Newspapers and the Making of Modern America

Newspapers and the Making of Modern America PDF Author: Aurora Wallace
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Presents a history of newspapers in the United States, categorizing them according to such types as small town publications, city tabloids, chains, community newspapers, and national news organizations.

Newspapers and the Making of Modern America

Newspapers and the Making of Modern America PDF Author: Aurora Wallace
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Presents a history of newspapers in the United States, categorizing them according to such types as small town publications, city tabloids, chains, community newspapers, and national news organizations.

Newsprint Metropolis

Newsprint Metropolis PDF Author: Julia Guarneri
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634147X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, ambitious publishers like Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and Robert McCormick produced the most spectacular newspapers Americans had ever read. Alongside current events and classified ads, publishers began running comic strips, sports sections, women’s pages, and Sunday magazines. Newspapers’ lavish illustrations, colorful dialogue, and sensational stories seemed to reproduce city life on the page. Yet as Julia Guarneri reveals, newspapers did not simply report on cities; they also helped to build them. Metropolitan sections and civic campaigns crafted cohesive identities for sprawling metropolises. Real estate sections boosted the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities’ roles as economic and information hubs. Advice columns and advertisements helped assimilate migrants and immigrants to a class-conscious, consumerist, and cosmopolitan urban culture. Newsprint Metropolis offers a tour of American newspapers in their most creative and vital decades. It traces newspapers’ evolution into highly commercial, mass-produced media, and assesses what was gained and lost as national syndicates began providing more of Americans’ news. Case studies of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee illuminate the intertwined histories of newspapers and the cities they served. In an era when the American press is under attack, Newsprint Metropolis reminds us how papers once hosted public conversations and nurtured collective identities in cities across America.

The Making of Modern America

The Making of Modern America PDF Author: Gary Donaldson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442209577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
The second edition of Dr. Gary A. Donaldson's highly successful textbook The Making of Modern America, introduces students to the cultural, social and political paths the United States has traveled from the end of WWII to the present day. While deftly cataloguing the sweeping changes and major events in America from "Dewey Defeats Truman" through the election of our first black President, this newly updated edition never loses touch with that American history taking place at the level of the people. This edition details not just the United States' rich cultural history, but elegantly repositions it as integral to our understanding of any portion of this country's past. Donaldson provides a factual foundation for students and then pushes them to interpret those facts, framing the discussions essential to any complete study of American history. The Making of Modern America, Second Edition is updated to include: --An expanded chapter titled "America After the New Millenium" which more retrospectively and completely details the 21st century's first decade. --A new chapter titled "The Second Bush and Obama: From the War on Terrorism to the Audacity of Hope" updating readers on the calamitous end to President George W. Bush's second term, the Obama administration's first term challenges and the Great Recession. --Newly revised readings each profiling an historical event, speech or figure--Lee Harvey Oswald to Bill Gates to Condoleeza Rice-- at the conclusion of each chapter.

The Burning House

The Burning House PDF Author: Anders Walker
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300235623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
A startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen through the eyes of some of the most important American writers "Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights movement."—Robert Greene, The Nation In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even cultures. The intellectuals discussed in this book all agreed that black culture was resilient, creative, and profound, brutally honest in its assessment of American history. By contrast, James Baldwin likened white culture to a “burning house,” a frightening place that endorsed racism and violence to maintain dominance. Why should black Americans exchange their experience for that? Southern whites, meanwhile, saw themselves preserving a rich cultural landscape against the onslaught of mass culture and federal power, a project carried to the highest levels of American law by Supreme Court justice and Virginia native Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Anders Walker shows how a generation of scholars and judges has misinterpreted Powell’s definition of diversity in the landmark case Regents v. Bakke, forgetting its Southern origins and weakening it in the process. By resituating the decision in the context of Southern intellectual history, Walker places diversity on a new footing, independent of affirmative action but also free from the constraints currently placed on it by the Supreme Court. With great clarity and insight, he offers a new lens through which to understand the history of civil rights in the United States.

The Republic of Color

The Republic of Color PDF Author: Michael Rossi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665172X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Republic of Color delves deep into the history of color science in the United States to unearth its origins and examine the scope of its influence on the industrial transformation of turn-of-the-century America. For a nation in the grip of profound economic, cultural, and demographic crises, the standardization of color became a means of social reform—a way of sculpting the American population into one more amenable to the needs of the emerging industrial order. Delineating color was also a way to characterize the vagaries of human nature, and to create ideal structures through which those humans would act in a newly modern American republic. Michael Rossi’s compelling history goes far beyond the culture of the visual to show readers how the control and regulation of color shaped the social contours of modern America—and redefined the way we see the world.

The Culture of Calamity

The Culture of Calamity PDF Author: Kevin Rozario
Publisher:
ISBN: 0226725707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Turn on the news and it looks as if we live in a time and place unusually consumed by the specter of disaster. The events of 9/11 and the promise of future attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, and the inevitable consequences of environmental devastation all contribute to an atmosphere of imminent doom. But reading an account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, with its vivid evocation of buildings “crumbling as one might crush a biscuit,” we see that calamities—whether natural or man-made—have long had an impact on the American consciousness. Uncovering the history of Americans’ responses to disaster from their colonial past up to the present, Kevin Rozario reveals the vital role that calamity—and our abiding fascination with it—has played in the development of this nation. Beginning with the Puritan view of disaster as God’s instrument of correction, Rozario explores how catastrophic events frequently inspired positive reactions. He argues that they have shaped American life by providing an opportunity to take stock of our values and social institutions. Destruction leads naturally to rebuilding, and here we learn that disasters have been a boon to capitalism, and, paradoxically, indispensable to the construction of dominant American ideas of progress. As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s sty≤ and how the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new postmodern culture of calamity. The Culture of Calamity will stand as the definitive diagnosis of the peculiarly American addiction to the spectacle of destruction.

Making a Modern U.S. West

Making a Modern U.S. West PDF Author: Sarah Deutsch
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149622955X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 523

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Book Description
To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.

Newsprint Metropolis

Newsprint Metropolis PDF Author: Julia Guarneri
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
"At the close of the nineteenth century, new printing and paper technologies fueled an expansion of the newspaper business. Newspapers soon saturated the United States, especially its cities, which were often home to more than a dozen dailies apiece. Using New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Chicago as case studies, Julia Guarneri shows how city papers became active agents in creating metropolitan spaces and distinctive urban cultures. Newsprint Metropolis offers a vivid tour of these papers, from the front to the back pages. Paying attention to much-loved features, including comic strips, sports pages, advice columns, and Sunday magazines, she tells the linked histories of newspapers and of the cities they served. Guarneri shows how themed sections for women, businessmen, sports fans, and suburbanites illustrated entire ways of life built around consumer products. But while papers provided a guide to individual upward mobility, they also fostered a climate of civic concern and responsibility. Charity campaigns and metropolitan sections painted portraits of distinctive, cohesive urban communities. Real estate sections and classified ads boosted the profile of the suburbs, expanding metropolitan areas while maintaining cities' roles as economic and information hubs. All the while, editors were drawing in new reading audiences--women, immigrants, and working-class readers--helping to give rise to the diverse, contentious, and commercial public sphere of the twentieth century." -- Publisher's description

A Nation of Steel

A Nation of Steel PDF Author: Thomas J. Misa
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860522
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
From the age of railroads through the building of the first battleships, from the first skyscrapers to the dawning of the age of the automobile, steelmakers proved central to American industry, building, and transportation. In A Nation of Steel Thomas Misa explores the complex interactions between steelmaking and the rise of the industries that have characterized modern America. A Nation of Steel offers a detailed and fascinating look at an industry that has had a profound impact on American life.

New World Coming

New World Coming PDF Author: Nathan Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143913104X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
"To an astonishing extent, the 1920s resemble our own era, at the turn of the twenty-first century; in many ways that decade was a precursor of modern excesses....Much of what we consider contemporary actually began in the Twenties." -- from the Introduction The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, widespread social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. Bookended by the easy living of the Jazz Age, when the booze and money flowed seemingly without end, and the crash of '29 that led to breadlines and a level of human suffering not seen since World War I, New World Coming is a lively, entertaining, and all-encompassing chronological account of an age that defined America. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller -- an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee -- paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. In the Twenties, the American people soared higher and fell lower than they ever had before. As unprecedented economic prosperity and sweeping social change dazzled the public, the sensibilities and restrictions of the nineteenth century vanished, and many of the institutions, ideas, and preoccupations of our own age emerged. With scandal, sex, and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, the contemporary culture of celebrity and sensationalism took root and journalism became popular entertainment. By discarding Victorian idealism and embracing twentieth-century skepticism, America became, for the first time, thoroughly modernized. There is hardly a dimension of our present world, from government to popular culture, that doesn't trace its roots to the 1920s, and few decades are more intriguing or significant today. The first comprehensive view of the era since Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's 1931 classic, New World Coming reveals this remarkable age from the vantage point of nearly a century later. It's all here -- the images and the icons, the celebrities and the legends -- in a book that will resonate with history readers, 1920s aficionados, and Americans everywhere.