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In American Silence , a complement to his previous study Trickster in the Land of Dreams , Zeese Papanikolas investigates a number of significant American cultural artifacts and the lives of their makers. For Papanikolas, both the private failures and public successes of Clarence King, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Hank Williams resonate with silences.
The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists,and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as rag...
Louis Tikas was a union organizer killed in the battle between striking coal miners and stateømilitia in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. In Buried Unsung he stands for a whole generation of immigrant workers who, in the years before World War I, found themselves caught between the realities of industrial America and their aspirations for a better life.
Zeese Papanikolas forges seemingly disparate events and movements in western history?including some of its strangest and most exotic strains?into a coherent whole by examining them against the laughter and wisdom of Shoshonean trickster tales. Seen against these tales, the West becomes both a canvas for the projection of utopian dreams and the site of their shattered remains. ø Papanikolas undertakes a dramatic retelling of Shoshoni creation stories and examines, along with other topics, the mythologies embedded in the ?Dream Mine? of Mormon folklore, the heroic images of cowboys and Wobblies, the MX missile, the dark side of Oz, and the Las Vegas of tourists, dam builders, and gamblers. ø Among those whose visions are played out against the mirage-haunted background of the West are Cabeza de Vaca, Winston Churchill, Big Bill Haywood, and Native American wise man, Antelope Jake. It is a testament to the power of Papanikolas's conception that he can weave the themes and topics of each chapter into a book that is both eloquent and intellectually stimulating.
Although the origins of the western are as old as colonial westward expansion, it was Owen Wister?s novel The Virginian, published in 1902, that established most of the now-familiar conventions of the genre. On the heels of the classic western?s centennial, this collection of essays both re-examines the text of The Virginian and uses Wister?s novel as a lens for studying what the next century of western writing and reading will bring. The contributors address Wister?s life and travels, the novel?s influence on and handling of gender and race issues, and its illustrations and various retellings on stage, film, and television as points of departure for speculations about the ?new West??as indeed Wister himself does at the end of the novel. ø The contributors reconsider the novel?s textual complexity and investigate The Virginian's role in American literary and cultural history. Together their essays represent a new western literary studies, comparable to the new western history.
This memoir chronicles three southern European clans, their migration to the United States, and intertwining, as well as hard working, warm, loving, and close-knit personal values they bestowed on their kin. Their story flows across Europe and North America from the mid 19th to the late 20th centuries. Family bonds survived and strengthened despite parental and sibling deaths, boarding schools, upheavals in occupied Romania during WW I, personal tragedies, separations imposed by WW II and the Communist bloc, civil war, and financial struggles. The Theodosious present a microcosm of southern European immigration to the United States in the earliest 1900s. From seemingly endless lines of railroad track stretching out before repair gangs of excited young Greeks in their first jobs in America to opening of substantial business establishments, they were comforted in the knowledge their toils would someday benefit their progeny.
Utah presents a paradox in women’s history as a state founded by deeply religious pioneers who supported polygamy but also a place that offered women early suffrage and encouraged education and leadership. Remarkable Utah Women tells the stories of seventeen strong and determined women who broke through the social, cultural, and political barriers of their times. The women in these pages include Emmeline B. Wells, who served as president of both the Mormon Relief Society and the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah; the Bassett sisters, who ran with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch; and Reva Beck Bosone, a US congresswoman and the state’s first female judge. The second edition features new bio...
"In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression.The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, andother singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstreamHollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat--and often the reality--of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies,...
This book explores the identity of American Indians from an Indigenous perspective and how outside influences throughout history, from the arrival of Columbus in 1492 to the twenty-first century, have affected Native people. Non-Native writers, boarding school teachers, movie directors, bureaucrats, churches, and television have all heavily impacted how Indians are viewed in the United States. Drawing on the life experiences of many American Indian men and women, this volume reveals how American Indian identity comprises multiple identities, including the noble savage, wild savage, Hollywood Indian, church-going Indian, rez Indian, urban Indian, Native woman, Indian activist, casino Indian, ...
Contains histories of some of the minorities in Utah.