Walt's Utopia

Walt's Utopia PDF Author: Priscilla Hobbs
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476693358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The "Happiest Place on Earth" opened in 1955 during a trying time in American life--the Cold War. Disneyland was envisioned as a utopian resort where families could play together and escape the tension of the "real world." Since its construction, the park has continually been updated to reflect changing American culture. The park's themed features are based on familiar Disney stories and American history and folklore. They reflect the hopes of a society trying to understand itself in the wake of World War II. This second edition expands its perspective in response to, among other things, the cultural shifts brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. New and updated chapters endeavor to hold Disney accountable: not accountability for misdeeds, but its accountability to include everyone, as American mythmakers and cultural titans.

Walt's Utopia

Walt's Utopia PDF Author: Priscilla Hobbs
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147665395X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The "Happiest Place on Earth" opened in 1955 during a trying time in American life--the Cold War. Disneyland was envisioned as a utopian resort where families could play together and escape the tension of the "real world." Since its construction, the park has continually been updated to reflect changing American culture. The park's themed features are based on familiar Disney stories and American history and folklore. They reflect the hopes of a society trying to understand itself in the wake of World War II. This second edition expands its perspective in response to, among other things, the cultural shifts brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. New and updated chapters endeavor to hold Disney accountable: not accountability for misdeeds, but its accountability to include everyone, as American mythmakers and cultural titans.

Utopia Drive

Utopia Drive PDF Author: Erik Reece
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations PDF Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254550
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Utopias and Utopians

Utopias and Utopians PDF Author: Richard C.S. Trahair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113594766X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Utopian ventures are worth close attention, to help us understand why some succeed and others fail, for they offer hope for an improved life on earth. Utopias and Utopians is a comprehensive guide to utopian communities and their founders. Some works look at literary utopias or political utopias, etc., and others examine the utopias of only one country: this work examines utopias from antiquity to the present and surveys utopian efforts around the world. Of more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries roughly half are descriptions of utopian ventures; the other half are biographies of those who were involved. Entries are followed by a list of sources and a general bibliography concludes the volume.

The Village Against The World

The Village Against The World PDF Author: Dan Hancox
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781681880
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The land is for those who work it—"La tierra es de quien la trabaja." One hundred kilometers from Seville, there is a small village, Marinaleda, that for the last thirty years has been at the center of a long struggle to create a communist utopia. In a story reminiscent of the Asterix books, Dan Hancox explores the reality behind the community where no one has a mortgage, sport is played in the Che Guevara stadium and there are monthly "Red Sundays" where everyone works together to clean up the neighbourhood. In particular he tells the story of the village mayor, Sánchez Gordillo, who in 2012 became a household name in Spain after leading raids on local supermarkets to feed the Andalucian unemployed.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 143811270X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Presents a selection of important older literary criticism of selected works by Walt Whitman.

Vinyl Leaves

Vinyl Leaves PDF Author: Stephen M Fjellman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000010872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Walt Disney World is a pilgrimage site filled with utopian elements, craft, and whimsy. It’s a pedestrian’s world, where the streets are clean, the employees are friendly, and the trains run on time. All of its elements are themed, presented in a consistent architectural, decorative, horticultural, musical, even olfactory tone, with rides, shows, r

Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945

Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870-1945 PDF Author: Caterina Bernardini
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387554
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Caterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman’s poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman’s success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman’s reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman’s work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.

Walt Whitman and Modern Music

Walt Whitman and Modern Music PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135672490
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Walt Whitman's poetry, especially his Civil War poetry, attracted settings by a wide variety of modern composers in both English- and German-speaking countries. The essays in this volume trace the transformation of Whitman's nineteenth-century texts into vehicles for confronting twentieth-century problems-aesthetic, social, and political. The contributors pay careful attention to music and poetry alike in examining how the Whitman settings become exemplary means of dealing with both the tragic and utopian faces of modernism. The book is accompanied by a recording by Joan Heller and Thomas Stumpf of complete Whitman cycles composed by Kurt Weill, George Crumb, and Lawrence Kramer, and the first recording of four Whitman songs composed in the 1920s by Marc Blitzstein.

The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules PDF Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612193757
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing—even romantic—about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us—and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.