American Culture

A special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre offering a range of new critical perspectives on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, including:

“Is It Like a Beat Without a Melody?”: Rap and Revolution in Hamilton | Jeffrey
Severs

Rise Up: Nuyorican Resistance and Transcultural Aesthetics in Hamilton | Gabriel
Mayora

Hamilton’s Women | Stacy Wolf

Blackout on Broadway: Affiliation and Audience in In the Heights and Hamilton |
Elena Machado Sáez

Staging a Revolution: The Cultural Tipping Points of John Gay and Lin-Manual
Miranda | Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Miranda’s Les Miz | Jeffrey Magee

Hamilton Meets Hip-Hop Pedagogy | Alison Dobrick

“Hey Yo, I’m Just Like My Country”: Teaching Miranda’s Hamilton as an
American Chronicle | Timothy J. Viator

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Metamyth of a Nation’s Founding | Helen M. Whall

“What If This Bullet Is My Legacy?”: The Guns of Hamilton | Meredith Conti

Hamilton and Class | Matthew Clinton Sekellick

A Conversation Rewound: Queer and Racialized Temporalities in Hamilton |
Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva

In light of recent "bathroom bills" in several states, this essay addresses gender identity in the Bible, which proponents of the bills claim supports their legislation. However, this essay argues that the Bible challenges many aspects of gender, especially in Roman perspective, and actually supports a more tolerant and communal respect for gender identity and the transgender community as a whole.

The aim of this paper is to provide and explain the historical development of the concept commonly known as the American Dream with a view to examining its gradual transformation from Franklin's self-made man to ready-made success promoted on social media platforms such as Facebook. Comparing prominent stages in American history, the paper will study the contribution each of them made to the legacy of the American Dream. Finally, we will attempt to answer the following questions: Are the fundamental concepts of the American Dream, such as upward mobility, still present in the digital age? Have the virtues commonly associated with the achievement of any aspect of the American Dream become obsolete? What constitutes the American Dream in the era of social media?

Culturally Responsive instruction must be differentiated to effectively embed elements to address students’ different cultures, needs, skill levels and goals. Regardless of the students in the classroom the teacher must be able to reach all of them to create a climate of inclusion and heightened engagement.  Carr, etc al. in the text “Making Science Accessible to English Learners and Making Mathematics Assessable to English Learners” provide a framework that can guide a teachers’ lesson planning and instruction. This includes instruction not only for ESL students but, SEL and a culturally diverse student population.

Working on his dissertation (“Low Power Radio and the FCC: Social Movements in a Globalized Media Landscape”) at UNC Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Comm. He received his MA from the University of Oregon in 1998 and BA from Harvard (Anthropology) in ...

American exceptionalism claim that the United States has exceptional status in the international area and has different characteristics from other states in terms of its historical, geographical, national richness, and religion. According to that view, the U.S. has exclusive and best qualifications from the point of democracy, economic liberalism, and social structure in the world. These are mostly acceptable, but the main point is that the United States provided these welfare conditions to their people with the dark side of its American exceptionalist understanding. Indeed, the U.S. had gained a chance to apply its superiority, global leadership, and the exceptionalist strategy to the world after the World Wars and abolishment of the Soviet Union. These developments ensured the opportunity to increase the United States’ activities in all around the world thanks to the development of its economy and technology as well. However, the U.S. needed the kind of ideology to justify its economic, ideologic, military, and cultural invasion of the world, which will be provided by the American exceptionalist ideas.

In May 2001, a traveling party of 26 Mexican citizens tried to cross the Arizonan desert in order to enter the United States illegally. Their attempt turned into a front-page news event after 14 died and 12 barely made it across the border due to Border Patrol intervention. Against the background of consistent tightening of anti-immigration laws in the United States, my essay aims to examine the manner in which Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004) reenacts the group’s journey from Mexico through the “vast trickery of sand” to the United States in a rather poetic and mythical rendition of the travel north. Written to include multiple perspectives (of the immigrants and their coyotes, the immigration authorities, Border Patrol agents, high officials on both sides of the border), Urrea’s account, I argue, stands witness to and casts light on the often invisible plight of those attempting illegal passage to the United States across the desert. It thus humanizes the otherwise dry statistics of immigration control by focusing on the everyday realities of human-smuggling operations and their economic and social consequences in the borderland region. At the same time, my paper highlights the impact of the Wellton 26 case on the (re)negotiation of identity politics and death politics at the US-Mexican border.

It should not be surprising that Japanese marketing practices vary from traditional Western marketing practices, because marketing is the process of satisfying wants and needs and these desires vary tremendously among cultures. In fact, it would have been ...

PhD dissertation: This dissertation examines how mass magazines framed American abstraction for a broad public during the years following the Second World War.  While art historians have devoted much attention to Abstract Expressionism’s place within the New York art establishment and its international promotion, the presentation of this and other art to the American public has been largely overlooked.  Most Americans who did not frequent museums and galleries or read art journals would have experienced art primarily in mass magazines such as Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, and The Saturday Evening Post.  This dissertation investigates how such magazines defined modern art and its role in postwar American culture for millions of readers.

During the late 1940s mass magazines portrayed modern art as a culturally divisive issue in articles that ridiculed abstraction, describing it as a mediocre European derivation that required no skill and questioning whether it was art at all or actually a highbrow hoax on middle America.  As American abstraction gained support from art institutions and markets in the 1950s, magazines depicted modern art as a commonplace consumer object, a stylistic choice that demonstrated both the consumer’s personality and capitalist freedom.  By the end of the decade, mass magazines characterized Abstract Expressionism as the embodiment of American freedom and individualism, the leading international style, and an asset in the cultural Cold War.  Yet letters to the editors reveal that readers were still not convinced of the value of abstract art.  These mass magazine representations of abstract painting and readers’ responses to it constructed both a vision of postwar American culture and a middle American public for it.

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.

This is a review of Eric Avila's American Cultural History. Avila is an Urban Historian whose research interests include Chicano Studies, race and racialization, built environment studies, Architecture, and Urban Planning.
Avila's book is part of Oxford's Very Short Introductions series and deals with an overview of American history through art, film, literature, music and internet culture.

One of Reagan's well known talents was his ability to act. His speech about the Challenger Disaster was so moving because he was able to act in different roles throughout the speech in order to properly address the different parts of his grieving audience. To analyze Reagan’s Challenger Address, I  use the “Texture of Texts” theory by Vernon K. Robbins to show exactly how Reagan achieves his goal to console the nation.

“Jewish identity,” which emerged as an analytical term in the 1950s, appealed to a set of needs that American Jews felt in the postwar period, which accounted for its popularity. Identity was the quintessential conundrum for a community on the threshold of acceptance. The work of Kurt Lewin, Erik Erikson, Will Herberg, Marshall Sklare, and others helped to shape the communal conversation. The reframing of that discourse from one that was essentially psychosocial and therapeutic to one that was sociological and survivalist reflected the community’s growing sense of physical and socioeconomic security in the 1950s and early 1960s. The American Jewish Committee and its Division of Scientific Research offers an enlightening case study of this phenomenon. Jewish educators seized on identity formation, making it the raison d’être of their endeavor. But the ascent of identity discourse also introduced a number of challenges for the Jewish educator—conceptual, methodological, political, and even existential.

An exploration of the rhizomatic character of Indigenous Futurism. I attend here to an examination of two forms of aesthetic technique in the visual medium: "imbrication," refashioned from the historian Coll Thrust, and "adornment," derived from a meditation on maaʔíbcaa, A Híraaca (Hidatsa) verb meaning "to bead." In each case, I am tracking an aesthetic technique oriented toward revising the American pop-cultural edifice, thereby creating an "imposition" into the field of expectation within which American popular culture does its work. These aesthetic strategies impose themselves within cultural contexts wherein Indigenous presence is typically constrained or wholly absent by revising and unsettling the imputed futurescape of, in this case, the American pop-culture SF franchise Star Wars.

The name of Yellow Nose, the Ute boy who became a noted Cheyenne warrior is familiar even to the average reader of Plains Indian history, primarily because of his deed at the battle of Little Bighorn, where he captured a US guidon. It is less known however, that he was a remarkable and innovative artist, who produced a quite good number of images, and of these the majority is autobiographical. The so-called “Spotted Wolf – Yellow Nose ledger” is also known as an artistic production more or less connected to him, but no thorough research was ever done on that remarkable collection of drawings . The present paper is a reconstruction of his biography and his artistic oeuvre, with which we can explore the life and artistic output of this great personality of Native American history and art history.

Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)

...one day you set foot in someone else's country and your world turned upside down. These people were *weird*, really off the wall. The neighbours back home might be slack, but at least you could talk to them. In this new place, it was, well, eerie. A bit dangerous too. You were 100% outnumbered, and they called you a foreigner. You kept a low profile, and sort of adapted. Maybe you changed a bit too. After living on Mars for a few years, when you went home for a holiday the old family reckoned you'd gone native. Well, come to think of it, *they* looked sort of silly now...

We investigate the location patterns of organizations that embody key religious- spiritual traditions and that have grown to prominence in the latter twentieth and early twenty- first centuries: evangelical churches, yoga, and martial arts. The distribution of key cultural organizations depends on the degree to which they are able to frame themselves in relation to one another and to core American traditions. Organizations associated with the American religious divide are more polarized in their social appeal and spatial distributions, and those framed as broadly neutral elements of popular culture are more widely distributed. Using a national database of local amenities, we find that theologically conservative churches are popular in many neighborhoods but concentrated in less-educated and nonwhite areas. Yoga studios are less geographically dispersed and more spatially concentrated in college-educated and white areas. Compared to these, martial arts schools, sports clubs, and other pop-culture amenities are more widely distributed across different types of areas.

" Video gaming: it’s a boy’s world, right? That’s what the industry wants us to think. Why and how we came to comply are what Carly A. Kocurek investigates in this provocative consideration of how an industry’s craving for respectability hooked up with cultural narratives about technology, masculinity, and youth at the video arcade.

From the dawn of the golden age of video games with the launch of Atari’s Pong in 1972, through the industry-wide crash of 1983, to the recent nostalgia-bathed revival of the arcade, Coin-Operated Americans explores the development and implications of the “video gamer” as a cultural identity. This cultural-historical journey takes us to the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, for a close look at the origins of competitive gaming. It immerses us in video gaming’s first moral panic, generated by Exidy’s Death Race (1976), an unlicensed adaptation of the film Death Race 2000. And it ventures into the realm of video game films such as Tron and WarGames, in which gamers become brilliant, boyish heroes.

Whether conducting a phenomenological tour of a classic arcade or evaluating attempts, then and now, to regulate or eradicate arcades and coin-op video games, Kocurek does more than document the rise and fall of a now-booming industry. Drawing on newspapers, interviews, oral history, films, and television, she examines the factors and incidents that contributed to the widespread view of video gaming as an enclave for young men and boys.

A case study of this once emergent and now revived medium, Coin-Operated Americans is history that holds valuable lessons for contemporary culture as we struggle to address pervasive sexism in the domain of video games—and in the digital working world beyond." (Publisher's Summary)

Serving as the sequel to Gene Roddenberry’s original television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation pushed the boundaries of the “final frontier.” At the same time, the show continued the franchise’s celebrated exploration of the human experience, reflecting current social and political events. ST:TNG became immensely successful, spawning four feature films and several television spin-offs.

This collection of new essays explores both the series’ characters and its themes. Topics include the Federation’s philosophy concerning technocracy, sexuality and biopolitics; foreign policy shifts in the Prime Directive; key characters including Jean-Luc Picard, Data, Deanna Troi, Tasha Yar; and Klingon martial arts, music, and history.

Pomimo licznych przemian kulturowych, społecznych, technologicznych, gospodarczych i politycznych, którym podlega współczesny świat, niezmienna pozostaje rola Stanów Zjednoczonych – jako globalnej potęgi oraz wdzięcznego obiektu zainteresowań obserwatorów wielu proweniencji. Państwo to, jako jedno z najbardziej złożonych w wymiarze kulturowo-społecznym, wciąż przyciąga uwagę i fascynuje: amerykańskie wybory prezydenckie stanowią wydarzenie komentowane na całym świecie, amerykańskie gwiazdy muzyki, filmu i sportu zyskują status ikon światowej kultury popularnej, amerykańskie trendy kulturowe kopiuje się pod każdą szerokością geograficzną. Niniejszy zbiór zawiera szkice poświęcone różnym aspektom funkcjonowania społeczeństwa Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki. Stanowi on kolejne opracowanie autorstwa badaczy skupionych wokół Instytutu Amerykanistyki i Studiów Polonijnych Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego oraz kontynuację wcześniejszego projektu A. Małek i P. Napierały pt. "Stany Zjednoczone wczoraj i dziś...". Do udziału w jego przygotowaniu poprosiliśmy młodych amerykanistów wywodzących się z różnych dyscyplin naukowych (takich jak politologia, historia, kulturoznawstwo czy filmoznawstwo) – w nadziei, że zestawienie różnych idei, perspektyw i oryginalnych interpretacji oraz zróżnicowana metodologia badań przełożą się na publikację pod wieloma względami interesującą dla Czytelników. Zajmowały nas zarówno problemy społeczeństwa i kultury amerykań-skiej, jak i meandry sceny politycznej USA. Myślą przewodnią naszego projektu było przedstawienie aktualnego stanu wiedzy, celem nadrzędnym zaś stworzenie tomu o charakterze interdyscyplinarnym, ukazującego rzeczywistość Stanów Zjednoczonych przez pryzmat różnorodnych zainteresowań i tradycji naukowych.

Introduction to the definitive compilation of  19th-century American painter, George Caleb Bingham's (1811-1879) private and public letters dating from 1835 to 1879, edited by Lynn W. Gentzler and  published by The State Historical Society of Missouri and The Friends of Arrow Rock Inc. in 2011. The introduction comprises an overview of Bingham's life, providing the social, political, and cultural context for the annotated letters that follow.