Paradise Transformed

Paradise Transformed PDF Author: Arthur C Verge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Paradise Transformed

Paradise Transformed PDF Author: Arthur C Verge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description


Bohemian Los Angeles

Bohemian Los Angeles PDF Author: Daniel Hurewitz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520256239
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Historian Hurewitz brings to life a vibrant and all-but-forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape the entire American landscape. In a hidden corner of Los Angeles, the personal first became the political, the nation's first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale (now part of Silver Lake), Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party's intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. He discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations.--From publisher description.

L.A. Noir

L.A. Noir PDF Author: John Buntin
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307459853
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Other cities have histories. Los Angeles has legends. Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men–one L.A.’s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief–each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city. Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel’s enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood’s favorite gangster–and L.A.’s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul. William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy "Combination"–a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker’s life mission became to topple it–and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city–a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and movies such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the battle between the underworld and the police played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hills, from the gritty streets of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The outcome of this decades-long entanglement shaped modern American policing–for better and for worse–and helped create the Los Angeles we know today. A fascinating examination of Los Angeles’s underbelly, the Mob, and America’s most admired–and reviled–police department, L.A. Noir is an enlightening, entertaining, and richly detailed narrative about the city originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Se–ora la Reina de los Angeles, "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels."

The Way We Really Were

The Way We Really Were PDF Author: Roger W. Lotchin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252068195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The customary picture of the World War II era in California has been dominated by accounts of the Japanese American concentration camps, African Americans, and women on the home front. The Way We Really Were substantially enlivens this view, addressing topics that have been neglected or incompletely treated in the past to create a more rounded picture of the wartime situation at home. Exploring the developments brought to fruition by the war and linking them to their roots in earlier decades, contributors address the diversity of the musical scene, which arose from a cross-pollination of styles brought by Okies, blacks, and Mexican migrants. They examine increased political involvement by women, Hollywood's response to the war, and the merging of business and labor interests in the Bay Area Council. They also reveal how wartime dynamics led to substantial environmental damage and lasting economic gains by industry. The Way We Really Were examines significant wartime changes in the circumstances of immigrant groups that have been largely overlooked by historians. Among these are Italian Americans, heavily insular and pro-Fascist before the war and very pro-American and assimilationist after, and Chinese American men, who achieved new legitimacy and entitlement through military service. Also included is a look at cultural negotiation among multiple ethnic groups in the Golden State. A valuable addition to the literature on California history, The War We Really Were provides an entree into new areas of scholarship and a fresh look at familiar ones.

Boyle Heights

Boyle Heights PDF Author: George J. Sánchez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520391640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
The radical history of a dynamic, multiracial American neighborhood. “When I think of the future of the United States, and the history that matters in this country, I often think of Boyle Heights.”—George J. Sánchez The vision for America’s cross-cultural future lies beyond the multicultural myth of the "great melting pot." That idea of diversity often imagined ethnically distinct urban districts—the Little Italys, Koreatowns, and Jewish quarters of American cities—built up over generations and occupying spaces that excluded one another. But the neighborhood of Boyle Heights shows us something altogether different: a dynamic, multiracial community that has forged solidarity through a history of social and political upheaval. Boyle Heights is an in-depth history of the Los Angeles neighborhood, showcasing the potent experiences of its residents, from early contact between Spanish colonizers and native Californians to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the hunt for hidden Communists among the Jewish population, negotiating citizenship and belonging among Latino migrants and Mexican American residents, and beyond. Through each period and every struggle, the residents of Boyle Heights have maintained remarkable solidarity across racial and ethnic lines, acting as a unified polyglot community even as their tribulations have become more explicitly racial in nature. Boyle Heights is immigrant America embodied, and it can serve as the true beacon on a hill toward which the country can strive in a time when racial solidarity and civic resistance have never been in greater need.

Santa Monica

Santa Monica PDF Author: Paula A. Scott
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 9780738524696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
An icon of Southern California and one of America's most imaginative and vibrant cities--the fitting destination at the end of Route 66--Santa Monica lies on the brink of the West and is known throughout the nation for its beaches and its Hollywood A-list locals With a foundation built by the Gabrielino Indians and molded by Spanish and Mexican land grants, railroad battles, and a constant influx of settlers, Santa Monica became an oceanside haven for actors and airplane companies, road races and ranchers.

Paradise Lot

Paradise Lot PDF Author: Eric Toensmeier
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584005
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Book Description
When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and brick. The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a "permaculture paradise" replete with perennial broccoli, paw paws, bananas, and moringa—all told, more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden—intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression—also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and even silkworms. In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process. Packed full of detailed, useful information about designing a highly productive permaculture garden, Paradise Lot is also a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.

Land Forum

Land Forum PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gardens
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description


Future of Hope and Present Reality

Future of Hope and Present Reality PDF Author: Andrew Chester
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161521966
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This book is the first of a two-volume work with the overall title "Future Hope and Present Reality . These volumes had their origin in the Speaker s Lectures that Andrew Chester gave in Oxford; their main focus is central themes in biblical eschatology, and especially the apparent contradictions between what is hoped for in the future and what is experienced in the present: the stark discrepancy, that is, between the world as it is and the world as it should be. In this first volume, as the subtitle "Eschatology and Transformation in the Hebrew Bible indicates, the author is concerned with the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament; the second will be on the New Testament). He deals, successively, with central eschatological themes and the deep tensions they involve: divine threats of an absolute end (to human life and to the world itself), and divine promises of blessing and transformation, along with the theological questions inevitably raised by these - both in themselves and in relation to each other; the whole phenomenon of prophecy, and the problems it involves - not least, whether it can be taken seriously, in face of the contradictions and failures it manifests. He discusses the sheer discrepancy between ideal and reality in traditions relating to kingship, along with the tensions inherent in the emergence of messianic hope; death, as representing the end of any relationship with God, along with hope that goes beyond death - in relation both to the individual and also the nation; and, finally, visions of a transformed and paradisal world, and whether these can bear any relation to reality. It is argued that the Hebrew Bible can be seen to offer genuine grounds for hope, but that these can have any cogency only if the problems involved are really engaged with."

From Muhammad to Bin Laden

From Muhammad to Bin Laden PDF Author: David Bukay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351518585
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
From Muhammad to Bin Laden analyzes the ideological, religious, and cultural foundations of one of the most inconceivable phenomena in contemporary world politics. Bukay analyzes the homicide bombings and atrocities perpetuated by worldwide jihad. He also uses information from primary sources to suggest how to cope with this lethal phenomenon.The book explores the meaning and interpretation of the seemingly benign concept of da'wah, the expansion of the Islamic community. Da'wah provides the religious and ideological justification for the lethal phenomenon of worldwide jihad; it describes the incentive and motivational drive that support the emergence and the operation of the fundamentalist Islamic movement. Bukay locates the dimensions of the phenomenon of jihad as well as the reasons, motivations, and aspects of the behavior of fundamentalist groups. The importance of this work lies in its skillful combination of historical perspectives and contemporary dynamics, religious and anthropological aspects of the phenomena, and its use of research tools of both the humanities and social sciences.By exploring the religious and cultural foundations of homicide bombers' activities, Bukay explains the essence of jihad, how it is connected to the da'wah, and together, how da'wah and jihad serve as the platform of the current worldwide terrorist activities. Bukay quotes religious edicts and declarations of classical and modern Islamic texts, as well as contemporary Islamic fanatic movements from Ibn Hanbal in the eighth century to Sayyid Qutb in the mid-twentieth century. He also aims to bring to the world's consciousness the aims and objectives of fundamentalist Islam. The volume concludes by challenging the free world to wake up before the bells of another world war start to ring. From Muhammad to Bin Laden will interest scholars, policymakers, and lay readers. Its importance is transparent, particularly in light of the current developments in the Middle East.