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Freedom's Ring begins with the question of how the American ideal of freedom, which so effectively defends a conservative agenda today, from globally exploitative free trade to anti-French \"freedom fries\" during the War in Iraq, once bolstered the progressive causes of Freedom Summer, the Free Speech Movement, and more militant Black Power and Women's Liberation movements with equal efficacy. Focused as it is on the faring of freedom throughout the liberation era, this book also explores attempts made by rights movements to achieve the often competitive or cross-canceling American ideal of equality-economic, professional, and otherwise. Although many struggled and died for it in the civil rights era, freedoms such as the vote, integrated bus rides, and sex without consequences via the Pill, are ultimately free-costing officialdom little if anything to fully implement-while equality with respect to jobs, salaries, education, housing, and health care, will forever be the much more expensive nut to crack. Freedom's Ring regards the politics of freedom, and politics in general, as a low-cost substitute for and engrossing distraction from substantive economic problem-solving from the liberation era to the present day.

KEYWORDS: Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Charles Manson, automobility In this essay I consider the true crime and automotive contexts of major work by Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson. I examine the specific role played by automobility in the commission and narrative rendition of era-defining or (as these writers might frame it) world-ending true crime, especially their reaction to the apocalyptic indications of the Manson Family murders. Despite their starkly differentiated literary personas, both Didion and Thompson used themes of speed and travel to distance themselves from Manson, and yet both ultimately exploited such \"little fellas\" (both the impoverished and socially marginalized Charles Manson and elsewhere the Hells Angels) to enrich their own literary fame.

Too often lost in our understanding of the American Cold War crisis, with its nuclear brinkmanship and global political chess game, is the simultaneous crisis on the nation's racial front. Reckoning Day is the first book to examine the relationship of African Americans to the atom bomb in postwar America. It tells the wide-ranging story of African Americans' response to the atomic threat in the postwar period. It examines the anti-nuclear writing and activism of major figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lorraine Hansberry as well as the placement (or absence) of black characters in white-authored doomsday fiction and nonfiction. Author Jacqueline Foertsch analyzes the work of African American thinkers, activists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and musical performers in the \"atomic\" decades of 1945 to 1965 and beyond. Her book tells the dynamic story of commitment and interdependence, as these major figures spoke with force and eloquence for nuclear disarmament, just as they argued unassailably for racial equality on numerous other occasions. Foertsch also examines the placement of African American characters in white-authored doomsday novels, science fiction, and survivalist nonfiction such as government-sponsored forecasts regarding post-nuclear survival. In these, black characters are often displaced or absented entirely: in doomsday narratives they are excluded from executive decision-making and the stories' often triumphant conclusions; in the nonfiction, they are rarely envisioned amongst the \"typical American\" survivors charged with rebuilding US society. Throughout Reckoning Day, issues of placement and positioning provide the conceptual framework: abandoned at \"ground zero\" (America's inner cities) during the height of the atomic threat, African Americans were figured in white-authored survival fiction as compliant servants aiding white victory over atomic adversity, while as historical figures they were often perceived as \"elsewhere\" (indifferent) to the atomic threat. In fact, African Americans' \"position\" on the bomb was rarely one of silence or indifference. Ranging from appreciation to disdain to vigorous opposition, atomic-era African Americans developed diverse and meaningful positions on the bomb and made essential contributions to a remarkably American dialogue.

A clear overview of the major cultural forms of 1940s America: fiction and non-fiction (specifically newspapers and magazines), music and radio, film and theatre, serious and popular visual arts, and case studies of influential texts and practitioners of the decade.

“Despite the trend toward stay-at-home mothering in the post-WWII decades, few popular women’s narratives…focus on the domesticated woman, with the notable exceptions of Grace Metalious’s scandalous bestseller Peyton Place (1956), Sue Kaufman’s acerbic social commentary Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), and Betty Friedan’s liberal-feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique (1963). Herein, Friedan deplored the suburban entrapment of middle-class women and argued vigorously throughout her own career for women’s improved access to the paid professional sector. Due to the influence of this text and related outcries from the nascent feminist second wave, stories about women’s search for meaningful careers in conflict with traditional desires for spouse and children left their mark on this era.”

From the Publisher: This book explores the major cultural forms of 1940s America-fiction and non-fiction; music and radio; film and theatre; serious and popular visual arts-and key texts, trends and figures, from Native Son to Citizen Kane, from Hiroshima to HUAC, and from Dr Seuss to Bob Hope. After discussing the dominant ideas that inform the 1940s the book culminates with a chapter on the 'culture of war'. Rather than splitting the decade at 1945, Jacqueline Foertsch argues persuasively that the 1940s should be taken as a whole, seeking out links between wartime and postwar American culture.

Foertsch examines Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. These works' struggle for the conscience of America is nevertheless built upon numerous points of overlap: the Clutters were murdered by two ex-cons, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who strongly resemble Kerouacs exuberant joyriders, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise: Kerouac's Dean Moriarty and Capote's Dick Hickock play the dominant partner in each pairs road adventures, with Sal and Perry in the respective submissive roles. An aura of homoeroticism envelops each pair, despite the compulsive eye for women--especially underage women--displayed by Dean and Dick. Left on his own, Perry Smith might have lived a life of harmless, if pointless, adventuring: like the young men of Kerouacs novel, he dreamed of riches under the sea and a life of ease in Mexico. But Dick offers the dose of \"practicality\" that puts an end to Perry's romantic longing to light out for the territory in the manner inaugurated by Huckleberry Finn. Instead of seeking buried treasure in a distant mountain range, Dick proposes a well-orchestrated score against a source of wealth much closer to home.

Interrogating a broad array of lesbian, gay, and feminist theories, this book considers instances of unnecessarily divisive turf-battling, yet focuses primarily on the productive debates that define and vitalize the field.

Yet they risked worsening the very problem they sought to alleviate whenever they dared to publicize and politicize women's sexuality. [...]the hated \"Madonna-Whore combination,\" lambasted by Robin Morgan in the Radical Women's manifesto \"No More Miss America!\" reemerged as a \"Revolutionary-Whore combination\" in the midst of some radical feminists' most effective protest. [...]because of the nature of the stories discussed here, how do these texts position sexual activity in contexts that are simultaneously \"free\" (engaged in consensually and without social constraint or legal prosecution) and yet also freely participate in the prostitution economy wherein the sex in question must be paid for and is often quite expensive? Since these conditions optimized describe a state of total, ideal, and perhaps ultimately idealized sexual freedom, the discussion here will mainly concern the ways in which the texts in question fall short of these ideals. Theresa Dunn is not as financially well situated, and thus her approach to female sexuality is more \"radical\" for being experienced \"freely\": she has sex with any male partner she feels inclined to invite home and without the monetary compensation that said partners, and American society as a whole, assume into play so as to categorize and ultimately contain sexual activity such as Theresa's. Because Theresa's habit of engaging in anonymous sex not for money but for sheer self-interested pleasure is the more aggravating departure from social convention for attractive white middle-class women such as herself, the price she pays is much higher: although both she and Bree are threatened with violence and death by the men seeking their sexual favors, only Theresa has these threats actually visited upon her; she is brutally slain for her transgressions, while Bree is rescued from harm by a representative of the state in the figure of Det. John Klute. [...]the occupation of a female victim is buried deep within the story of a tabloid newspaper unless the occupation has a glamorous connotation, however, tenuous. [...]the sympathetic veteran angle is Rossner's own, since the real-life Wilson did no military service.) In the real and fictional versions of this story, Wilson/White was pathologized as a closet-queer, sexually exploited by the flamboyant gay man keeping him in New York but for whom Rossner's White could no longer stand to perform as sexual slave.