Catalogue Search | MBRL
Search Results Heading
Explore the vast range of titles available.
MBRLSearchResults
-
LanguageLanguage
-
SubjectSubject
-
Item TypeItem Type
-
DisciplineDiscipline
-
YearFrom:-To:
-
More FiltersMore FiltersIs Peer Reviewed
Done
Filters
Reset
1,489
result(s) for
"Life Social aspects United States History."
Sort by:
Chicanx Utopias
2022
Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for
civil rights and global justice in the post-World War II era,
Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to
combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They
envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined
the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the
latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture
forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams
that sprang from everyday experiences.
In Chicanx Utopias , Luis Alvarez offers a broad study
of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the
film Salt of the Earth , brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms,
poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx
pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered
interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements,
and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities
and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter
Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book
reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense
of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.
Food politics
2013
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly
The Gentlemen and the Roughs
2010
During the Civil War, the Union army - like the society from which it sprang - appeared cohesive enough to withstand four years of grueling war against the Confederates and to claim victory in 1865. But fractiousness bubbled below the surface of the North's presumably united front. Internal fissures were rife within the Union army: class divisions, regional antagonisms, ideological differences, and conflicting personalities all distracted the army from quelling the Southern rebellion.In this highly original contribution to Civil War and gender history, Lorien Foote reveals that these internal battles were fought against the backdrop of manhood. Clashing ideals of manliness produced myriad conflicts when educated, refined, and wealthy officers (gentlemen) found themselves commanding a hard-drinking group of fighters (roughs) - a dynamic that often resulted in violence and even death. Challenges, fights, and duels were common. Based on extensive research into heretofore ignored primary sources - courts-martial records and regimental order books - The Gentlemen and the Roughs uncovers holes in our understanding of the men who fought the Civil War and the society that produced them.
The Wow Climax
2006,2007
A spirited collection of essays that get to the heart of
what gives popular culture its emotional impact
Vaudevillians used the term \"the wow climax\" to refer to the
emotional highpoint of their acts-a final moment of peak spectacle
following a gradual building of audience's emotions. Viewed by most
critics as vulgar and sensationalistic, the vaudeville aesthetic
was celebrated by other writers for its vitality, its liveliness,
and its playfulness. The Wow Climax follows in the path of
this more laudatory tradition, drawing out the range of emotions in
popular culture and mapping what we might call an aesthetic of
immediacy. It pulls together a spirited range of work from Henry
Jenkins, one of our most astute media scholars, that spans
different media (film, television, literature, comics, games),
genres (slapstick, melodrama, horror, exploitation cinema), and
emotional reactions (shock, laughter, sentimentality). Whether
highlighting the sentimentality at the heart of the Lassie
franchise, examining the emotional experiences created by horror
filmmakers like Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and avant garde
artist Matthew Barney, or discussing the emerging aesthetics of
video games, these essays get to the heart of what gives popular
culture its emotional impact.
Crimes against nature
Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these \"crimes\" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
2011,2014
In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.
Suffering For Science
2005
From gruesome self-experimentation to exhausting theoretical calculations, stories abound of scientists willfully surrendering health, well-being, and personal interests for the sake of their work. What accounts for the prevalence of this coupling of knowledge and pain-and for the peculiar assumption that science requires such suffering? In this lucid and absorbing history, Rebecca M. Herzig explores the rise of an ethic of \"self-sacrifice\" in American science. Delving into some of the more bewildering practices of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, she describes when and how science-the supposed standard of all things judicious and disinterested-came to rely on an enthralled investigator willing to embrace toil, danger, and even lethal dismemberment. With attention to shifting racial, sexual, and transnational politics, Herzig examines the suffering scientist as a way to understand the rapid transformation of American life between the Civil War and World War I.Suffering for Science reveals more than the passion evident in many scientific vocations; it also illuminates a nation's changing understandings of the purposes of suffering, the limits of reason, and the nature of freedom in the aftermath of slavery.
Intimate Enemies
by
Kimberly Theidon
in
Anthropology
,
Ayacucho (Dept.)
,
Ayacucho (Peru: Department) -- Politics and government
2012,2013
In the aftermath of a civil war, former enemies are left living side by side-and often the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. Though the internal conflict in Peru at the end of the twentieth century was incited and organized by insurgent Senderistas, the violence and destruction were carried out not only by Peruvian armed forces but also by civilians. In the wake of war, any given Peruvian community may consist of ex-Senderistas, current sympathizers, widows, orphans, army veterans-a volatile social landscape. These survivors, though fully aware of the potential danger posed by their neighbors, must nonetheless endeavor to live and labor alongside their intimate enemies. Drawing on years of research with communities in the highlands of Ayacucho, Kimberly Theidon explores how Peruvians are rebuilding both individual lives and collective existence following twenty years of armed conflict.Intimate Enemiesrecounts the stories and dialogues of Peruvian peasants and Theidon's own experiences to encompass the broad and varied range of conciliatory practices: customary law before and after the war, the practice ofarrepentimiento(publicly confessing one's actions and requesting pardon from one's peers), a differentiation between forgiveness and reconciliation, and the importance of storytelling to make sense of the past and recreate moral order. The micropolitics of reconciliation in these communities present an example of postwar coexistence that deeply complicates the way we understand transitional justice, moral sensibilities, and social life in the aftermath of war. Any effort to understand postconflict reconstruction must be attuned to devastation as well as to human tenacity for life.
Oaxaca in Motion
2022
Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but
it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion documents
a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is
global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international
economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its
cross-border analogue.
Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and
interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana
Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as
domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to
fight the US-instigated \"war on drugs\" or else leave their fields
to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these
moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes
discovers that migrants' experiences dramatically alter their
conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of
masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised
views with them when they return home, influencing their families
and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to
those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly
demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, \"Who is a
migrant?\"
Armed with Abundance
2011
Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, inArmed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other \"comforts\" share the frame with combat.To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance to insulate soldiers--and, by extension, the American public--from boredom and deprivation, making the project of war perhaps easier and certainly more palatable. The result was dozens of overbuilt bases in South Vietnam that grew more elaborate as the war dragged on. Relying on memoirs, military documents, and G.I. newspapers, Lair finds that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers' Vietnam deployments. Abundance quarantined the U.S. occupation force from the impoverished people it ostensibly had come to liberate, undermining efforts to win Vietnamese \"hearts and minds\" and burdening veterans with disappointment that their wartime service did not measure up to public expectations. With an epilogue that finds a similar paradigm at work in Iraq,Armed with Abundanceoffers a unique and provocative perspective on modern American warfare.