Press 2013-08-04 379 pages

After The passion is gone: American religious consequences

Landres, Shawn J.,Berenbaum, Michael
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ topped box office charts and changed the American religious conversation. The controversies it raised remain unsettled. In After The Passion Is Gone: American Religious Consequences, leading scholars of religion and theology ask what Gibson's film and the resulting controversy reveal about Christians, Jews, and the possibilities of interreligious dialogue in the United States. Landres and Berenbaum's collection moves beyond questions of whether or not the film was faithful to the gospels, too violent, or antisemitic and explores why the debate focused on these issues but not others. The public discussion of The Passion shed light on a wide range of American attitudes--evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish--about media and faith, politics and history, Jesus and Judaism, fundamentalism and victimhood. After The Passion Is Gone takes a unique view of vital points in Christian-Jewish relations and contemporary American religion.
AltaMira Press 2004-11-20 348 pages

The Washington Senators

Povich, Shirley
A facsimile edition of the celebrated 1954 history of the Senators Shirley Povich's history of the Washington Senators originally appeared in 1954 as part of the popular series of major league team histories published by G. P. Putnam. With their colorful prose and delightful narratives, the Putnam books have been described as the Cadillac of the genre and have become prized collectibles for baseball readers and historians. One of the American League's eight charter franchises, the club was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1901 as the Washington Senators. In 1905 the team changed its name to the Washington Nationals. However, fans and newspapers persisted in using the "Senators" nickname, and over time the use of "Nationals" faded and "Senators" reemerged as the team's official name. In their first nine seasons the Senators finished last four times and didn't climb above sixth place until 1912. The major catalysts in their rise were the ascendance to greatness of Walter Johnson, who emerged in 1910 as the American League's best pitcher, and the hiring of Clark Griffith as manager in 1912. Griffith pioneered in the use of relief pitchers and in signing Caribbean talent. Although the team's new respectability faded, the 1924 hiring of twenty seven-year-old Bucky Harris as player-manager brought instant results, with a surprise World Series Championship in Harris's first season at the helm. The club repeated as AL champions in 1925 and its best season came in 1933, when it captured the AL title with a team record 99-53 mark. The Senators had only four more winning seasons over the next twenty six years. Povich's unique insight as a Washington Post sportswriter led to thoughtful advice and comfort for the long-suffering Senators fans. Legends like Walter Johnson, Gabby Street, Bucky Harris, Roger Peckinpaugh, Sam Rice, Firpo Marberry, Joe Cronin, and Leon "Goose" Goslin fill these pages, and their colorful exploits are woven into the fabric of each season's story. Sure to be treasured by baseball lovers everywhere, The Washington Senators is another enjoyable addition to the Writing Sports Series.
The Kent State University Press 2010 256 pages