The Romance of Small-town Chautauquas

The Romance of Small-town Chautauquas
Author: James R. Schultz
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2002
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780826214409

In The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas, James Schultz offers a unique pictorial study of a cultural movement that started in 1904 and spread across the country. For almost thirty years, tent shows known as "chautauquas" brought popular education and entertainment to small towns in America from coast to coast. With more than one hundred photographs and other illustrations from the era, the book presents a captivating overview of the tent chautauqua movement from its inception to its demise in 1932. These traveling chautauquas--which were an outgrowth of the lyceum movement--evolved in the early part of the twentieth century. Keith Vawter, owner of the Chicago branch of the Redpath Lyceum, came up with an idea that would bring to rural America the same quality of lectures and other forms of entertainment that were available through the lyceum. His concept was a circuit of traveling tents that moved from town to town. Vawter named his traveling circuits "chautauquas," modeling them after the Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State, an intellectual community with summerlong programs of lectures, seminars, and workshops. Tent chautauquas offered a variety of cultural events by politicians, writers, and theologians, filling a void in the lives of rural residents who did not have access to the array of talent available to city dwellers. The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas contains many previously unpublished photographs that reflect the styles and customs of a bygone era, as well as photos and anecdotes about many people of prominence who toured as speakers or entertainers. These included individuals such as President Warren G. Harding, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, journalist and historian Ida Tarbell, poet Carl Sandburg, and many others. Schultz utilizes the existing literature on chautauquas, but he contributes much new information from the files of his father and uncle, both of whom were involved in the management of the Redpath Chautauquas, as well as interviews he conducted with individuals who remember attending chautauqua performances. Celebrating a fascinating chapter of America's cultural history, The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas will appeal to students of American history and chroniclers of the entertainment industry.

All the Facts

All the Facts
Author: James W. Cortada
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2016-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190460695

All the Facts presents a history of the role of information in the United States since 1870, when the nation began a nearly 150-year period of economic prosperity and technological and scientific transformations. James Cortada argues that citizens and their institutions used information extensively as tools to augment their work and private lives and that they used facts to help shape how the nation evolved during these fourteen decades. He argues that information's role has long been a critical component of the work, play, culture, and values of this nation, and no more so than during the twentieth century when its function in society expanded dramatically. While elements of this story have been examined by thousands of scholars---such as the role of radio, newspapers, books, computers, and the Internet, about such institutions as education, big business, expanded roles of governments from town administration to the state house, from agriculture to the services and information industries---All the Facts looks at all of these elements holistically, providing a deeper insight into the way the United States evolved over time. An introduction and 11 chapters describe what this information ecosystem looked like, how it evolved, and how it was used. For another vast layer of information about this subject the reader is directed to the detailed bibliographic essay in the back of this book. It includes a narrative history, case studies in the form of sidebars, and stories illustrating key points. Readers will find, for example, the story of how the US postal system helped create today's information society, along with everything from books and newspapers to TV, computers, and the Internet. The build-up to what many today call the Information Age took a long time to achieve and continues to build momentum. The implications for the world, and not just for the United States, are as profound as any mega-trend one could identify in the history of humankind. All the Facts presents this development thoroughly in an easy-to-digest format that any lover of history, technology, or the history of information and business will enjoy.

Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice

Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice
Author: Gary L. Anderson
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 1833
Release: 2007-04-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1452265658

This is an important historical period in which to develop communication models aimed at creating opportunities for citizens to find a voice for new experiences and social concerns. Such basic social problems as inequality, poverty, and discrimination pose a constant challenge to policies that serve the health and income needs of children, families, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Important changes both in individual values and civic life are occurring in the United States and in many other nations. Recent trends such as the globalization of commerce and consumer values, the speed and personalization of communication technologies, and an economic realignment of industrial and information-based economies are often regarded as negative. Yet there are many signs - from the WTO experience in Seattle to the rise of global activism aimed at making biotechnology accountable - that new forms of citizenship, politics, and public engagement are emerging. The Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice presents a comprehensive overview of the field with topics of varying dimensions, breadth, and length. This three-volume Encyclopedia is designed for readers to understand the topics, concepts, and ideas that motivate and shape the fields of activism, civil engagement, and social justice and includes biographies of the major thinkers and leaders who have influenced and continue to influence the study of activism. Key Features Offers multidisciplinary perspectives with contributions from the fields of education, communication studies, political science, leadership studies, social work, social welfare, environmental studies, health care, social psychology, and sociology Provides an easily recognizable approach to topics, ideas, persons, and concepts based on alphabetical and biographical listings in civil engagement, social justice, and activism Addresses both small-scale social justice concepts and more large-scale issues Includes biography pieces indicating the concepts, ideas, or legacies of individuals and groups who have influenced current practice and thinking such as John Stuart Mill, Rachel Carson, Mother Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr., Karl Marx, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton

Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900

Daily Life in the Industrial United States, 1870-1900
Author: Julie Husband
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2019-06-24
Genre: History
ISBN:

Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets. Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 is a narrative-based social history that is ideal for college and high school students researching this era. Thematically organized chapters, devoted to Economic Life, Domestic Life, Recreational Life, and other themes, are broad in scope but include primary documents and telling details that give readers a visceral sense of the lives of people who lived during the era of industrialization. Primary documents range from first-person diaries of individuals who lived during the era, to letters from freed slaves looking to reunite with relatives sold away from them, to speeches and essays by activists including Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams. They reveal how people understood the goals of education, the legal position of African Americans in the South, and marriage, among many other daily phenomena. Readers will become privy to a range of personal experiences while comprehending the importance of the economic and social developments of the period. A chronology, a glossary, a selection of illustrations, and further reading sources complete the work.

Fast Families, Virtual Children

Fast Families, Virtual Children
Author: Ben Agger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2016-01-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317259610

The Internet, cell phones, and other technologies have changed the ways in which people conduct their family lives, raise children, and navigate the blurry boundary between work and home. Private life is colonized by employers, teachers, corporations; family time is taken up by work, homework, and shopping. What it means to be parents and children has changed dramatically. This book shows how the nurturance of family has increasingly become a willful, radical idea in an era of pervasive technology. The authors analyze important trends, including the acceleration and attenuation of childhood, and offer a children s bill of rights and accompanying parental responsibilities."

Consumers' Imperium

Consumers' Imperium
Author: Kristin L. Hoganson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807888885

Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium, Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan. Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead
Author: Nancy C. Lutkehaus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691190275

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."--Margaret Mead This quotation--found on posters and bumper stickers, and adopted as the motto for hundreds of organizations worldwide--speaks to the global influence and legacy of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78). In this insightful and revealing book, Nancy Lutkehaus explains how and why Mead became the best-known anthropologist and female public intellectual in twentieth-century America. Using photographs, films, television appearances, and materials from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, Lutkehaus explores the ways in which Mead became an American cultural heroine. Identifying four key images associated with her--the New Woman, the Anthropologist/Adventurer, the Scientist, and the Public Intellectual--Lutkehaus examines the various meanings that different segments of American society assigned to Mead throughout her lengthy career as a public figure. The author shows that Mead came to represent a new set of values and ideas--about women, non-Western peoples, culture, and America's role in the twentieth century--that have significantly transformed society and become generally accepted today. Lutkehaus also considers why there has been no other anthropologist since Mead to become as famous. Margaret Mead is an engaging look at how one woman's life and accomplishments resonated with the issues that shaped American society and changed her into a celebrity and cultural icon.

Unreasonable Men

Unreasonable Men
Author: Michael Wolraich
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-07-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 023034223X

The gripping tale of a few progressive Republicans whose revolt against their own party started the war between Progressives and Conservatives that now defines modern American politics