The Familiar Made Strange

The Familiar Made Strange
Author: Brooke L. Blower
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801455456

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

Classical New York

Classical New York
Author: Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0823281035

Essays on the historical Greco-Roman influence on the evolving architectural landscape of New York City. During its rise from capital of an upstart nation to global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of New York’s art and architecture. This compilation of essays offers a survey of diverse reinterpretations of classical forms in some of the city’s most iconic buildings, public monuments, and civic spaces. Classical New York examines the influence of Greco-Roman thought and design from the Greek Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the late-nineteenth-century American Renaissance and Beaux Arts period and into the twentieth century’s Art Deco. At every juncture, New Yorkers looked to the classical past for knowledge and inspiration in seeking out new ways to cultivate a civic identity and to structure their public and private spaces. Specialists from a range of disciplines—archaeology, architectural history, art history, classics, and history— focus on how classical art and architecture are repurposed to help shape many of New York City’s most evocative buildings and works of art. Federal Hall evoked the Parthenon as an architectural and democratic model; the Pantheon served as a model for the creation of libraries at New York University and Columbia University; Pennsylvania Station derived its form from the Baths of Caracalla; and Atlas and Prometheus of Rockefeller Center recast ancient myths in a new light during the Great Depression. This examination of post-Revolutionary art, politics, and philosophy enriches the conversation about how we shape space—be it civic, religious, academic, theatrical, or domestic—and how we make use of that space and the objects in it.

Remaking the American College Campus

Remaking the American College Campus
Author: Jonathan Silverman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1476663335

The built and landscaped spaces of colleges and universities radiate and absorb the values of the cultures in which they were created. As economic and political forces exert pressure on administrators and as our understanding of higher education shifts, these spaces can transform dramatically. Focusing on the utopian visions and the dystopian realities of American campus life, this collection of new essays examines campus spaces from the perspective of those who live and work there. Topics include disability, sustainability, first-year writing, underrepresented groups on campus, online education, adjunct labor, and the way profit-driven agendas have shaped colleges and universities.

New York City

New York City
Author: Best Books on
Publisher: Best Books on
Total Pages: 820
Release: 1939
Genre:
ISBN: 1623760550