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In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted ...
"Candid and intimate accounts of the factory-worker tragedy that shaped American labor rights. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, New York. The top three floors housed the Triangle Waist Company, a factory where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as "waists." The fire killed 146 workers in a mere 15 minutes but pierced the perpetual conscience of citizens everywhere. The tragedy of the fire, and the resulting movements for change, were pivotal in shaping workers' rights and unions. This book is a collection of stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers. Nineteen contributors offer a collective testimony: a written memorial to the Triangle victims"--
Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic—the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine—is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood po...
"Memory Work demonstrates the evolution of the pioneering minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt, analyzing the key theme of memory in her practice. In addition to the artist's own popular published writings, which detail the unique challenges facing female artists, Memory Work draws on unpublished manuscripts, private recordings, and never-before-seen working drawings to validate Truitt's original ideas about the link between perception and mnemonic reference in contemporary art."--Provided by publisher.
Traces the development of the subway from its inception to its decline as an overcrowded and dangerous part of city life - Explores how it has been represented in film and art - Gives women's experiences of the subway - Examines the city's racial tensions - Skyscapers - Spatial layout of the city - Urban space.
Daughters of the Great Depression is a reinterpretation of more than fifty well-known and rediscovered works of Depression-era fiction that illuminate one of the decade's central conflicts: whether to include women in the hard-pressed workforce or relegate them to a literal or figurative home sphere. Laura Hapke argues that working women, from industrial wage earners to business professionals, were the literary and cultural scapegoats of the 1930s. In locating these key texts in the "don't steal a job from a man" furor of the time, she draws on a wealth of material not usually considered by literary scholars, including articles on gender and the job controversy; Labor Department Women's Bure...
New York Jews, so visible and integral to the culture, economy and politics of America's greatest city, has eluded the grasp of historians for decades. Surprisingly, no comprehensive history of New York Jews has ever been written. City of Promises: The History of the Jews in New York, a three volume set of original research, pioneers a path-breaking interpretation of a Jewish urban community at once the largest in Jewish history and most important in the modern world.
Picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women sculptors in the United States from the late eighteenth century throught the 1930s and the emerging of a professional identity for women artists. Thanks to their success as neoclassicists, women sculptors were able to cross over into nationalistic and political subjects that were unavailable to women painters.
This book explores the meaning and symbolism of the flower motif in the art of women artists, from the nineteenth century to the present day. It begins with a discussion of the symbolic significance of the flower in canonical texts such as the Song of Songs, in which the female lover is likened to a “lily among the thorns,” and to an “enclosed garden.” These allegorical images permeated into Christian iconography, attaining various expressions in the plastic arts from the twelfth through nineteenth centuries. The heart of the book is a discussion of the meaning of the change in representations of the flower, and at the same time the appearance of amazing images of “masculine” sky...
The Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898 celebrated Omaha’s key economic role as a center of industry west of the Mississippi River and its arrival as a progressive metropolis after the Panic of 1893. The exposition also promoted the rise of the United States as an imperial power, at the time on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and the nation’s place in bringing “civilization” to Indigenous populations both overseas and at the conclusion of the recent Plains Indian Wars. The Omaha World’s Fair, however, is one of the least studied American expositions. Wendy Jean Katz brings together leading scholars to better understand the event’s place in the larger history of both Victo...