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This fascinating account of a French woman's impressions of America in the late nineteenth century reveals an unusual cross-cultural journey through fin de siècle Paris, Chicago, and New York. Madame Leon Grandin's travels and extended stay in Chicago in 1893 were the result of her husband's collaboration on the fountain sculpture for the World's Columbian Exposition. Initially impressed with the city's fast pace and architectural grandeur, Grandin's attentions were soon drawn to its social and cultural customs, reflected as observations in her writing. During a ten-month interval as a resident, she was intrigued by the interactions between men and women, mothers and their children, teachers and students, and other human relationships, especially noting the comparative social freedoms of American women. After this interval of acclimatization, the young Parisian socialite had begun to view her own culture and its less liberated mores with considerable doubt. "I had tasted the fruit of independence, of intelligent activity, and was revolted at the idea of assuming once again the passive and inferior role that awaited me!" she wrote. Grandin's curiosity and interior access to Chicago's social and domestic spaces produced an unusual travel narrative that goes beyond the usual tourist reactions and provides a valuable resource for readers interested in late nineteenth-century America, Chicago, and social commentary. Significantly, her feminine views on American life are in marked contrast to parallel reflections on the culture by male visitors from abroad. It is precisely the dual narrative of this text--the simultaneous recounting of a foreigner's impressions, and the consequent questioning of her own cultural certainties--that make her book unique. This translation includes an introductory essay by Arnold Lewis that situates Grandin's account in the larger context of European visitors to Chicago in the 1890s.
Why has "America" - that is, the United States of America - become so much more than simply a place in the imagination of so many people around the world? In both Europe and Latin America, the United States has often been a site of multiple possible futures, a screen onto which could be projected utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Whether castigated as a threat to civilized order or championed as a promise of earthly paradise, America has invariably been treated as a cipher for modernity. It has functioned as an inescapable reference point for both European and Latin American societies, not only as a model of social and political organization - one to reject as much one to emulate - but also as the prime example of a society emerging from a dramatic diversity of cultural and social backgrounds.
In recent years, American art scholars have increasingly focused on the importance of cross-cultural exchanges during the nineteenth century. As essayist François Brunet puts it, mid-nineteenth century landscapes were “transnational . . . permeated by complex transactions where ‘American’ originality produced itself not only in imitation of or reaction against ‘European’ influences, . . . but as critical mirroring and incorporating of ‘European’ images.” Articles in this collection make clear that the “conversation of cultures” went both ways, with American artworks and culture also affecting European artistic and literary practice. Essays explore the transnational origin of many types of American artworks, from stained glass windows, which usually copied their European originals with great exactitude, to paintings and sculptures using distinctly American motifs, such as the Puritan and the cowboy, to distinguish American art students from their Parisian masters. It also examines American cultural icons, particularly the American Indian, appropriated by European writers, artists, and philosophers to embody primeval wisdom. A distinguished international group of scholars, including Brunet, Robert Rydell, and Peter Gibian, offer valuable perspectives on the ever-broadening field of transnational cultural studies.
André Siegfried (1875–1959) was a leading figure in French academic and cultural life for over five decades. A world traveller who trained as a geographer, Siegfried became a leading political scientist and prominent newspaper columnist. As a long-time professor at Sciences Po, he shaped generations of his country’s elite. France in the World explores the life and career of André Siegfried. An innovator in the field of political science, he established himself as France’s leading interpreter of the English-speaking world. Often likened to Alexis de Tocqueville, Siegfried published influential studies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand, striving to understand France’s place in a changing global context. Siegfried was a cosmopolitan promoter of liberalism and individual freedom. But at the same time he perceived France to be the core of a Western civilization whose leadership and values were threatened by Americanization, anti-imperial nationalism, and non-white immigration. By following Siegfried’s long career and examining the breadth of his writings, Sean Kennedy shows how his racial and ethnic essentialism was a unifying aspect of his life’s work. That these ideas were considered unremarkable for most of his lifetime offers a powerful illustration of how racist thinking permeated mainstream French republicanism. Exploring the many facets of Siegfried’s career, France in the World examines the entanglement of liberal and racist thinking during an era that witnessed political extremism and a rapidly changing international order.
Fascination Alleyway is a work that was written in the 20th century for 21st century thinkers. This book of poetry revolves around music. Thoughts from the radical 60's, the unsettled 70's, and the apathetic 80's and 90's populate this collection of words. This book of my own thoughts, some call poetry, is an attempt to reach eyes and minds with a new age understanding of our world at large. Tune in and turn on to KROCK in Syracuse, NY. Listen to The Sound And The Fury, with Jrrbll on Sunday morning from 12:00 AM to 6:00 AM. The Sound And The Fury is the longest running hard rock program to date. Jrrbll reads a passage from Fascination Alleyway every Sunday Morning. KROCK is streaming online for your listening pleasure.
Offering a much-needed report on the academic study of U.S. history in Europe, this collection of essays provides a historical overview of its development in 13 European countries. It offers insight into the possible connections between governmental policies on both sides of the Atlantic, popular interest, student demand, and individual scholars' commitment to this academic pursuit. These essays also contribute towards a better understanding of the complex ways in which European historians of the United States have navigated the different--and often conflicting--demands, constraints, and opportunities that arise from their official job descriptions and various institutional affiliations.
What does "America" mean to French intellectuals? Is it a postmodern ideal situated beyond history and metaphysics? A source of spiritual decadence that threatens the European tradition? Or is it "Extrême-Occident," the Far Western site that gives historical reality to the utopias of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment? Jean-Philippe Mathy offers the first systematic examination of French texts that address the question of America. He shows how prominent French intellectuals have represented America as myth and metaphor, covering the entire ideological spectrum from Maurras to Duhamel, and from Sartre to Aron. The texts themselves range from novels and poems to travel narratives and philosophical essays by Claudel, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and many others. Mathy deftly situates these discourses on America against the background of French intellectual and political history since 1789. The judgments on American culture that originate in France, he contends, are also statements about France itself. Widespread condemnation of American materialism and pragmatism cuts across deep ideological and political divides in France, primarily because French intellectuals still operate within a framework of critical and aesthetic models born in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and elaborated in the age of French classicism. Mathy engages issues central to interpreting the American experience, such as the current controversies over multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Although Mathy deals mainly with French authors, he does not limit himself to them. Rather, he uses a comparative, cross-cultural approach that also takes in accounts of America by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Gramsci, and other Europeans, as well as American self-interpretations from Emerson and Dewey to Cornel West and Christopher Lasch. Because debates on American modernity have played a crucial intellectual role in France, Extrême-Occident is a major contribution to modern French cultural history. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the main currents of twentieth-century French thought.
Graffiti are ubiquitous within the ancient world, but remain underexploited as a form of archaeological or historical evidence. They include a great variety of texts and images written or drawn inside and outside buildings, in public and private places, on monuments in the city, on objects used in daily life, and on mountains in the countryside. In each case they can be seen as actively engaging with their environment in a variety of ways. Ancient Graffiti in Context interrogates this cultural phenomenon and by doing so, brings it into the mainstream of ancient history and archaeology. Focusing on different approaches to and interpretations of graffiti from a variety of sites and chronological contexts, Baird and Taylor pose a series of questions not previously asked of this evidence, such as: What are graffiti, and how can we interpret them? In what ways, and with whom, do graffiti communicate? To what extent do graffiti represent or subvert the cultural values of the society in which they occur? By comparing themes across time and space, and viewing graffiti in context, this book provides a series of interpretative strategies for scholars and students of the ancient world. As such it will be essential reading for Classical archaeologists and historians alike.