When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts--work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact...
When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American h...
David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the least common denominator of social values and concerns. In considering both the context and content of popular culture,...
David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so l...
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are.
For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms--Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the...
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Pa...
In this book, America's foremost scholar of African-American folklife revolutionizes our understanding of Afro-American material culture. Bringing to the essays his extensive research into the written, oral, and material sources of Afro-American culture as well as his impressive scholarly knowledge of folklife, social history, anthropology, and art history, Vlach presents the evidence of African influence on black American folklife, both past and present.
In this book, America's foremost scholar of African-American folklife revolutionizes our understanding of Afro-American material culture. Bringing ...
Defender of the Faith offers a reinterpretation of William Jennings Bryan in his last years as an unchanging Progressive whose roots were deeply embedded in agrarian populism. It changes the standard picture of Bryan in his final years as that of a crusader for social and economic reform sadly transformed into a reactionary champion of anachronistic rural evangelism, cheap moralistic panaceas, and Florida real estate. He pleaded for for progressive labor laws, liberal taxes, government aid to farmers, public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, federal development of...
Defender of the Faith offers a reinterpretation of William Jennings Bryan in his last years as an unchanging Progressive whose roots were deepl...
"My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." So began the first of Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Fireside Chats, which came on the heels of his decision, two days after his inauguration, to close all American banks. During this address, Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio to share his hopes and plans directly with the people. He concluded by encouraging Americans to "tell me your troubles." Roosevelt's invitation was unprecedented, and the enormous public response it elicited signaled the advent of a new relationship between Americans...
"My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." So began the first of Franklin D. Roosevelt's famou...
