Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2015-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 150175727X

Model Airplanes are Decadent and Depraved tells the story of the American glue-sniffing epidemic of the 1960s, from the first reports of use to the unsuccessful crusade for federal legislation in the early 1970s. The human obsession with inhalation for intoxication has deep roots, from the oracle at Delphi to Judaic biblical ritual. The discovery of nitrous oxide, ether, and chloroform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the later development of paint thinners, varnishes, lighter fluid, polishes, and dry-cleaning supplies provided a variety of publicly available products with organic solvents that could be inhaled for some range of hallucinogenic or intoxicating effect. Model airplane glue was one of those products, but did not appear in warnings until the first reports of problematic behavior appeared in 1959, when children in several western cities were arrested for delinquency after huffing glue. Newspaper coverage both provided the initial shot across the bow for research into the subject and convinced children to give it a try. This "epidemic" quickly spread throughout the nation and the world. Though the hobby industry began putting an irritant in its model glue products in 1969 to make them less desirable to sniff, that wasn't what stopped the epidemic. Just as quickly as it erupted, the epidemic stopped when the media coverage and public hysteria stopped, making it one of the most unique epidemics in American history. The nation's focus drifted from adolescent glue sniffing to the countercultural student movement, with its attendant devotion to drug use, opposition to the Vietnam War, southern race policies, and anti-bureaucracy in general. This movement came to embody a tumultuous era fraught with violence, civil disobedience, and massive sea changes in American life and law—glue sniffing faded by comparison.

The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk

The Battle for the Souls of Black Folk
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1440843589

In the 20 years between 1895 and 1915, two key leaders—Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois—shaped the struggle for African American rights. This book examines the impact of their fierce debate on America's response to Jim Crow and positions on civil rights throughout the 20th century—and evaluates the legacies of these two individuals even today. The debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington on how to further social and economic progress for African Americans lasted 20 years, from 1895 to Washington's death in 1915. Their ongoing conversation evolved over time, becoming fiercer and more personal as the years progressed. But despite its complexities and steadily accumulating bitterness, it was still, at its heart, a conversation—an impassioned contest at the turn of the century to capture the souls of black folk. This book focuses on the conversation between Washington and Du Bois in order to fully examine its contours. It serves as both a document reader and an authored text that enables readers to perceive how the back and forth between these two individuals produced a cacophony of ideas that made it anything but a bipolar debate, even though their expressed differences would ultimately shape the two dominant strains of activist strategy. The numerous chapters on specific topics and historical events follow a preface that presents an overview of both the conflict and its historiographical treatment; evaluates the legacies of both Washington and Du Bois, emphasizing the trajectories of their theories beyond 1915; and provides an explanation of the unique structure of the work.

Separate Games

Separate Games
Author: David K. Wiggins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610756002

Winner of the 2017 NASSH Book Award for best edited collection. The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the twentieth century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the twelve essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these “separate games” provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination. The significance of this sporting culture is vividly showcased in the stories of the Cuban Giants baseball team, basketball’s New York Renaissance Five, the Tennessee State Tigerbelles track-and-field team, black college football’s Turkey Bowl Classic, car racing’s Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, Negro League Baseball’s East-West All-Star game, and many more. These teams, organizations, and events made up a vibrant national sporting complex that remained in existence until the integration of sports beginning in the late 1940s. Separate Games explores the fascinating ways sports helped bind the black community and illuminate race pride, business acumen, and organizational abilities.

The Tyranny of Architecture: A Vegan Apologetic

The Tyranny of Architecture: A Vegan Apologetic
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2017-03-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1365799018

The Tyranny of Architecture is a full philosophical defense of veganism, one that defends the practice in a way fundamentally unique among such arguments. It makes the case that in a human society built on artificial constructs, the only demonstrable ethics not part of an imagined community is that of respecting the right to life and contentment, construed for farmed animals as adequate food, space, and other basic amenities, along with the right not to be tortured and killed for the unnecessary whims of humans existing mentally within a subset of artificial constructs that do not include those nonhuman animals.

The Great Shark Hunt

The Great Shark Hunt
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2011-09-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451669259

The first volume in Hunter S. Thompson’s bestselling Gonzo Papers offers brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in his signature style. Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling “Gonzo Papers” is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed “gonzo”—“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” which appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970. From this essay, a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful ‘60s and ‘70s.

Gonzo Marketing

Gonzo Marketing
Author: Christopher Locke
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2009-06-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0786748729

Ladies and gentlemen, please return your tray tables to the fully upright and locked position, suspend your disbelief and put on your tinfoil pyramid hats. We are now entering -- [cue lights, cue music] the Brand Dimension! Gonzo Marketing is a knuckle-whitening ride to the place where social criticism, biting satire, and serious commerce meet -- and where the outdated ideals of mass marketing and broadcast media are being left in the dust. As master of ceremonies at the wake for traditional one-size-fits-all marketing, Locke has assembled a unique guest list, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Hunter S. Thompson, to guide us through the revolution that is rocking business today, as people connect on the Web to form powerful micromarkets. These networked communities, based on candor, trust, passion, and a general disdain for anything that smacks of corporate smugness, reflect much deeper trends in our culture, which Locke illuminates with his characteristic wit. Just as gonzo journalism arose in response to "objective" news standards that claimed to foster fairness but in practice discouraged writers from speaking their minds in their own voices, so too does gonzo marketing call for a similar response to assumptions about consumer behavior that no longer relate to how people actually live their lives. Gonzo Marketing is not yet-another nostrum for hoodwinking the unwary. It's about market advocacy. It describes how "the artist formerly known as advertising" must do a 180. It's about transforming the marketing message from "we want your money" to "we share your interests." It's about tapping into, listening to, and even forming alliances with emerging on-line markets, who probably know more about your company than you do. It's a hip-hop cover of boring old best practices played backwards. The paradox is that companies that support and promote these communities can have everything they've always wanted: greater market share, customer loyalty, brand equity. Irreverent, penetrating, profoundly simple, and on-the-money, Gonzo Marketing is the raucous wake-up that no one interested in any aspect of twenty-first century business-from the trading floor right up to the boardroom-can afford to ignore.

Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983

Youth and Permissive Social Change in British Music Papers, 1967–1983
Author: Patrick Glen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-12-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319916742

This book is a work of press history that considers how the music press represented permissive social change for their youthful readership. Read by millions every week, the music press provided young people across the country with a guide to the sounds, personalities and controversies that shaped British popular music and, more broadly, British culture and society. By analysing music papers and oral history interviews with journalists and editors, Patrick Glen examines how papers represented a lucrative entertainment industry and mass press that had to negotiate tensions between alternative sentiments and commercial prerogatives. This book demonstrates, as a consequence, how music papers constructed political positions, public identities and social mores within the context of the market. As a result, descriptions and experiences of social change and youth were contingent on the understandings of class, gender, sexuality, race and locality.

Hey Rube

Hey Rube
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2005-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0684873206

A compilation of articles in which journalist Hunter S. Thompson reflects on politics, sex, and sports in the modern world.

Womb of Monsters

Womb of Monsters
Author: Thomas Aiello
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2001-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595206654

In the late sixties, a rogue psychiatrist created a gated community of mental patients called Yesterday, utilizing some revolutionary mental health techniques. When Orson Littlefield is sent to the Yesterday mental facility, he is introduced to a new medication that makes his delusions come to life. His next door neighbor, who is actually just another part of his delusion, becomes enraged when Orson kicks yet another figment of his imagination into her yard. She then promptly murders him with a nuclear warhead. Meanwhile, the antichrist, a Louisiana bunny rabbit, rises to power and seduces the world. One testament later, a high school football star takes on the persona of savior for a sports starved small town. His life is naturally replete with miracles, disciples, a donkey, and plenty of sex. Interspersed throughout are the author’s own attempts to come to terms with the fact that all the characters in his story are just figments of his imagination. Newspapers come to life, girlfriends evaporate, and various characters throughout are stricken with stigmata. A social commentary, religious satire, and absurdist comedy that examines the fine line between imagination and reality: come look inside the womb of monsters.

Treasury of Great Humor

Treasury of Great Humor
Author: Al Sarrantonio
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1996
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 9780517181508

35 wild, witty, and wonderful tales from such authors as Dave Barry, Mark Twain, Garrison Keillor, and others.