The American Midwest

The American Midwest
Author: Andrew R. L. Cayton
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 1918
Release: 2006-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253003490

This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Cool Colleges 101: The Midwestern Region of the United States

Cool Colleges 101: The Midwestern Region of the United States
Author: Peterson's
Publisher: Peterson's
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2011-10-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0768935709

Peterson's Cool Colleges 101: The Midwestern Region of the United States features colorful, easy-to-read undergraduate profiles of dozens of colleges and universities in the Midwestern United States. You're about to make one of the most important decisions of your life, and you need the best information possible. Peterson's guide can help you make that choice with dozens of school photos that provide a preview of campus and student life. For more information see Peterson's Cool Colleges 101.

American Sports [4 volumes]

American Sports [4 volumes]
Author: Murry R. Nelson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1678
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0313397538

America loves sports. This book examines and details the proof of this fascination seen throughout American society—in our literature, film, and music; our clothing and food; and the iconography of the nation. This momentous four-volume work examines and details the cultural aspects of sport and how sport pervasively reflects—and affects—myriad aspects of American society from the early 1900s to the present day. Written in a straightforward, readable manner, the entries cover both historical and contemporary aspects of sport and American culture. Unlike purely historical encyclopedias on sports, the contributions within these volumes cover related subject matter such as poetry, novels, music, films, plays, television shows, art and artists, mythologies, artifacts, and people. While this encyclopedia set is ideal for general readers who need information on the diverse aspects of sport in American culture for research purposes or are merely reading for enjoyment, the detailed nature of the entries will also prove useful as an initial source for scholars of sport and American culture. Each entry provides a number of both print and online resources for further investigation of the topic.

The Holy Trinity of American Sports

The Holy Trinity of American Sports
Author: Craig A. Forney
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2010
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0881461733

The Holy Trinity of American Sports explores how football, baseball, and basketball interact to illustrate civil religion in the United States. These three sports mark movement through one year in the country, providing extended seasons to supplement holidays like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Year after year, they generate ritual actions of daily, weekly, yearly, and once-in-a-lifetime significance. Football, baseball, and basketball portray three core stories of national worldview. Football depicts stories about the realities of life within history, while baseball expresses mythic aspiration for an ideal future. Basketball presents narrative of irreversible progress, story of fast-paced movement to highly productive conditions. Through stories of life, the three games convey doctrines about the source of truth, where to find knowledge of truths, and how to solve problems. Beyond doctrinal convictions, they disclose ethical beliefs of the nation for the worst, best, and most common situations. Functioning as a unit, the sports trinity communicates commitments to certain social arrangements, offering directives for interaction with people outside and inside the country. Football, baseball, and basketball possess great importance in the United States because they provide comprehensive and detailed illustration of American beliefs.

The Sports Shoe

The Sports Shoe
Author: Thomas Turner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1474281818

"Meticulously researched and beautifully produced." Times Literary Supplement "A big and beautiful book." Journal of British Studies "A definitive history of the sports shoe." Amber Butchart, fashion historian "A necessary book [and] a great read." Samuel Smallidge, Archivist, Converse "Both educational and entertaining." Scene Point Blank The story of the sneaker's rise from the first Victorian tennis shoes to the Nike Air Max and beyond. Moving from the athletic field to the shopping mall, Thomas Turner tells a fresh story of the evolution of the sports shoe against the changing landscape of society, sport, fashion, industry, and technology. The Sports Shoe takes us on a journey from the first Victorian tennis shoes to the sneaker of today, to the adidas Superstar and the innovative technologies of Nike Air Max. Featuring newly uncovered archival material and historic images showcasing key personalities, vintage marketing and common perceptions of this hugely desirable product, this book is a must-have for any sneaker collector, historian of popular culture, or anyone interested in the place of athletic footwear in our lives today.

Finding a New Midwestern History

Finding a New Midwestern History
Author: Jon K. Lauck
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496201825

In comparison to such regions as the South, the far West, and New England, the Midwest and its culture have been neglected both by scholars and by the popular press. Historians as well as literary and art critics tend not to examine the Midwest in depth in their academic work. And in the popular imagination, the Midwest has never really ascended to the level of the proud, literary South; the cultured, democratic Northeast; or the hip, innovative West Coast. Finding a New Midwestern History revives and identifies anew the Midwest as a field of study by promoting a diversity of viewpoints and lending legitimacy to a more in-depth, rigorous scholarly assessment of a large region of the United States that has largely been overlooked by scholars. The essays discuss facets of midwestern life worth examining more deeply, including history, religion, geography, art, race, culture, and politics, and are written by well-known scholars in the field such as Michael Allen, Jon Butler, and Nicole Etcheson.

Beyond the Cheers

Beyond the Cheers
Author: C. Richard King
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2001-05-31
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0791490408

Focusing on half-time performances, commercialized stagings, media coverage, public panics, and political protests, Beyond the Cheers offers an ethnography, history, and social critique of racial spectacles in college sport. King and Springwood argue that collegiate revenue producing sports are created as a spectacle, driven by a range of contradictory meanings and exploitative practices. While Native Americans are viewed largely as empty or distorted images and African Americans are seen as both shining stars and 'troubled delinquents,' White Americans remain constant as spectators, coaches, administrators, journalists, and athletes, producing and consuming college sport, performing and policing, but seemingly unmarked as racial subjects. In consuming these spectacles, American sports fans learn to embrace inflated, contradictory, and distorted renderings of racial difference and the history of race relations in America.

Communication and Sport

Communication and Sport
Author: Michael L. Butterworth
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110657155

Sport is a universal feature of global popular culture. It shapes our identities, affects our relationships, and defines our communities. It also influences our consumption habits, represents our cultures, and dramatizes our politics. In other words, sport is among the most prominent vehicles for communication available in daily life. Nevertheless, only recently has it begun to receive robust attention in the discipline of communication studies. The handbook of Communication and Sport attends to the recent and rapid growth of scholarship in communication and media studies that features sport as a central site of inquiry. The book attempts to capture a full range of methods, theories, and topics that have come to define the subfield of "communication and sport" or "sports communication." It does so by emphasizing four primary features. First, it foregrounds "communication" as central to the study of sport. This emphasis helps to distinguish the book from collections in related disciplines such as sociology, and also points readers beyond media as the primary or only context for understanding the relationship between communication and sport. Thus, in addition to studies of media effects, mediatization, media framing, and more, readers will also engage with studies in interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, and rhetorical communication. Second, the handbook presents an array of methods, theories, and topics in the effort to chart a comprehensive landscape of communication and sport scholarship. Thus, readers will benefit from empirical, interpretive, and critical work, and they will also see studies drawing on varied texts and sites of inquiry. Third, the handbook of Communication and Sport includes a broad range of scholars from around the world. It is therefore neither European nor North American in its primary focus. In addition, the book includes contributors from commonly under-represented regions in Asia, Africa, and South America. Fourth, the handbook aims to account for both historical trajectories and contemporary areas of interest. In this way, it covers the central topics, debates, and perspectives from the past and also suggests continued and emerging pathways for the future. Collectively, the handbook of Communication and Sport aspires to provide scholars and students in communication and media studies with the most comprehensive assessment of the field available.

Sports and the Racial Divide

Sports and the Racial Divide
Author: Michael E. Lomax
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2011-03-11
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1617030465

With essays by Ron Briley, Michael Ezra, Sarah K. Fields, Billy Hawkins, Jorge Iber, Kurt Kemper, Michael E. Lomax, Samuel O. Regalado, Richard Santillan, and Maureen Smith This anthology explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, and sports and analyzes the forces that shaped the African American and Latino sports experience in post-World War II America. Contributors reveal that sports often reinforced dominant ideas about race and racial supremacy but that at other times sports became a platform for addressing racial and social injustices. The African American sports experience represented the continuation of the ideas of Black Nationalism—racial solidarity, black empowerment, and a determination to fight against white racism. Three of the essayists discuss the protest at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. In football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and track and field, African American athletes moved toward a position of group strength, establishing their own values and simultaneously rejecting the cultural norms of whites. Among Latinos, athletic achievement inspired community celebrations and became a way to express pride in ethnic and religious heritages as well as a diversion from the work week. Sports was a means by which leadership and survival tactics were developed and used in the political arena and in the fight for justice.

Philly Sports

Philly Sports
Author: Ryan Swanson
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1557281874

Not distributed; available at Arkansas State Library.