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Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Grawemeyer Award, Aaron Jay Kernis achieved recognition as one of the leading composers of his generation while still in his thirties. Since then his eloquent yet accessible style, emphasis on melody, and willingness to engage popular as well as classical forms has brought him widespread acclaim and admiring audiences. This biography offers the first survey of the composer's life and work. Immersed in music by middle school, and later training under Theodore Antoniou, John Adams, Jacob Druckman, and others, Kernis rejected the idea of distancing his work from worldly concerns and composed on political themes. His Second Symphony, from 1991, engaged with the first Gulf War; 1993's Still Moment with Hymn was a reaction to the Bosnian Genocide; and the next year's Colored Field and 1995's Lament and Prayer dealt with the Holocaust. Yet Kernis also used sources as disparate as futurist agitprop and children's games to display humor in his work. The book's analysis addresses not only Kernis's wide range of subjects but also the eclecticism that has baffled critics, analyzing his dedication to synthesis and the themes consistent in his work. The book gives a rare mid-career portrait of a major American cultural figure.

An invention of the Industrial Revolution, the accordion provided the less affluent with an inexpensive, loud, portable, and durable “one-man-orchestra” capable of producing melody, harmony, and bass all at once. This book considers the accordion and its myriad forms, from the concertina, button accordion, and piano accordion familiar in European and North American music to the more exotic-sounding South American bandoneón and the sanfoninha. Capturing the instrument's spread and adaptation to many different cultures in North and South America, the chapters illuminate how the accordion factored into power struggles over aesthetic values between elites and working-class people who often were members of immigrant and/or marginalized ethnic communities. Specific histories and cultural contexts discussed include the accordion in Brazil, Argentine tango, accordion traditions in Colombia and the Dominican Republic, cross-border accordion culture between Mexico and Texas, Cajun and Creole identity, working-class culture near Lake Superior, the virtuoso Italian-American and Klezmer accordions, Native American dance music, and American avant-garde.

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. This book offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As the book shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical—yet legitimate—gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. The book's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

This book challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. The book suggests that the war experience (World War II), even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation’s cultural firmament. Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, the book demonstrates that the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable. During the war, there were ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists. It was advertisers who turned a situation, that should have been disadvantageous to them, into an opportunity to cement their place in a postwar society defined by advertising and the consumer products it promoted. The book aims to uncover the significant political and economic forces that shaped the industry and the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products.

Bookended by remarks from African American diplomats Walter C. Carrington and Charles Stith, this book uses close readings of speeches, letters, historical archives, diaries, memoirs of policymakers, and newly available FBI files to confront much-neglected questions related to race and foreign relations in the United States. Why, for instance, did African Americans profess loyalty and support for the diplomatic initiatives of a nation that undermined their social, political, and economic well-being through racist policies and cultural practices? The book explores African Americans' history in the diplomatic and consular services and the influential roles of cultural ambassadors like Joe Louis and Louis Armstrong. It concludes with an analysis of the effects on race and foreign policy in the administration of Barack Obama. Groundbreaking and critical, the book expands on the scope and themes of recent collections to offer the most up-to-date scholarship to students in a range of disciplines, including U.S. and African American history, Africana studies, political science, and American studies.

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. This book argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, the book follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As the book reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians.

Numerous activists and scholars have appealed for rights, inclusion, and justice in the name of “citizenship.” This book shows that there is nothing redeemable about citizenship, nothing worth salvaging or sustaining in the name of “community” practice, or belonging. According to the book, citizenship is a violent dehumanizing mechanism that makes the comparative devaluing of human lives seem commonsensical, logical, and even necessary. The book argues that whenever we work on behalf of citizenship, whenever we work toward including more types of peoples under its reign, we inevitably reify the violence of citizenship against non-normative others. The book's focus on three legal case studies—same-sex marriage law, hate crime legislation, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty and racialization—exposes how citizenship confounds and obscures the mutual processes of settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and heterosexism. In this way, the book argues that citizenship requires anti-intersectionality, that is, strategies that deny the mutuality and contingency of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation—and how, oftentimes, progressive left activists and scholars follow suit.

Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As this book demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, the book explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. It begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows the focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, the book reveals a spiritual middle way, an approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.

Employers have enjoyed a tremendous amount of power throughout American history. This nine-chapter collection examines that power as it relates to the so-called “labor question” or “labor problem,” defined in the late nineteenth century by academics, clergymen, journalists, lawyers, politicians and employers to describe strikes, boycott campaigns, and union organization campaigns. Employers asserted their power in numerous ways; they organized with one another, busted unions, broke strikes, and blacklisted labor activists. They enjoyed largely favorable political climates; judges regularly granted them injunctions against protesting workers, politicians passed laws making union organizing difficult, and armed forces—police forces and National Guardsman--assisted them during strikes and boycott campaigns staged by workers. These chapters examine class conflicts on the local and national levels, demonstrating how employers contested labor in many different contexts—and usually won. The chapters explore how employers used race to divide the working class, how they sought to deflect attention away from their own privileged class positions, how they used the law to their advantages, and how they settled internal disagreements. Taken together, the chapters reveal a rich history of employer organizing, lobbying politicians, and creating new forms of public relations while enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people.

Early twentieth-century Britons thought that they were living in the “age of noise,” sensing the historical changes going on around them as a series of disturbing shifts in the sonic atmosphere. From motorcar engines and wireless loudspeakers to the terrifying interruptions of mechanized warfare, the feeling of living in topsy-turvy times arrived via the ear. Yet historians have not listened to the sounds of early twentieth-century Britain nor unravelled what it meant to live in an “age of noise”. This book turns a critical ear to the “ways of hearing” operating in Britain between 1914 and 1945 and argues that attempts to shape encounters with everyday sound were expressive of hopes and fears for modernity. Competing expert groups – doctors, psychologists, planners, mystics, even – thought differently about how best to attune the individual hearing self to the sounding social body in modernity. Examining noise abatement campaigns, scientific as well as enchanted interventions in the everyday sonic environment, and attempts to manage the auditory culture of total war, the book offers the first auditory history of modern Britain.

Both a precursor to and a critical member of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda weaves documentary and fiction into tapestries that portray distinctive places and complex human beings. Critics and aficionados have celebrated Varda's independence and originality since the New Wave touchstone Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) brought her a level of international acclaim she has yet to relinquish. The book traces Varda's works from her 1954 debut La Pointe Courte through a varied career that includes nonfiction and fiction shorts and features, installation art, and the triumphant 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès. Drawing on Varda's archives and conversations with the filmmaker, the book focuses on the concrete details of how Varda makes films: a project's emergence, its development and the shifting forms of its screenplay, the search for financing, and the execution from casting through editing and exhibition. In the process, it explores the artistic consistencies and bold changes in Varda's career and reveals how one woman charted a nontraditional trajectory through independent filmmaking. The result is a book that reveals the artistic consistencies and bold changes in the career of one of the world's most exuberant and intriguing directors.

The music of Alec Wilder (1907–1980) blends several American musical traditions, such as jazz and the American popular song, with classical European forms and techniques. Stylish and accessible, Wilder's musical oeuvre ranged from sonatas, suites, concertos, operas, ballets, and art songs to woodwind quintets, brass quintets, jazz suites, and hundreds of popular songs. Wilder enjoyed a close musical kinship with a wide variety of musicians, including classical conductors such as Erich Leinsdorf, Frederick Fennell, and Gunther Schuller; jazz musicians Marian McPartland, Stan Getz, and Zoot Sims; and popular singers including Frank Sinatra, Mabel Mercer, Peggy Lee, and Tony Bennett. In this biography and critical investigation of Wilder's music, Wilder's early work as a part-time student at the Eastman School of Music, his ascent through the ranks of the commercial recording industry in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, his turn toward concert music from the 1950s onward, and his devotion late in his life to the study of American popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century are chronicled. The book discusses some of his best-known music, such as the revolutionary octets and songs such as I'll Be Around, While We're Young, and Blackberry Winter, and explains the unique blend of cultivated and vernacular traditions in his singular musical language.

Like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction author Alfred Bester started his career as a pulp writer and finished it as a Grand Master, but he followed a far more curious path to the field’s highest honor than either of his big-name contemporaries. He focused on SF only intermittently yet, as a result, developed a distinctive, outsider approach that opened up avenues for cutting-edge vanguards such as New Wave and cyberpunk. Making extensive use of Bester’s unpublished correspondence, this book carefully examines Bester’s entire career, giving particular attention to how his work across mediums, combined with his love of modernist and decadent authors, shaped his groundbreaking approach to science fiction. During the 1950s, Bester crossbred pulp aesthetics and high style to explosive effect, producing landmark novels and stories that crackled with excess and challenged the assumptions of Golden Age science fiction. His focus on language as a plot device and a tool for world-building, and his use of modernist style in the service of science-fictional extrapolation left the field changed forever. The book argues that what Bester brought to SF was not a radically new template but an idiosyncratic self-reflexivity about the writing and reading protocols of the genre that put the field into a highly productive and transformative dialogue with itself.

This book argues that pornographic film relies on a particular "Victorianness" in generating eroticism—a Gothic Victorianness that is monstrous and restrained, repressed but also perverse, static but also transformative, and preoccupied with gender, sexuality, race, and time. Pornographic films enthusiastically expose the perceived hypocrisy of this Victorianness, rhetorically equating it with mainstream, legitimate culture, as a way of staging pornography’s alleged sexual authenticity and transgressive nature. Through an analysis of porn set during the nineteenth century and porn adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this book shows how these adaptations expose the implicit pornographic aspects of “legitimate” culture while also revealing the extent to which “high” and “low” genres rely on each other for self-definition. In the process, neo-Victorian pornographies draw on Gothic spaces and icons in order to situate itself as this Gothic other, utilizing the Gothic and the monstrous to craft a transformative, pornographic space. These neo-Victorian Gothic pornographies expose the way the genre as a whole emphasizes, navigates, transgresses, and renegotiates gender, sexuality, and race through the lens of history and legacy.

This book examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. This book investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. It argues that African American authors and artists—such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others—viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. The book explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street “Stroll” district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Almost all studies of the nation’s extreme inequality of income and wealth have overlooked a critical, overarching cause of the creation of The New Gilded Age. The permanent political class has driven and sustained economic and political inequality not only with the government policies it has crafted over the past four decades. It has created inequality by becoming a self-dealing, self-serving nepotistic oligarchy that is enabling the One Percent and the .01 Percent to create an American aristocracy of wealth. American Oligarchy describes a multifaceted culture of self-dealing and corruption reaching into every sector of American society. The political class’s direct creation of economic inequality by channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites, has been described extensively; less exposed has been how its self-aggrandizement indirectly—but hidden in plain sight—creates a culture of corruption that infects the entire society.

From 1868 through 1939, anarchists' migrations from Spain to Argentina and back again created a transnational ideology and influenced the movement's growth in each country. This book follows the lives, careers, and travels of Diego Abad de Santillán, Manuel Villar, and other migrating anarchists to highlight the ideological and interpersonal relationships that defined a vital era in anarchist history. Drawing on extensive interviews with Abad de Santillán, José Grunfeld, and Jacobo Maguid, along with unusual access to anarchist records and networks, the book uncovers the ways anarchist migrants in pursuit of jobs and political goals formed a critical nucleus of militants, binding the two countries in an ideological relationship that profoundly affected the history of both. It also considers the impact of reverse migration and discusses political decisions that had a hitherto unknown influence on the course of the Spanish Civil War. Personal in perspective and transnational in scope, the book offers an enlightening history of a movement and an era.

This first scholarly biography of Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919) sheds new light on an important woman suffrage leader who has too often been overlooked and misunderstood. An immigrant from a poor family, Shaw grew up in an economic reality that encouraged the adoption of non-traditional gender roles. Challenging traditional gender boundaries throughout her life, she put herself through college, worked as an ordained minister and a doctor, and built a tightly knit family with her secretary and longtime companion Lucy E. Anthony. Drawing on unprecedented research, the book shows how these circumstances and choices both impacted Shaw's role in the woman suffrage movement and set her apart from her native-born, middle- and upper-class colleagues. The book also rehabilitates Shaw's years as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), arguing that Shaw's much-belittled tenure actually marked a renaissance of both NAWSA and the suffrage movement as a whole.