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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Slogan of 1960s hippie changes, evoking color, peace and creativity as well as any reference to nature. Like other motifs and slogans of the period—“Summer of Love,” “groovy,” “psychedelic,” etc.—it has become a period marker for nostalgic media.
Nonetheless, the vivid image of flowers inserted into gun barrels of this period was recreated in 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, WA.
Industry:Culture
The largest wave of immigration into the United States from Eastern Europe took place between 1880 and 1914, when some 7 million people from this region arrived in America. Apart from about 1.8 million Jews, mostly of Russian origin, who had been forced out by persecutions, nearly all these peoples were of Slavic stock. Poles were the largest single group, consisting of about 1.1 million people, but there were also substantial numbers of Russians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Latvians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats and Romanians.
Some of these immigrants, like the Russian Doukhobors, came searching for religious freedom, while others, especially from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire, were avoiding conscription into the army Most, however, were attracted to America by economic opportunities. Rising populations, collapsing agricultural prices and changes in land tenure meant that many peasant families could no longer subsist. America had acquired the reputation of a “promised land,” where work could be found and there was a chance of advancement. Many of the immigrants were in fact recruited by agents in their home countries; others took passage to America trusting that the rumors of plentiful work would turn out to be true. Many of the immigrants were single young males looking for work rather than land.
Most of the immigrants did find work, especially in the rapidly growing industrial centers of the Midwest. The large Polish community in Chicago, IL, for example, dates from around this time. However, wages were low and the immigrants suffered much discrimination. Some stuck it out and put down roots; others moved west to establish homesteads in the Great Plains. Many returned. In the decade before the First World War, immigration records show that around half of all Hungarian, Croat, Slovak and Slovene immigrants returned to Europe soon after their arrival.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires at the end of the First World War brought more Slavic immigrants, though in smaller numbers, and there were more after the Second World War. Refugees from behind the Iron Curtain continued to arrive in small numbers; for example, the events of 1956 brought several thousand Hungarians to the USA, while the first suppression of the Solidarity movement in 1982 resulted in around 8,000 Poles fleeing to America.
In many ways, the Slavic immigrants have been model members of the “melting-pot” society The initial immigrants tried to integrate quickly into American society and culture, sometimes even changing their names to Anglicized forms. Unlike German and Jewish immigrants, who retained political affiliations and set up strong intercommunity organizations, the Slavs did not become highly political. During the Cold War, the Republican Party in particular canvassed for votes among immigrants who had families behind the Iron Curtain, but the Slavs never developed the political voice of, for example, Jewish Americans or Irish Americans. In the 1970s, however, following the success of the Black Power movement, some groups of Slavic descent such as Polish Americans and Ukrainian Americans did establish cultural associations with the aim of reawakening pride in their own culture and counteracting racism from WASP segments of society.
Industry:Culture
Stars and sex symbols are a crucial part of popular culture and the pleasure the audience takes in watching film and television, but they are also crucial to the economics of the entertainment industry as well. The tradition of the star precedes twentieth-century mass media (nineteenth-century theater and opera promoters advanced the careers of certain performers in order to boost sales of tickets). Yet, postwar American entertainment worlds have increasingly fixated upon the body of the sex symbol in order to encourage public consumption.
Perhaps because of the importance of the Hollywood studio system, sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s emerged from film. In the 1950s, women who moved from this realm onto the pages of magazines, newspapers and posters, and into the popular imaginations of men, seemed to reflect the growing economy of the country. These women, such as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, were buxom, breathy, blonde and, at first glance, seemed to exist for the sexual and visual pleasure of men. Sex symbols stood in contradistinction to the more appropriate standards of domesticated femininity that were being portrayed in television in the 1950s. These women stood outside traditional marriage and were more interested in seeking out fun than in keeping a good, clean home.
Similarly the male sex symbols that emerged out of the crumbling studio system, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Montgomery Clift, unlike the efficient corporate model of masculinity, were intense brooders who refused to fit into suburbanized America.
Richard Dyer, who writes on the meanings of celebrity and film in Stars (1979) and elsewhere, argues that for famous actors, films are a vehicle for the display of the star’s persona. The performance of this persona requires repetition of key elements of narrative, visual style and iconography. Thus when Marilyn Monroe became a star, her roles, the way she looked and the ways in which she became styled and shot in film and publicity outlets became similar, solidifying a persona. Although a sex symbol is unattainable and an object of fantasy, he or she must also seem knowable and familiar to the masses.
After the Hollywood studio lost power, agents and public relations have taken over the management of stars. Along with this change, stars have tended to emerge from different sectors of the entertainment industry. For example, one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1980s and 1990s, Madonna, started out as a pop singer. Her career benefited from MTV, where her videos featured her dancing and knowing sexual comeons.
Although she has never successfully maintained a film career, she has always managed her persona well—with the help of agents, publicists, magazine editors and gossip columnists eager for copy. The contemporary sex symbol is also a corporate entity who, like Madonna, has moved into book publishing, as well as the music and film industry. Much of what Madonna’s work has centered upon is her experience of her own body and her popular philosophizing on the importance of sex.
The body of the sex symbol in the 1990s changed dramatically. Whereas in the 1950s the female body featured an hour-glass figure and the male body was wiry, the 1990s sexsymbol body for both was lean, muscular and sculpted, reflecting the importance of working out and also marking the entrance of the fashion model as a massmarketed sex symbol. White models Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Christy Turlington have moved from the runway into superstardom with forays into television, video and film. Black models such as Naomi Campbell and Tyra Banks have become the first minority stars that have been marketed as sex symbols to both black and white audiences. A black male model, Tyson, sporting the clothing of WASP-aspiring Ralph Lauren, has established himself as a sex symbol, as have black actors Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. In 1999 Latino singer Ricky Martin broke into the mainstream of sex symbolism, recognized as much for his gyrating hips just as Elvis punctuated the meanings of his songs with his pelvic thrusts.
Even as America’s sex symbols diversify, one rule remains in place: when the star sings and speaks of love, his or her body must make the audience think of sex. As a result the movement and posture of the star, as well as the publicity machinery that supports him or her, is always crucial for keeping sales up.
Industry:Culture
Superfund is the name commonly used for the federal program to clean up hazardous waste sites, which is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The program was created by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), which has been copied by many states, which have their own “Superfund” programs. The program is called “Superfund” because CERCLA created a special government fund to help pay for the clean-up of abandoned hazardous waste sites.
The passage of the Superfund law reflected growing public concern with hazardous waste sites, an issue that had been largely overlooked in the burst of environmental legislation that Congress had passed in the early 1970s. Public interest in the issue was brought to a head by the case of Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, from which the state had evacuated 237 families in 1978. The neighborhood had been built alongside a former industrial waste site, which began leaching the chemicals that had been dumped into it for decades, damaging the health of the residents who had never been informed of the hazard.
Under the Superfund law, the EPA determines whether a hazardous waste site qualifies for the clean-up program by assessing the threat the site poses to human health and the environment. Every state has had at least one site on the Superfund list, with New Jersey having the largest number of sites. Once a site is listed, EPA (or other federal agencies, if the site is owned by the government) develops a plan to clean up the site.
The Superfund law has been pathbreaking in a number of respects. First, it holds companies (and municipalities) financially responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste sites even if dumping the wastes was legal at the time they were brought to the site. The Superfund law imposes “strict liability,” meaning that if you had disposed of any wastes at a hazardous site, you are considered liable, even if you did nothing considered legally negligent. And liability is “retroactive,” applying to wastes that were dumped before the law was passed.
The second unusual feature of the law concerns the Superfund itself, which is based on the principle of “polluter pays.” The fund was established to pay for a site clean-up if the waste had been dumped by a company that no longer existed, or if it was impossible to determine who was responsible. The Superfund was financed by new taxes on the chemical and petroleum industries and other industries most likely to have dumped hazardous wastes. In 1995, the year the taxing authority under the law expired, the Superfund taxes brought in about $1.5 billion. Congress has generally appropriated about $250 million a year out of general tax revenues to cover some of the program’s administrative costs.
The Superfund program has succeeded at cleaning up sites, but at a slower rate than originally expected. As of September 1998, EPA had listed 1,370 sites, but clean-up was complete at only 176 of them.
The Superfund program has become increasingly controversial as debates have developed over how to make the program more efficient and less costly. Industry has sought to change the liability scheme in the law, which has produced an enormous amount of litigation as each entity that dumped wastes at a site tries to limit its own liability. Industry and some municipalities have also sought to change the standard for cleaning up a site so that more wastes can be contained—preventing them from leaching into drinking water, for example—rather than being removed or treated.
Industry:Culture
Special Commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in July 1967, to investigate race riots of the preceding two years. The final report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, released in March 1968, detailed patterns of inequality and racism embedded in urban life. It also issued a warning: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The Kerner Commission’s report was characteristic of a time before the full impact of renewed immigration was felt. Race was one division in American society but others were becoming increasingly apparent. Nevertheless, American society would become increasingly divided between those who benefited from the perquisites of suburban culture and those confined to inner cities as a growing underclass.
Industry:Culture
Television has been the central medium in sports since the end of the 1950s. It has established football as the most lucrative of all sports, helped refashion basketball in the 1980s and has been the financial backbone for almost all the major sports. With the emergence of cable channels like ESPN, the number of sports benefiting from television coverage has increased, and the bidding wars for major-league sports have become still more intense. By 1996 sports consumed about 40 hours of every week on the four major networks, in addition to the 24-hours-a-day sports broadcasting on several cable channels. Building on this nexus of sport and television, newspapers, talk radio, magazines and catalogs have raised sports to the level of virtual obsession.
The establishment of sports television as a major commercial and cultural force in the United States is usually dated to December 28, 1958, when a national NBC audience watched the Baltimore Colts come back to tie the New York Giants in the championship game of the NFL, and then, under the leadership of Johnny Unitas, win in suddendeath overtime. Played in New York City (and so watched by key figures in advertising and broadcasting), the game brought millions of new fans to the game of football.
Pete Rozelle, commissioner of football in the 1960s and 1970s, built on this newfound strength. Negotiating with the networks on behalf of the league he managed to secure large contracts (most notably the CBS bid of $14.1 million in 1964), revenues from which were divided evenly among the teams, securing the financial health of even teams in smaller markets. Congress complied, passing the Sports Antitrust Broadcast Act, permitting professional leagues to pool revenues and to sell their television rights as a single entity.
The power of television was further demonstrated in 1970 during a mid-season game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. With the Giants leading, 32–29 and with 65 seconds playing time remaining, NBC cut away from the game to show a children’s special, Heidi. Meanwhile, in the game, the Raiders scored two touchdowns and won 43–32. Ten thousand enraged football fans called NBC in New York, blowing a fuse on its switchboard. Since then, no network game has been pre-empted, and even sponsors of CBS’ 60 Minutes, which follows football on Sunday, do not mind being delayed by overtime games.
Roone Arledge added Monday Night Football to the ABC prime-time schedule in 1970. With Howard Cossell, the most controversial sports commentator of his day, Don Meredith and former star Frank Gifford, the show was an instant success. Even after the addition of the tongue-tied O.J. Simpson, the dumping of Cossell and other personnel changes, the show has remained strong, cementing a national audience for otherwise local fixtures (though the hiring of comedian Dennis Miller as a commentator for the 2000 season suggests a less confident outlook at ABC).
The relationship between football and television has been a symbiotic one. The networks were seen as crucial in the establishment of football; now football is seen by television executives as fundamental to their network’s financial health. Thus, Rupert Murdoch established FOX as a network to contend with in 1993 by bidding $1.6 billion to win the right to televise NFL games for four years ($500 million more than CBS had paid for the preceding four years), in addition stealing away CBS’ best commentary team, John Madden and Pat Somerall. Although CBS had lost money on its previous contract, it came back with an astonishing bid of $4 billion over eight years to wrest control of AFC games from NBC. Owing to such network contracts (the total of which amount to $18 billion), the value of the average football franchise has now reached over $200 million.
Other sports have also been successful in using television, though, unlike in football, focusing on players has often been crucial. Basketball was in the financial doldrums until the mid-1980s when CBS made a deliberate move to concentrate all its efforts on games featuring marquee players on major teams, such as Magic Johnson and Kareem AbdulJabbar for the Los Angeles Lakers, Larry Bird for the Boston Celtics and Julius Erving for the Philadelphia 76ers. This plan paid off with the ascendancy of the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan, considered the best player ever to play the game. The downside has been witnessed in Jordan’s second retirement, followed by declining basketball TV ratings as the sport waits for its next crop of stars to emerge.
Golf similarly has benefited from the sudden arrival of Tiger Woods. Prior to Woods’ emergence, networks expected major golf championships to be watched in approximately 20 million homes. In 1997, when Woods captured the Masters, about 30 million homes tuned in. The $100 million investment the networks made in professional golf began to produce a much better return.
The impact of TV has been seen in the way the games themselves are performed.
Almost every team sport now has additional timeouts to allow for commercials (soccer has found it more difficult to gain large television revenues because it doesn’t have such commercial breaks). The result is longer games. One hour of football or basketball takes 3 hours to play. In addition, television officials believe that to draw viewers they must avoid having ties, so most sports now institute sudden-death overtimes.
Often the success of a sport is determined not by the number of people who participate in the game, but by the number who will watch on television. Tennis “arrived” with Billie Jean King’s 1973 “battle of the sexes” against Bobby Riggs; the success of women’s soccer was acknowledged when the 1999 World Cup pulled down a better rating than that year’s NBA playoff. This has been frustrating for enthusiasts of new sports, especially since the major sports of football, baseball and basketball have been able (largely through exemptions to antitrust legislation) to establish virtual monopolistic control over the networks. With the arrival of cable and the overall threat to the existence of the networks, this vaunted position for the major leagues is no longer guaranteed. All kinds of games are now seen on television, not merely those shown on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
Journalists at newspapers have tended to be boosters for their cities and the teams they cover. A surface indignation about racism, sexism, commercialism and other excesses in different sports (like the failure of players to be good “role models”) is often undermined by the clamor for good performances from their cities’ teams. Some change may be expected as more women journalists and commentators are read in print and seen on television, from the pre-game shows to the commentary boxes. Issues have arisen, however, as a result of revelations concerning the parentage of Alexandra Stevenson, a rising tennis star whose mother, the sports journalist Samantha Stevenson, contested restrictions placed on women journalists’ access to sportsmen at the end of the 1970s.
The fact that her interviews with Julius Erving led to the conception of their daughter has resulted in some women journalists feeling let down, and some sports officials maintaining that their opposition to such contacts had been justified.
The long-time standard in sports journalism has been Sports Illustrated, but each sport has its own magazines, some independent, others run by national and regional sports federations. In addition to such magazines, each sports enthusiast can expect the arrival in the mail of a plethora of catalogs promoting sporting goods. This saturation has carried over into talk radio and television sports news programs, during which the performance of local teams, their coaches and owners are dissected. Such programming is now so common that a sitcom, Sports Nïght (ABC), has been loosely based on them.
Industry:Culture
Talk radio is a programming format that encompasses a wide range of topics, such as health, finance, religion, politics, community issues and sports. Listener call-in and interview shows enjoy considerable popularity. The personality of the host is the key ingredient to talk radio’s popularity.
There has been an explosion in talk radio since the 1980s due to the need by AM radio for programming and technological advances made possible by satellite transmission, drastically reducing costs of traditional telephone lines. Early talk radio was primarily overnight programming, such as with Larry Kïng Live and Talk Net in the 1980s. Later successes include Howard Stern, conservative anti-gay activist, the controversial conservative Rush Limbaugh, psychologist Dr Laura Schlesinger and former Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy. In 1997, 588 radio stations reported a talk format and 1,008 reported a news/talk format.
Industry:Culture
The blues is quintessential, twentieth-century American culture. Evolving from African chants and rhythms and the field shouts and gospel choruses of the nineteenth-century plantations of the South, with hints of ragtime, minstrelsy vaudeville and other commercial sounds, the blues came to be performed usually by a sole singer with a guitar, picking out a riff in a twelve-bar, three-chord pattern, singing in a raw, throaty style of personal suffering and general hard times of the sorrows of love, work and life.
Female vocalists such as Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith were popular on the “race records” of the 1920s, as were the solo bluesmen, many of them from the Mississippi Delta, such as Son House, Charley Patton and Robert Johnson.
Blues musicians began moving to cities along with the great migration of African Americans as the country began to prepare for the Second World War. With the war build-up came factory jobs and cash for leisure-time activities. In cities like St. Louis, Los Angeles, Detroit and, especially Chicago, electric blues emerged as bluesmen plugged in their guitars and performed with small combos, often including a rhythm section, piano and harmonica. Guitarists like jazzman Charlie Christian, Texas transplant, Los Angeleno T-Bone Walker and the first Sonny Boy Williamson pioneered the electric sound, combining the picking and riffing of acoustic blues with elements of jazz and R&B.
The guitarist Muddy Waters migrated to Chicago in 1943 and began playing an electrified version of the blues learned in the Mississippi Delta. By the 1950s he was playing regularly in clubs throughout the city and recording for Chess Records, a pioneering blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll label. Chess also recorded Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Rogers, Chuck Berry and a host of other major blues talents, including Willie Dixon who often arranged and wrote for the label’s acts.
Like all major postwar popular music forms, the blues mixed and matched from a wide range of styles, producing variations (often regional) such as the Louisiana swamp blues of Guitar Slim, the boogie blues of John Lee Hooker and the jump blues of Big Joe Turner. The mixing of the blues with other forms created the foundation for rock ’n’roll as performers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley added R&B, country and pop elements.
While the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid1950s cut into the popularity of the blues, it is universally acknowledged that electric blues forms the foundation of rock music.
While blues performances continued in clubs, the genre did not regain popularity until the British invasion of the mid-1960s. Rock bands from England like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds paid tribute to the blues, recording classic songs and touring with legends like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Guitar-based rock, from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan, continues to rely heavily on the blues foundation for both its backbeat and lead guitar.
Industry:Culture
Vast woodlands and towering trees have impressed successive generations of American explorers and pioneers, and have also provided resources for building and fuel for these settlers as they cleared forest lands for agriculture and settlement. Nevertheless, the United States remains surprisingly wooded—roughly one-third of the nation’s total land surface. This entails extensive coverage in both the urban Northeast (New England and the Mid-Atlantic) and the Pacific Northwest, while the Great Plains have relatively minimal tree coverage. Western forests tend to be dominated by evergreens, including pines, firs, spruces and the gigantic redwoods of the Pacific Coast. Eastern forests tend to be hardwoods or mixtures of types, including the panoramas of oak, maple, beech and other trees that make autumnal leaves an event throughout New England each year.
America’s diverse forests have shaped historical narratives of humans and nature, whether tales of Native Americans or heroic woodsmen like Paul Bunyan or Daniel Boone. They have also shaped American representations of landscape and are fundamental to mass media as diverse as Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and Disney’s Pocahantas (1996). They have been recognized and preserved as important components of urban parks and local identities, as well as beloved and highly visited national parks and forests from the Smoky Mountains to Yellowstone and Yosemite. Forests, for many people, are “nature.” In the twenty-first century trees and forests represent not only a renewable resource, but also an expanding one. Yet, that resource is also the source of bitter fights over management and ownership of forests and parklands. These controversies often reflect differences between economic perspectives, environmental perspectives and sentimentalideological construction of the forest. Ownership of forest lands is divided between government proprietorship, which dominates the West and Alaska, and private management. While much of this private ownership does not involve logging per se, large corporate owners have developed extensive single-species, regularly planted tree farms that worry environmentalists because of their lack of diversity and flexibility Federal forests have become controversial because of their openness to leased commercial cutting, which has meant the loss of old growth forests as wood is sold to Asian markets. As in private “tree farms,” this logging can destroy unique environments, which has pitted environmentalists and measures like the Endangered Species Act against loggers and their families as well as corporate interests, producing violent confrontations on both sides. Various strategies of ecological management, however, have emerged in the Pacific Northwest to reach a compromise between employment and environment.
Industry:Culture
The Branch Davidians are an offshoot fringe group of the Seventh Day Adventist denomination founded in 1935. On February 28, 1993 the Branch Davidians, led by their Patriarch, David Koresh (aka Vernon Howell), were involved in a deadly shootout with federal agents at the groups’ fortified compound near Waco, Texas, attempting to execute a warrant for weapons violations. A fifty-one-day siege with federal authorities ensued until the FBI attempted to drive members out by ramming the compound with tear gas equipped armored vehicles. In response the Davidians apparently shot some of their own members and set their own structure on fire killing seventy-eight people including many children. Waco soon became a rallying of an emerging political movement distrustful of government known as the “Militia” or “Patriot” movement. In 1999 revelations about the failure of federal authorities to disclose various details about the siege reignited debate on the topic. Nonetheless, a Texas jury cleared the federal government of responsibility in 2000.
Industry:Culture
