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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in American Popular Culture
Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas
Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …
“Calypso”—Harry Belafonte (1956), Judith E. Smith
“Calypso”—Harry Belafonte (1956), Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Harry Belafonte, the Harlem-born son of poor undocumented Jamaican immigrants, an untrained singer whose heart was set on becoming an actor, made music history with “Harry Belafonte: Calypso.” This record was the very first by a solo performer to sell a million copies, holding the top spot on “Billboard’s” pop album charts for an unprecedented 31 weeks (in addition, 58 weeks in the top ten, 99 weeks among the top 100). The higher-ups at RCA had doubted the commercial potential of a thematically unified recording of “island and Calypso songs,” but the “Calypso” record, released at the end of May …
Bessie [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
Bessie [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Bessie opens with an arresting shot of Queen Latifah as singer Bessie Smith, dressed in the white costume familiarized by a widely reproduced photograph, with blue tones emphasizing both interiority (her eyes are closed, and the music viewers hear is playing in her head), and the blues genre associated with her. When the shift to every day colors returns viewers to the movie’s present (1927), an unsmiling Bessie walks through an adoring backstage crowd, press cameras flashing, into a waiting car. Rachel Portman’s score suggests foreboding; the next long shot shows Bessie framed in a doorway as she calls out …
Urban Culture, Judith E. Smith
Urban Culture, Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
Encyclopedia entry on "Urban Culture" submitted for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. by Joan Shelly Rubin (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) 516-522.
The Failure Of The Free World: Anarchy In Uncle Tom’S Cabin, Andy Cerrone
The Failure Of The Free World: Anarchy In Uncle Tom’S Cabin, Andy Cerrone
Interdisciplinary Perspectives: a Graduate Student Research Showcase
Harriett Beecher Stowe is often identified as an advocate for Christianity, woman's suffrage, autonomy, and the abolishment of slavery. However, inviting the reader to view her work through an anarchist lens, her magnum opus—Uncle Tom’s Cabin— offers the reader the opportunity to reconstruct her politics with immense implication. Critics regard Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a sermon devised with the intention to inflate the nation with the righteous spirit of God, offering to the reader the opportunity to partake in the message of her religious vision. While Stowe's absolute faith in her Christian profile of God is present, she invariably …
Amelia [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
Amelia [Film Review], Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
What is the cultural terrain staked out by Amelia, the recent Hollywood-distributed biopic about intrepid flyer Amelia Earhart? The quick shots that precede the opening credits direct attention to the particular themes that Producer Ted Waitt, director Mira Nair, and screenwriters Ron Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan have emphasized in their 2009 feature about the flyer. Her airplane taking off into the dark gestures to the mystery of her last flight and disappearance without a trace. Her celebrity status is indicated by cheering crowds, radio interviews, and photographs, fusing seamlessly with her status as an object of heterosexual adoration once …
Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters In 1950s Hollywood Film, Judith E. Smith
Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters In 1950s Hollywood Film, Judith E. Smith
American Studies Faculty Publication Series
A Jewish-created urban and cosmopolitan working girl feminism persisted in the 1950s as a cultural alternative to the suburban, domestic consumerism critiqued so eloquently by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The film persona of Jewish, Academy Award-winning actress Judy Holliday embodied this working girl feminism. Audiences viewed her portrayals of popular front working girl heroines in three films written by the Jewish writer and director Garson Kanin, sometimes in association with his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, and directed by the Jewish director George Cukor in the early 1950s: Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It …
The Tourist Experience In Boston, 1848-1910: American History, Middle-Class Leisure And The Development Of Urban Tourism, Hillary Corbett
The Tourist Experience In Boston, 1848-1910: American History, Middle-Class Leisure And The Development Of Urban Tourism, Hillary Corbett
American Studies Graduate Final Projects
This project analyzes a selection of representative guidebooks produced between 1848 and 1910, to illustrate the development of a tourist industry in Boston and to indicate how the changing nature of the city influenced a similar change in the tourist experience. It also provides the necessary context in which to place this narrative. Part I introduces two key elements essential to understanding the relevance of urban tourism in Boston: the city’s experiences with the national phenomena of electrification and urban planning in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and Boston’s distinctive role in nineteenth-century America’s developing national identity and history. In …
Cyberspace, Y2k: Giant Robots, Asian Punks, Rachel Rubin
Cyberspace, Y2k: Giant Robots, Asian Punks, Rachel Rubin
Institute for Asian American Studies Publications
On the eve of the 21st century, a group of young Asian American writers bravely announced—tongue partially in cheek, in keeping with the aesthetic of sincere irony that characterizes the so-called Generation X—their recreation of “a monster.” This announcement, posted on the internet (at www.gidra.net), was drafted by the “editorial recollective” of Gidra, a samizdat (self-published) monthly newsletter launched thirty years earlier by a group of UCLA students who wanted a forum where they could address the particular concerns and issues facing Asian Pacific Americans in the Vietnam War era. Writers and editors of a new Gidra declared in …