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Whether it's needlepoint or woodworking, collecting stamps or dolls, everyone has a hobby, or is told they need one. But why do we fill our leisure time with the activities we do? And what do our hobbies say about our culture? Steven Gelber here traces the history and significance of hobbies from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1950s. Although hobbies are often touted as a break from work, Gelber demonstrates that they reflect and reproduce the values and activities of the workplace by bringing utilitarian rationality into the home, imitating the economic stratification of the marketplace, and reinforcing traditional gender roles. Drawing on a wide array of social and cultural theory, Hobbies fills a critical gap in American cultural history and provides a compelling new perspective on the meaning of leisure.
"Filled with brilliant insights and tantalizing leads."--
"Colorado of the East," "the Queen City," "City of Homes," and "Wall Street Suburb" are all monikers that have been applied to Plainfield over the years, but no single phrase can capture the essence of this wonderfully diverse and unique place. From its inauspicious start as an agrarian Quaker community in the fields beyond Elizabethtown, post-Civil War Plainfield developed into a complete incarnation of gilded-age splendor. It flourished briefly as a summer resort before becoming an affluent bedroom community for New York City's financiers and captains of industry. As economic and development patterns changed, Plainfield slipped into a secondary role, but not for long. Rediscovery of its rich history and outstanding architectural heritage by new generations has renewed the vigor that has been so much a part of Plainfield's legacy. Plainfield is a work that expresses the authors' devotion to their hometown. They have carefully selected images that contrast everyday activities with little-known events in the city's three-hundred-year saga.
America stocks its shelves with mass-produced goods but fills its imagination with handmade folk objects. In Pennsylvania, the "back to the city" housing movement causes a conflict of cultures. In Indiana, an old tradition of butchering turtles for church picnics evokes both pride and loathing among residents. In New York, folk-art exhibits raise choruses of adoration and protest. These are a few of the examples Simon Bronner uses to illustrate the ways Americans physically and mentally grasp things. Bronner moves beyond the usual discussions of form and variety in America's folk material culture to explain historical influences on, and the social consequences of, channeling folk culture into a mass society.
The journal of the Brainerd Mission is an indispensable source for understanding Cherokee culture and history during the early nineteenth century. The interdenominational mission was located in the heart of Cherokee country near present-day Chattanooga. For seven years the Brainerd missionaries kept a journal describing their lives and those of their charges. Although the journal has long been recognized as a significant primary document, it was not fully transcribed or made widely available until now. The journal entries provide a richly textured and sensitive look at Cherokee life and American missionary activities during the early nineteenth century. They shed new light on the daily lives and personalities of individual Cherokees, as well as on poorly understood aspects of Cherokee politics and religion. The journal provides interesting ethnographic details concerning Cherokee council meetings, ceremonial occasions, gender relations, and the internal social and political tensions among families. Of equal interest are the complex and often conflicted attitudes of the missionaries, who were interested in Cherokee traditional culture but simultaneously worked to change it.
Three prominent folklorists wrote these essays in the 1970s about Dorrance Weir of upstate New York and his song "Take that Night Train to Selma," Joe Scott of Maine and his song "The Plain Golden Band," and Paul Hall of Newfoundland and "The Bachelor's Song."
Includes Part 1, Books, Group 1, Nos. 1-12 (1940-1943)