That
intensity results from the ways in which the songs transform aspects of
sentimentality developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoires,
particularly parlor songs and torch songs. Power ballads energize sentimental
topics and affects with rapturous feelings of uplift. Instead of concentrating
on individual emotions like earlier sentimental songs do, power ballads create
charged clouds of mixed emotions that produce feelings of euphoria. The
emotional adrenaline rushes in power ballads are characteristic of larger
experiences in popular culture in which emotions are to be grand,
indiscriminate, and immediate.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
Significantly,
the writer changed the ethnic identity of some characters from white American
to Asian American. He also added and highlighted Asian American themes and
issues. In short, Lee made an “Asian American” short-story cycle par excellence
by coloring his stories yellow. This essay examines Lee's rewriting and
arrangement of his magazine stories for an Asian American short-story cycle. It
first compares the differences between the magazine and cycle versions of the
stories. It goes on to examine totalizing devices such as the common setting,
recurrent places, connective characters, and unifying themes. Lastly, it
elucidates the arrangement of the eight stories and significance of the title
story in the cycle. It ultimately argues that Don Lee retrofitted his magazine
stories extensively and meticulously for a short-story cycle in order to
portray the diverse aspects of post-immigrant Asian America at the turn of the
century from his positionality as a third-generation Korean American.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
This
involves close textual analysis of the four examples identified, examining the
contrasting visual styles, strategies and tones. The textual discussions will
not take place in isolation, however: this article will chart the simultaneous
developments in real-world electoral politics, with particular focus on the
influence of the media in the election campaigns contemporaneous with the
fictional examples discussed. The article charts a shift in the representation
of political authenticity, from a cynical attitude towards its possibility in
the 1970s, to an uncomplicated reversion to traditional markers of this elusive
concept in the 2000s.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
The
essay uses Ernst Bloch's theory of disappointment and utopianism to dwell, in
particular, upon the novel's representations of the American Dream as
intimately related to failure and the promise of the New World. Bloch's
insistence that disappointment is embedded within utopian formations suggests
that the novel's tragic take on Gatsby's dreams is the key to its mid-century
fame and its continued cultural appeal.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
The
churches that these fundamentalists and evangelicals belonged to would grow
tremendously in the coming decades, eventually claiming roughly 26 percent of
the American population. From the 1960s forward, conservative Protestants would
also become key political players, helping to decide national elections. Their
responses to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which intended to end
discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, and
the heated debates that led up to the law reveal much about how conservative Christians
related to the state and to a changing society. Responses to the bill ranged
from resigned acceptance to racist denunciation. But believers were united in
their antistatism and in their opposition to political and theological
liberalism. This article examines how evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged
in politics and understood race and racism in personal terms. It also analyzes
the religious dimensions of modern American conservatism.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
Over
the course of a century, heraldic entrepreneurs sought to broaden the market
for family crests, and in doing so Americanized heraldic practice. The early
projects of Albert Welles, Frank Allaben and Frances M. Smith linked heraldry with
new approaches to genealogical research and encouraged its use by a broad cross
section of American society. In the late twentieth century, entrepreneur Gary
Halbert sold millions of heraldic mementos that epitomized the modern
commodification of history and identity. The result of a century of marketing
is an American heraldry that is both more accessible than its European
antecedents and less closely tied to verifiable genealogical relationships.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
In
the first half of the 20th century, the US South lagged behind the Northeast in
social and economic development, but in the 1920s and 1930s writers from the US
South produced texts that used modernist aesthetic forms to depict poor, rural
living conditions. This essay argues that ruralism in the South was a product
of modernization, and that cultural development in southern literature preceded
modernization, yielding texts that employ a discontinuous narrative technique
to depict the rural regions, such as William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and
James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
Patent
medicine shows became popular in the United States around the turn of the
twentieth century by selling their products alongside free musical and
theatrical entertainments. The “doctors” promised a range of cures, but usually
mixed their remedies with alcohol or narcotics – using the promise of health to
evade religious authorities and law enforcement, even in dry counties. Many
talented black performers toured with medicine shows, including a number of
artists later associated with the blues. I argue that the medicine show had a
decisive impact on the blues by providing not simply training in performance,
but also an impetus for the notorious suggestiveness of its lyric code. The
blues borrows from the medicine show its lawless appeal to ailments
uncategorized and ignored by socially sanctioned experts.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
Two
competing strands of intellectual history, which arose from divergent
interpretations of human nature, impacted the democratic tradition in the
United States. This paper examines this divergence through a succinct
comparison of Benjamin Franklin's and George Whitefield's teachings on human
perfection. Whitefield's view of perfection is derived from Protestant
Christianity and argues that man is called to constantly pursue a personal and
earthly unattainable goal. Franklin sought to replace the religious view with
one grounded upon enlightenment and sought to establish an earthly perfection,
which aligned with his democratic ideal. This view of perfection was attainable
to all through the education of the citizens of the new nation in a liberal tradition.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
This
essay considers the television series Breaking Bad in light of Nicos
Poulantzas's concept of the new petty bourgeoisie and Bruno Latour's notion of
the production of “monsters” in modern society as a result of the
compartmentalization of science from society. Breaking Bad, which has received
near universal praise from the popular press, established itself as the most
recent dominant show in the recent wave of serial dramas. As a show that
resembles the experimental vacuum chamber described by Latour, Breaking Bad
succeeds in naturalizing its own terms so that they go unquestioned by viewers.
My article views the character Walter White not as the everyman antihero
presented by the show, but rather as a representative of what Poulantzas has
termed the new petty bourgeoisie. A contention made in this essay is that the
quarantined nature of such serial dramas allows them to work as vehicles for
ideologies that go unexamined by their viewers.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
During
and after the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, thousands of
photographs were taken. None, however, would become as iconic as Thomas
Franklin's photo of three firefighters raising an American flag above the
rubble of the World Trade Center. Franklin's photo, I argue in this essay,
casts 9/11 in the familiar myth of American exceptionalism, screening out but
still gesturing to the heterogeneous memories left unsettled and animate in
amateur photographs, missing-person posters, bodies in pain, and performance.
In considering the struggle over the visual memory of the attacks, I first
consider how, in the wake of 9/11, the discourse of exceptionalism served to
disavow the exceptions historically taken by the state and to rationalize the
War on Terror. I show how this system of myths works in dialectical relation to
other disruptive forms of cultural memory. I then read Franklin's iconic
photograph as a screen by which traumatic memories are masked and onto which
nationalist desires are projected. Finally, I analyze 9/11 photography that
troubles the exceptionalist optics of Franklin's photo by evoking the visual
legacy of the Vietnam War and so challenging the logic of righteous warfare.
Website: http://www.arjonline.org/social-sciences-and-humanities/american-research-journal-of-history-and-culture/
