Witnesses to a Vanishing America

Witnesses to a Vanishing America
Author: Lee Clark Mitchell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1400856159

Propelled across the continent by notions of rugged individualism" and "manifest destiny," pioneer Americans soon discovered that such slogans only partly disguised the fact that building an empire meant destroying a wilderness. Through an astonishing range of media, they voiced their concern about America's westward mission. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence, Lee Clark Mitchell portrays the growing apprehensions Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Vanishing American Corporation

The Vanishing American Corporation
Author: Gerald F. Davis
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1626562806

It may be hard to believe in an era of Walmart, Citizens United, and the Koch brothers, but corporations are on the decline. The number of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between 1996 and 2012. In recent years we've seen some of the most storied corporations go bankrupt (General Motors, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak) or disappear entirely (Bethlehem Steel, Lehman Brothers, Borders). Gerald Davis argues this is a root cause of the income inequality and social instability we face today. Corporations were once an integral part of building the middle class. He points out that in their heyday they offered millions of people lifetime employment, a stable career path, health insurance, and retirement pensions. They were like small private welfare states. The businesses that are replacing them will not fill the same role. For one thing, they employ far fewer people—the combined global workforces of Facebook, Yelp, Zynga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Tableau, Zulily, and Box are smaller than the number of people who lost their jobs when Circuit City was liquidated in 2009. And in the “sharing economy,” companies have no obligation to most of the people who work for them—at the end of 2014 Uber had over 160,000 “driver-partners” in the United States but recognized only about 2,000 people as actual employees. Davis tracks the rise of the large American corporation and the economic, social, and technological developments that have led to its decline. The future could see either increasing economic polarization, as careers turn into jobs and jobs turn into tasks, or a more democratic economy built from the grass roots. It's up to us.

The Vanishing American

The Vanishing American
Author: Brian W. Dippie
Publisher:
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN:

Traces the turns of U.S. Indian policy and the effects of white social attitudes on Indian assimilation.

The Vanishing American Dream

The Vanishing American Dream
Author: Virginia Deane Abernethy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351295500

The United States has gone off track, allowing domestic and foreign aid policies to be co-opted by a government—abetted by mass media—that serves special interests rather than the greater national good. Americans' tendencies to trust, play fair, and help have been abused and require replacement by a realistic outlook. The Vanishing American Dream posits solutions to get America back on the right track. Abernethy sees population growth driven by mass immigration as a major cause of economic and cultural changes that have been detrimental to most Americans. The environment has been degraded by over-crowding and increasing demands on natural resources. Work is cheapened by explosive growth in the labour force creating a buyer's market. One salary or wage no longer supports a family and educates children. Women working outside the home is a necessity, not a choice, for most American families. Furthermore, feminism, aimed originally at balanced gender roles, has been turned viciously against males of all ages and ultimately against females through degrading their traditional and valuable contributions. Abernethy proposes that Americans need time to regroup, untroubled by a continuing influx of foreign peoples. The family, small business, and responsive local government are centres around which a solvent and confident citizenry can prosper again.

The Vanishing American Jew

The Vanishing American Jew
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2000-01-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0446930504

In this urgent book, Alan M. Dershowitz shows why American Jews are in danger of disappearing - and what must be done now to create a renewed sense of Jewish identity for the next century. In previous times, the threats to Jewish survival were external - the virulent consequences of anti-Semitism. Now, however, in late-twentieth-century America, the danger has shifted. Jews today are more secure, more accepted, more assimilated, and more successful than ever before. They've dived into the melting pot - and they've achieved the American Dream. And that, according to Dershowitz, is precisely the problem. More than 50 percent of Jews will marry non-Jews, and their children will most often be raised as non-Jews. Which means, in the view of Dershowitz, that American Jews will vanish as a distinct cultural group sometime in the next century - unless they act now. Speaking to concerned Jews everywhere, Dershowitz calls for a new Jewish identity that focuses on the positive - the 3,500-year-old legacy of Jewish culture, values, and traditions. Dershowitz shows how this new Jewish identity can compete in America's open environment of opportunity and choice - and offers concrete proposals on how to instill it in the younger generation.

Our America

Our America
Author: Walter Benn Michaels
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822320647

Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

America First

America First
Author: Mandy Merck
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136007105

At a time when the expanded projection of US political, military, economic and cultural power draws intensified global concern, understanding how that country understands itself seems more important than ever. This collection of new critical essays tackles this old problem in a new way, by examining some of the hundreds of US films that announce themselves as titularly 'American'. From early travelogues to contemporary comedies, national nomination has been an abiding characteristic of American motion pictures, heading the work of Porter, Guy-Blaché, DeMille, Capra, Sternberg, Vidor, Minnelli and Mankiewicz. More recently, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, John Landis and Edward James Olmos have made their own contributions to Hollywood’s Americana. What does this national branding signify? Which versions of Americanism are valorized, and which marginalized or excluded? Out of which social and historical contexts do they emerge, and for and by whom are they constructed? Edited by Mandy Merck, the collection contains detailed analyses of such films as The Vanishing American, American Madness, An American in Paris, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, American Pie and many more.

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture
Author: Monika Kaup
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2002-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780292743489

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion. This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

American Indians in World War I

American Indians in World War I
Author: Thomas Anthony Britten
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826320902

Provides the first broad survey of Native American contributions during the war, examining how military service led to hightened expectations for changes in federal Indian policy and their standard of living.

Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity

Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity
Author: Leigh H. Edwards
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2009-02-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253220610

Throughout his career, Johnny Cash has been depicted—and has depicted himself—as a walking contradiction: social protestor and establishment patriot, drugged wildman and devout Christian crusader, rebel outlaw hillbilly thug and elder statesman. Leigh H. Edwards explores the allure of this paradoxical image and its cultural significance. She argues that Cash embodies irresolvable contradictions of American identity that reflect foundational issues in the American experience, such as the tensions between freedom and patriotism, individual rights and nationalism, the sacred and the profane. She illustrates how this model of ambivalence is a vital paradigm for American popular music, and for American identity in general. Making use of sources such as Cash's autobiographies, lyrics, music, liner notes, and interviews, Edwards pays equal attention to depictions of Cash by others, such as Vivian Cash's publication of his letters to her, documentaries and music journalism about him, Walk the Line, and fan club materials found in the archives at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, to create a full portrait of Cash and his significance as a cultural icon.