Browse by Title

Title: Dr. Strangelove's America: society and culture in the atomic age
Author: Henriksen, Margot A
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Did America really learn to "stop worrying and love the bomb," as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove , would have us believe? Does that darkly satirical comedy have anything in common with Martin Luther King Jr.'s impassioned "I Have a Dream" speech or with Elvis Presley's throbbing "I'm All Shook Up"? In Margot Henriksen's vivid depiction of the decades after World War II, all three are expressions of a cultural revolution directly related to the atomic bomb. Although many scientists and other Americans protested the pursuit of nuclear superiority after World War II ended, they were drowned out by Cold War rhetoric that encouraged a "culture of consensus." Nonetheless, Henriksen says, a "culture of dissent" arose, and she traces this rebellion through all forms of popular culture.At first, artists expressed their anger, anxiety, and despair in familiar terms that addressed nuclear reality only indirectly. But Henriksen focuses primarily on new modes of expression that emerged, discussing the disturbing themes of film noir (with extended attention to Alfred Hitchcock) and science fiction films, Beat poetry, rock 'n' roll, and Pop Art. Black humor became a primary weapon in the cultural revolution while literature, movies, and music gave free rein to every possible expression of the generation gap. Cultural upheavals from "flower power" to the civil rights movement accentuated the failure of old values.Filled with fascinating examples of cultural responses to the Atomic Age, Henriksen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the United States at mid-twentieth century.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Draw the lightning down: Benjamin Franklin and electrical technology in the Age of Enlightenment
Author: Schiffer, Michael B
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Urban Studies | History of Science | Anthropology | American Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Most of us know - at least we've heard - that Benjamin Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment with a kite. What few of us realize - and what this book makes powerfully clear - is that Franklin played a major role in laying the foundations of modern electrical science and technology. This fast-paced book, rich with historical details and anecdotes, brings to life Franklin, the large international network of scientists and inventors in which he played a key role, and their amazing inventions. We learn what these early electrical devices - from lights and motors to musical and medical instruments - looked like, how they worked, and what their utilitarian and symbolic meanings were for those who invented and used them. Against the fascinating panorama of life in the eighteenth century, Michael Brian Schiffer tells the story of the very beginnings of our modern electrical world. The earliest electrical technologies were conceived in the laboratory apparatus of physicists; because of their surprising and diverse effects, however, these technologies rapidly made their way into many other communities and activities. Schiffer conducts us from community to community, showing how these technologies worked as they were put to use in public lectures, revolutionary experiments in chemistry and biology, and medical therapy. This story brings to light the arcane and long-forgotten inventions that made way for many modern technologies - including lightning rods (Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation, xerography, and the internal combustion engine - and richly conveys the complex relationships among science, technology, and culture.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Dreams of difference: the Japan romantic school and the crisis of modernity
Author: Doak, Kevin Michael
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: From 1935 to 1945, the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Romanha), a group of major intellectuals and literary figures, explored issues concerning politics, literature, and nationalism in ways that still influence cultural discourse in Japan today. Kevin Doak's timely study is a broad critique of modernity in early twentieth-century Japan. He uses close readings and translations of texts and poems to suggest that the school's interest in romanticism stemmed from its attempt to surmount the "cultural crisis" of lost traditions. This attempt to overcome modernity eventually reduced the movement's earlier critical impulses to expressions of nationalist longing.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Driven into paradise: the musical migration from Nazi Germany to the United States
Author: Brinkmann, Reinhold 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Music | American Music | Composers | Musicology | European History | United States History
Publisher's Description: The forced migration of artists and scholars from Nazi Germany is a compelling and often wrenching story. The story is twofold, of impoverishment for the countries the musicians left behind and enrichment for the United States. The latter is the focus of this eminent collection, which approaches the subject from diverse perspectives, including documentary-style newspaper accounts and an exploration of Walt Whitman's poetry in the work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.The flood of musical migration from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1944 had a lasting impact. Hundreds of musicians and musicologists came to the United States and remained here, and the shaping power of their talents is incalculable. Several essays provide firsthand insights into aspects of American cultural history to which these émigrés made essential contributions as conductors, professors, and composers; other essays tell of the traumatic experience of being exiled and the difficulties of finding one's way in a foreign country. While the migration infused the U.S. with a distinctly European musical awareness, at the same time the status and authority of its participants tended to intervene in the development of a genuinely American cultural voice. The story of the unprecedented migration that resulted from Nazism has many dimensions, and Driven Into Paradise illuminates them in deeply human terms.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Drug war politics: the price of denial
Author: Bertram, Eva
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Law | Sociology | Medicine | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Why have our drug wars failed and how might we turn things around? Ask the authors of this hardhitting exposè of U.S. efforts to fight drug trafficking and abuse. In a bold analysis of a century's worth of policy failure, Drug War Politics turns on its head many familiar bromides about drug politics. It demonstrates how, instead of learning from our failures, we duplicate and reinforce them in the same flawed policies. The authors examine the "politics of denial" that has led to this catastrophic predicament and propose a basis for a realistic and desperately needed solution.Domestic and foreign drug wars have consistently fallen short because they are based on a flawed model of force and punishment, the authors show. The failure of these misguided solutions has led to harsher get-tough policies, debilitating cycles of more force and punishment, and a drug problem that continues to escalate. On the foreign policy front, billions of dollars have been wasted, corruption has mushroomed, and human rights undermined in Latin America and across the globe. Yet cheap drugs still flow abundantly across our borders. At home, more money than ever is spent on law enforcement, and an unprecedented number of people - disproportionately minorities - are incarcerated. But drug abuse and addiction persist.The authors outline the political struggles that help create and sustain the current punitive approach. They probe the workings of Washington politics, demonstrating how presidential and congressional "out-toughing" tactics create a logic of escalation while the criticisms and alternatives of reformers are sidelined or silenced. Critical of both the punitive model and the legalization approach, Drug War Politics calls for a bold new public health approach, one that frames the drug problem as a public health - not a criminal - concern. The authors argue that only by situating drug issues in the context of our fundamental institutions - the family, neighborhoods, and schools - can we hope to provide viable treatment, prevention, and law enforcement. In its comprehensive investigation of our long, futile battle with drugs and its original argument for fundamental change, this book is essential for every concerned citizen.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Dryden and the tradition of panegyric 
Author: Garrison, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1975
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
Similar Items

Title: Dryden in revolutionary England 
Author: Bywaters, David A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European History
Publisher's Description: In 1681, when he wrote Absalom and Achitophel , John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods.Dryden not only lived on in the country that had metaphorically cast him out but also remained a public literary figure, responding in his work to contemporary political changes. Between 1687 and 1700 he developed a subtle and powerful rhetoric in order to reconstruct his political and literary authority. Discussing both major and less-studied works, Dryden in Revolutionary England tells us much about the relation between politics and literature during a crucial, formative moment.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Durable inequality
Author: Tilly, Charles
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Sociology | History | Politics | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Charles Tilly, in this eloquent manifesto, presents a powerful new approach to the study of persistent social inequality. How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring representative paired and unequal categories, such as male/female, black/white, and citizen/noncitizen, Tilly argues that the basic causes of these and similar inequalities greatly resemble one another. In contrast to contemporary analyses that explain inequality case by case, this account is one of process. Categorical distinctions arise, Tilly says, because they offer a solution to pressing organizational problems. Whatever the "organization" is - as small as a household or as large as a government - the resulting relationship of inequality persists because parties on both sides of the categorical divide come to depend on that solution, despite its drawbacks. Tilly illustrates the social mechanisms that create and maintain paired and unequal categories with a rich variety of cases, mapping out fertile territories for future relational study of durable inequality.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Dwelling in the text: houses in American fiction 
Author: Chandler, Marilyn R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | American Literature
Publisher's Description: What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping .Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The dynamics of the breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish experience 
Author: Staniszkis, Jadwiga
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | European History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Understanding the dramatic political, social, and economic changes that have taken place in Poland in the mid-1980s is one key to predicting the future of the communist bloc. Jadwiga Staniszkis, an influential, internationally known expert on contemporary trends in Eastern Europe, provides an insider's analysis that deserves the attention of all scholars interested in the region.Staniszkis presents the breakthrough of 1989 as a consequence not only of systemic contradictions within socialism but also of a series of chance events. These events include unique historical circumstances such as the emergence of the "globalist" faction in Mosow, with its new, world-system perception of crisis, and the discovery of the round-table technique as a productive ritual of communication, imitated all over Eastern Europe. After describing the development, collapse, and reorganization of a "new center" in Poland in 1989-1990, she discusses the first attempt at privatizing the economy. Her analysis of the dilemmas accompanying breakthrough and transition is an invaluable guide to the challenges that face both capitalism and democracy in Eastern Europe.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Dynasty and empire in the age of Augustus: the case of the of the Boscoreale Cups 
Author: Kuttner, Ann L
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History | Classical History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: The two silver skyphoi commonly known as the Boscoreale Cups of Augustus and Tiberius are indispensable for providing the documentation of one of the only two cycles of Roman imperial state reliefs to survive from the Julio-Claudian period. Ann Kuttner offers the first comprehensive examination of these historical treasures.Kuttner studies the Cups not only from the standpoint of art history but also as they relate to Augustan ideology and politics. When she began work on this book, the whereabouts of the Cups was unknown, and she had to rely on the illustrations in Monuments et Memoires (Fondation Eugen Pinot, 1901). The rediscovery of the Cups at the Louvre in late 1990 has allowed Kuttner to examine them directly.   [brief]
Similar Items