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The years immediately following the Second World War witnessed a dramatic transformation of America's working-class suburbs, driven by an unprecedented post-war prosperity and a burgeoning consumer culture. Chrome and neon were the new currency in this newly vital consumer culture, and no post-war consumer products trafficked more heavily in this currency than diners, bowling alleys, and trailer parks. Through these three distinctively American institutions, Andrew Hurley examines the struggle of Americans with modest means to attain the good life after two long decades of depression and war. He tells the story of the humble origins, explosive growth, and gradual, sad decline of the diner, bowling alley, and trailer park in expert fashion. This is cultural and social history that knows how to entertain.
In tracing the rise of these three distinctively American institutions, Andrew Hurley examines the struggle of Americans with modest means to attain the good life after two long decades of depression and war.".
Focusing on midcentury Milwaukee, Eric Fure-Slocum charts the remaking of political culture in the industrial city. Professor Fure-Slocum shows how two contending visions of the 1940s city - working-class politics and growth politics - fit together uneasily and were transformed amid a series of social and policy clashes. Contests that pitted the principles of democratic access and distribution against efficiency and productivity included the hard-fought politics of housing and redevelopment, controversies over petty gambling, questions about the role of organized labor in urban life, and battles over municipal fiscal policy and autonomy. These episodes occurred during a time of rapid change in the city's working class, as African-American workers arrived to seek jobs, women temporarily advanced in workplaces, and labor unions grew. At the same time, businesses and property owners sought to reestablish legitimacy in the changing landscape. This study examines these local conflicts, showing how they forged the postwar city and laid a foundation for the neoliberal city.
By an award-winning historian of race and labor, a definitive account of how Ellis Island immigrants became accepted as cultural insiders in America
The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major writers and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * William Inge: Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955) and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957); * Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins: West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959); * Alice Childress: Just a Little Simple (1950), Gold Through the Trees (1952) and Trouble in Mind (1955); * Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee: Inherit the Wind (1955), Auntie Mame (1956) and The Gang's All Here (1959).
A complete guide to interpreting women’s history. Women’s history is everywhere, not only in historic house museums named for women but also in homes named for famous men, museums of every conceivable kind, forts and battlefields, even ships, mines, and in buckets. Women’s history while present at every museum and historic site remains less fully interpreted in spite of decades of vibrant and expansive scholarship. Doing Women’s History in Public: A Handbook for Interpretation at Museums and Historic Sites connects that scholarship with the tangible resources and the sensuality that form museums and historic sites-- the objects, architecture and landscapes-- in ways that encourage visitor fascination and understanding and center interpretation on the women active in them. With numerous examples that focus on all women and girls, it appropriately includes everyone, for women intersect with every other human group. This book provides arguments, sources (written, oral, and visual), and tools for finding women’s history, preserving it, and interpreting it with the public. It uses the framework of Significance (importance), Knowledge Base (research in primary, secondary, and tertiary sources), and Tangible Resources (the preserved physical embodiment of history in objects, architecture, and landscapes). Discusses traditional and technology-assisted interpretation and provides Tools to implement Doing Women’s History in Public. Using a hospitality model, museums and historic sites are the locales where we assemble, learn from each other, and take our insights into a more gender-shared future.
“An astonishing story, by turns ghastly, hilarious, unnerving, and moving.”—Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve In this “excellent” portrait of America’s famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, celebrated biographer Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874) a trenchant “comment on the times in which we live” (Wall Street Journal). “Uncovering ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called ‘the tyranny of the normal’ ” (BBC), Huang depicts the twins’ implausible route to assimilation after their “discovery” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824 and arrival in Boston as sideshow curiosities in 1829. Their climb from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich, southern gentry who profited from entertaining the Jacksonian mobs; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but an “extraordinary” (New York Times), Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for tyrannizing the other—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
Assesses the layered meanings and persistent global legacy of an American film classic.
The thrust of the literature on consumer space and society focuses on product labeling, marketing techniques and approaches to branding, as well as how mass consumer culture has reshaped individuals' interaction with needs and desires. Globetrotting Shopaholics departs from this current discourse by examining both consumption venues and the cultural, political and social reasons why we consume. It elucidates international trends in consumption politics, and how they impact the creation of consumer spaces, which, in this book, takes the form of numerous global loci including Canada's West Edmonton Mall, Japanese theme parks, shopping venues in the Philippines, and expat boutiques in Budapest. Using a wide range of epistemological frameworks including cultural ethnography, historical analysis, literary theory, sociological dissection, anthropological examination, and philosophical ruminations, this collection conveys how material objects and lifestyles are accumulated and represented internationally, and how consumer goods and spaces define who we are as human beings.
The prize-winning War Memorial Gymnasium at the University of British Columbia is discussed here, examining what the building's design, construction and shifting functions reveal about the university's values during the post-war years.