How The World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere

How The World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere PDF Author: Peter Conrad
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500772274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From politics and war, to jeans and sneakers: a look at America’s influence on the world from an international perspective On the day after 9/11, foreign newspapers ran headlines announcing “We Are All Americans Now.” Though the sentiment was not new, it was also not quite the same as when Henry Luce announced in 1941, the inauguration of what he called “the American Century,” during which the US was to raise all men “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist calls a little lower than angels.” When America suddenly emerged as a global power in the postwar period, the world—with pockets of resistance from France, Russia, and Japan in particular—was happy to be remade in the US image. America dazzled, and sometimes intimidated, older, staler, less innovative cultures. The affluence it placed on display was something to which most other countries aspired, and it was this fantasy that helped win the Cold War. Fast forward to today and the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, days before a possible financial default by the US government, calling for a de-Americanized world. A context for Peter Conrad’s grand tale is, inevitably, politics, war, and commerce, but for the most part he draws on his brilliant repertoire of cultural skills to assess, surprise, invigorate, and delight us with his kaleidoscopic presentation of the movies and music, jeans and sneakers, food and refrigerators, novels and paintings that have shaped so much of the world in our lifetimes.

How The World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere

How The World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere PDF Author: Peter Conrad
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500772274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book

Book Description
From politics and war, to jeans and sneakers: a look at America’s influence on the world from an international perspective On the day after 9/11, foreign newspapers ran headlines announcing “We Are All Americans Now.” Though the sentiment was not new, it was also not quite the same as when Henry Luce announced in 1941, the inauguration of what he called “the American Century,” during which the US was to raise all men “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist calls a little lower than angels.” When America suddenly emerged as a global power in the postwar period, the world—with pockets of resistance from France, Russia, and Japan in particular—was happy to be remade in the US image. America dazzled, and sometimes intimidated, older, staler, less innovative cultures. The affluence it placed on display was something to which most other countries aspired, and it was this fantasy that helped win the Cold War. Fast forward to today and the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, days before a possible financial default by the US government, calling for a de-Americanized world. A context for Peter Conrad’s grand tale is, inevitably, politics, war, and commerce, but for the most part he draws on his brilliant repertoire of cultural skills to assess, surprise, invigorate, and delight us with his kaleidoscopic presentation of the movies and music, jeans and sneakers, food and refrigerators, novels and paintings that have shaped so much of the world in our lifetimes.

The Americanization of Narcissism

The Americanization of Narcissism PDF Author: Elizabeth Lunbeck
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727134
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
American social critics in the 1970s, convinced that their nation was in decline, turned to psychoanalysis for answers and seized on narcissism as the sickness of the age. Books indicting Americans as greedy, shallow, and self-indulgent appeared, none more influential than Christopher Lasch’s famous 1978 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. This line of critique reached a crescendo the following year in Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech” and has endured to this day. But as Elizabeth Lunbeck reveals, the American critics missed altogether the breakthrough in psychoanalytic thinking that was championing narcissism’s positive aspects. Psychoanalysts had clashed over narcissism from the moment Freud introduced it in 1914, and they had long been split on its defining aspects: How much self-love, self-esteem, and self-indulgence was normal and desirable? While Freud’s orthodox followers sided with asceticism, analytic dissenters argued for gratification. Fifty years later, the Viennese émigré Heinz Kohut led a psychoanalytic revolution centered on a “normal narcissism” that he claimed was the wellspring of human ambition, creativity, and empathy. But critics saw only pathology in narcissism. The result was the loss of a vital way to understand ourselves, our needs, and our desires. Narcissism’s rich and complex history is also the history of the shifting fortunes and powerful influence of psychoanalysis in American thought and culture. Telling this story, The Americanization of Narcissism ultimately opens a new view on the central questions faced by the self struggling amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of modernity.

The Americanization of Emily

The Americanization of Emily PDF Author: William Bradford Huie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780722147764
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description


The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin PDF Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
“I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . .” —The New York Sun “Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most accomplished, complex, and unpredictable Americans of his own time or any other.” —The Washington Post Book World From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic—and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes—comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspects of his life and career that would have otherwise remained mysterious. In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex—and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity PDF Author: Eileen Tamura
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252063589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
"The main theme of this book is the interplay of Americanization and acculturation of the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands. By acculturation the author refers to what the Nisei wanted and actually did achieve-their adaptation to American middle-class life" -- Preface.

The Americanization of the World

The Americanization of the World PDF Author: William Thomas Stead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Anglo-Saxon race
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description


Patriotic Pluralism

Patriotic Pluralism PDF Author: Jeffrey Mirel
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674046382
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In this book, leading historian of education Jeffrey E. Mirel retells a story we think we know, in which public schools forced a draconian Americanization on the great waves of immigration of a century ago. Ranging from the 1890s through the World War II years, Mirel argues that Americanization was a far more nuanced and negotiated process from the start, much shaped by immigrants themselves.Drawing from detailed descriptions of Americanization programs for both schoolchildren and adults in three cities (Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit) and from extensive analysis of foreign-language newspapers, Mirel shows how immigrants confronted different kinds of Americanization. When native-born citizens contemptuously tried to force them to forsake their home religions, languages, or histories, immigrants pushed back strongly. While they passionately embraced key aspects of Americanization—the English language, American history, democratic political ideas, and citizenship—they also found in American democracy a defense of their cultural differences. In seeing no conflict between their sense of themselves as Italians, or Germans, or Poles, and Americans, they helped to create a new and inclusive vision of this country.Mirel vividly retells the epic story of one of the great achievements of American education, which has profound implications for the Americanization of immigrants today.

Americanization and Its Limits

Americanization and Its Limits PDF Author: Jonathan Zeitlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199269044
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
An analysis of Americanization in European and Japanese industry after World War II. The contributors analyze the creative role of local actors in selectively adapting US technology and management methods to suit local conditions, and in creating hybrid forms combining foreign and indigenous practices in unforeseen, yet remarkably competitive ways.

Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain

Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain PDF Author: Mark Glancy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857723057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
For 100 years, Hollywood has provided both the majority and the most popular of films shown on British screens. For many Britons, Hollywood films are not foreign films. Whether seen in the cinema, on television or the internet, they are regarded as normal screen fare and a part of everyday life. Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain is the first book to take a wide ranging view of this phenomenon, exploring the tastes and preferences of British audiences from the silent era to the present. Mark Glancy investigates the British reception of Hollywood films, ranging from The Public Enemy through film history to The Patriot and Grease. Drawing on rich original sources, his carefully researched and lively book explores Hollywood's capacity to appeal to British audiences, as well as its ability to alienate, enrage and amuse them.

Coca-Cola Socialism

Coca-Cola Socialism PDF Author: Radina Vučetić
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633862019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This book is about the Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the nineteen-sixties. After falling out with the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to the United States for support and inspiration. In the political sphere the distance between the two countries was carefully maintained, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive to the American model. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be beneficial, stabilising the regime internally and providing an image of openness in foreign policy. Coca-Cola Socialism addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. Its main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Radina Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and what life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people who lived in a country with communist ideology in a capitalist wrapping. Her book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream and questions both an uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and an exaggerated depiction of its authoritarianism.