Author: Kimberly R. Moffitt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 520
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Book Description
The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade, edited by Kimberly R. Moffitt and Duncan A. Campbell, is a holistic analysis of the decade that focuses on major turning points and developments in literature, entertainment, politics, and social experimentation. This analysis ultimately presents the 1980s as a significant phenomenon in the American landscape. The 1980s is a groundbreaking and stand-alone introductory volume that is unapologetically interdisciplinary in nature and encourages students to explore topics of the decade often overlooked or grouped together with other, more memorable decades such as the 1920s or 1960s.
Author: C. Hudson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230616194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
By the end of the 1980s, many Americans looked at the state of the nation with a renewed optimism, which was personified by an enduring American president - Ronald Wilson Reagan. The essays in this volume revisit the 1980s in order to examine the factors that contributed to his political and cultural triumphs and assess his legacy.
Author: Marlene Targ Brill
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 0822576031
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Outlines the important social, political, economic, cultural, and technological events that happened in the United States from 1990 to 1999.
Author: David Sirota
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345518802
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Wall Street scandals. Fights over taxes. Racial resentments. A Lakers-Celtics championship. The Karate Kid topping the box-office charts. Bon Jovi touring the country. These words could describe our current moment—or the vaunted iconography of three decades past. In this wide-ranging and wickedly entertaining book, New York Times bestselling journalist David Sirota takes readers on a rollicking DeLorean ride back in time to reveal how so many of our present-day conflicts are rooted in the larger-than-life pop culture of the 1980s—from the “Greed is good” ethos of Gordon Gekko (and Bernie Madoff) to the “Make my day” foreign policy of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush) to the “transcendence” of Cliff Huxtable (and Barack Obama). Today’s mindless militarism and hypernarcissism, Sirota argues, first became the norm when an ’80s generation weaned on Rambo one-liners and “Just Do It” exhortations embraced a new religion—with comic books, cartoons, sneaker commercials, videogames, and even children’s toys serving as the key instruments of cultural indoctrination. Meanwhile, in productions such as Back to the Future, Family Ties, and The Big Chill, a campaign was launched to reimagine the 1950s as America’s lost golden age and vilify the 1960s as the source of all our troubles. That 1980s revisionism, Sirota shows, still rages today, with Barack Obama cast as the 60s hippie being assailed by Alex P. Keaton–esque Republicans who long for a return to Eisenhower-era conservatism. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.” The 1980s—even more so. With the native dexterity only a child of the Atari Age could possess, David Sirota twists and turns this multicolored Rubik’s Cube of a decade, exposing it as a warning for our own troubled present—and possible future.
Author: Julian Gewirtz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241843
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
The 1980s saw spirited debate in China, as officials and the public pressed for economic and political liberalization. But after Tiananmen, the Communist Party erased the reform debate from memory. Julian Gewirtz shows how the leadership expunged alternative visions of China's future and set the stage for the policing of history under Xi Jinping.
Author: Doug Rossinow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
In this concise yet thorough history of America in the 1980s, Doug Rossinow takes the full measure of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the ideology of Reaganism. Believers in libertarian economics and a muscular foreign policy, Reaganite conservatives in the 1980s achieved impressive success in their efforts to transform American government, politics, and society, ushering in the political and social system Americans inhabit today. Rossinow links current trends in economic inequality to the policies and social developments of the Reagan era. He reckons with the racial politics of Reaganism and its debt to the backlash generated by the civil rights movement, as well as Reaganism's entanglement with the politics of crime and the rise of mass incarceration. Rossinow narrates the conflicts that rocked U.S. foreign policy toward Central America, and he explains the role of the recession during the early 1980s in the decline of manufacturing and the growth of a service economy. From the widening gender gap to the triumph of yuppies and rap music, from Reagan's tax cuts and military buildup to the celebrity of Michael Jackson and Madonna, from the era's Wall Street scandals to the successes of Bill Gates and Sam Walton, from the first "war on terror" to the end of the Cold War and the brink of America's first war with Iraq, this history, lively and readable yet sober and unsparing, gives readers vital perspective on a decade that dramatically altered the American landscape.
Author: Jason Cowley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847377173
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
On 26 May 1989, the final day of the season, Arsenal travelled to Anfield to face the mighty Liverpool, needing a two-goal victory to claim a championship that seemed for so many reasons to belong to their opponents. What followed was one of the most remarkable football matches at the end of one of the most dramatic and politically charged seasons in English football history; a season that marked the transition between old and new football and which would come to be seen as a threshold for astonishing changes not just in football but in the wider culture. Featuring interviews with the main players in this drama, including many of the legendary figures who took part in that famous final game, The Last Gameis a probing and resonant work of dramatic reportage that reflects on the stark changes the national sport has undergone in twenty tumultuous years. Journeying from the intense and hostile terraces of the 1980s, where male violence and tribalism coupled with decrepit stadiums led to tragedies like Heysel and Hillsborough, to the new commercialism that has engulfed the modern game, where fans have turned customers and, some say, security has come at the cost of identity, The Last Game tells the story of how a nation was changed by one astonishing game.
Author: Alison Pearlman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226651453
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
American art of the 1980s is as misunderstood as it is notorious. Critics of the time feared that market hype and self-promotion threatened the integrity of art. They lashed out at contemporary art, questioning the validity of particular media and methods and dividing the art into opposing camps. While controversies have since subsided, critics still view art of the 1980s as a stylistic battlefield. Alison Pearlman rejects this picture, which is truer of the period's criticism than of its art. Pearlman reassesses the works and careers of six artists who became critics' biggest targets. In each of three chapters, she pairs two artists the critics viewed as emblematic of a given trend: Julian Schnabel and David Salle in association with Neo-Expressionism; Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring vis-à-vis Graffiti Art; and Peter Halley and Jeff Koons in relation to Simulationism. Pearlman shows how all these artists shared important but unrecognized influences and approaches: a crucial and overwhelming inheritance of 1960s and 1970s Conceptualism, a Warholian understanding of public identity, and a deliberate and nuanced use of past styles and media. Through in-depth discussions of works, from Haring's body-paintings of Grace Jones to Schnabel's movie Basquiat, Pearlman demonstrates how these artists' interests exemplified a broader, generational shift unrecognized by critics. She sees this shift as starting not in the 1980s but in the mid-1970s, when key developments in artistic style, art-world structures, and consumer culture converged to radically alter the course of American art. Unpackaging Art of the 1980s offers an innovative approach to one of the most significant yet least understood episodes in twentieth-century art.
Author: Scott Crawford
Publisher: Akashic Books
ISBN: 1617755087
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
"The pictures, which include some posed portraits but are mostly concert shots, are the chief attraction. They freeze moments of adolescent release, vein-bulging intensity and sweaty communion that fuses performer and audience...Vivid and evocative." --Washington Post "Scott Crawford, the man behind the acclaimed documentary Salad Days, has given us another taste of the best-kept secret of 80s in his new book Spoke: Washington DC’s hardcore punk scene." --Dazed "With music by Minor Threat, Void, Rites of Spring, Government Issue, and many others propelling the story of hardscrabble, Reagan-era D.C. as the hotbed for a new artistic outlet in Salad Days, Crawford saw the book as a way to scoop up important narrative from the cutting-room floor and find a new home for it." --Fast Company "Pockmarked with burned-out buildings and boarded-over storefronts, Northwest DC was once home to a vibrant and sometimes violent punk movement beginning in the early 1980s. For geeky 12-year-old Scott Crawford, that changed everything: He chucked comic books for punk rock and self-published a music zine from his mother’s kitchen table in Silver Spring. This month, Crawford releases a book about those days, Spoke--a companion to his 2014 documentary, Salad Days--featuring stories from local players such as Dave Grohl, Henry Rollins, and Ian MacKaye." --Washingtonian Magazine "Spoke...adroitly uses both photographs and oral histories to capture the importance of what can best be described as a cultural revolution within the nation’s capital." --Shepherd Express "This coffee table version of the documentary [Salad Days] follows the D.C. scene’s often politically-charged brand of punk rock, from Bad Brains to Jawbox, and of course the legendary Fugazi. And there’s even the near-forgotten SOA, whose frontman Henry Rollins took his D.C. energy to L.A. where he stepped in as the singer for Black Flag." --Yellow Scene Magazine "A must-have for any rock historian or pop-culture buff...The perfect punk coffee table book." --Shockwave Magazine "Highly recommended...A must read for punk fans." --Chorus.fm/HiFiNoise "A worthy addition to the growing amount of literature on the American hardcore/punk scene, Spoke will look great on any aging punks’ coffee table as a document to a vital, electric time." --Ink19.com "A forthright testament to a kaleidoscopic community. This is a rounded collection, with surprises on every page...It’s collection that rocks." --Shelf Awareness for Readers The Washington, DC punk music scene of the 1980s gave birth to influential bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. Here that era is portrayed in its purest form: an oral history by the creators themselves, including nearly two hundred photographs capturing the power and spirit of this politically progressive corner of American underground music. This stunning and intimate collection features rare images from Jim Saah, Cynthia Connolly, Bert Queiroz, and many others who documented this vibrant community. Compiled by Scott Crawford—whose critically acclaimed film Salad Days provided an unprecedented exploration into the 1980s DC punk scene—Spoke delves deeper into one of the most dynamic movements in US music history. Featuring: BAD BRAINS, THE TEEN IDLES, BLACK MARKET BABY, SOA, MINOR THREAT, GOVERNMENT ISSUE, VOID, IRON CROSS, THE FAITH, SCREAM, MARGINAL MAN, GRAY MATTER, BEEFEATER, KING FACE, RITES OF SPRING, DAG NASTY, EMBRACE, SOULSIDE, FIRE PARTY, SHUDDER TO THINK, IGNITION, FUGAZI, SWIZ, THE NATION OF ULYSSES, and JAWBOX.
Author: Stephen Feinstein
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 0766069362
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98
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Book Description
The 1980s were a time of tremendous growth and prosperity. The Cold War ended. The human population on earth was the largest it had ever been. Computers and video games became readily available. Cable television brought a diversity of entertainment to the American household. Severe social, economic, and military pressures forced the Soviet Union to abandon its longstanding political doctrine. Although the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded and the worst nuclear power accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, the 1980s were a decade filled with wild style and economic stability, ushering in a new wave of hope for the future.
