Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard
College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven
College Conference, or "Seven Sisters," she defended women's
...intellectual abilities and the value of the liberal arts. She also
amassed a strong set of foreign policy credentials and, at the peak
of her prominence in 1945, served as the sole woman member of the
U.S. delegation to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. But
her accomplishments are undercut by other factors: she had a
reputation for bias against Jewish applicants for admission to
Barnard and early in the 1930s voiced an indulgent view of the Nazi
regime. In this biography, historian Nancy Woloch explores
Gildersleeve's complicated career in academia and public life. At
once a privileged insider, prone to elitism and insularity, and a
perpetual outsider to the sexist establishment in whose ranks she
sought to ascend, Gildersleeve stands out as richly contradictory.
The book examines her initiatives in higher education, her savvy
administration, her strategies for gaining influence in academic
life, the ways that she acquired and deployed expertise, and her
drive to take part in the world of foreign affairs. Woloch draws
out her ambivalent stance in the women's movement, concerned with
women's status but opposed to demands for equal rights. Tracing
resonant themes of ambition, competition, and rivalry, The
Insider masterfully weaves Gildersleeve's life into the
histories of education, international relations, and feminism.
This book examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century ...America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation’s new role as a global superpower. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans labored over how to realize diversity while honoring difference and manage dueling impulses toward globalism, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other.
The Kissing Sailor Verria, Lawrence; Galdorisi, George; Hartman, David
2012, 2012-05-15
eBook
On August 14, 1945, Alfred Eisenstaedt took a picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, minutes after they heard of Japan's surrender to the United States. Two weeks later LIFE magazine ...published that image. It became one of the most famous WWII photographs in history (and the most celebrated photograph ever published in the world's dominant photo-journal), a cherished reminder of what it felt like for the war to finally be over. Everyone who saw the picture wanted to know more about the nurse and sailor, but Eisenstaedt had no information and a search for the mysterious couple's identity took on a dimension of its own. In 1979 Eisenstaedt thought he had found the long lost nurse. And as far as almost everyone could determine, he had. For the next thirty years Edith Shain was known as the woman in the photo of V-J DAY, 1945, TIMES SQUARE. In 1980 LIFE attempted to determine the sailor's identity. Many aging warriors stepped forward with claims, and experts weighed in to support one candidate over another. Chaos ensued. For almost two decades Lawrence Verria and George Galdorisi were intrigued by the controversy surrounding the identity of the two principals in Eisenstaedt's most famous photograph and collected evidence that began to shed light on this mystery. Unraveling years of misinformation and controversy, their findings propelled one claimant s case far ahead of the others and, at the same time, dethroned the supposed kissed nurse when another candidate's claim proved more credible. With this book, the authors solve the 67-year-old mystery by providing irrefutable proof to identify the couple in Eisenstaedt's photo. It is the first time the whole truth behind the celebrated picture has been revealed. The authors also bring to light the couple's and the photographer's brushes with death that nearly prevented their famous
spontaneous Times Square meeting in the first place. The sailor, part of Bull Halsey's famous task force, survived the deadly typhoon that took the lives of hundreds of other sailors. The nurse, an Austrian Jew who lost her mother and father in the Holocaust, barely managed to escape to the United States. Eisenstaedt, a World War I German soldier, was nearly killed at Flanders.
This book explores the Erie Railway's contributions to nineteenth-century visual culture by promoting scenic thinking in which closely viewed scenes and deep prospects became the basis for engaging ...landscapes and their representations. Erie guides became commentary on landscape, with images and texts as annotations on the production of culture.
This Vol in the Clarendon Studies in Criminology series (Roger Hood, series editor) analyzes the relation of gender, race, & class, drawing on an ethnographic study of the illegal drug market in ...Bushwick, a neighbohood in New York City, derived from individual contact with 211 women drug users. Current theory tends to describe such women in terms of either passivity & submissiveness or autonomy & volition. This dualism is contradicted in a description of the networks of women drug users in Bushwick. Women-centered networks in the community serve as a primary resource of women drug users for income generation, drug consumption, & personal safety, because they are isolated from conventional sources of economic & social support & peripheral to the male-dominated core networks of drug-using populations. However, these networks are riven by racial divisions between African American, Latina, & European American women. Further, while it is true that new opportunities in the drug market have emerged with the advent of the crack cocaine market & the erosion of male dominance of the drug economy, these opportunities are gender coded & unlikely to be given to women. Some women gained entrance into the dominant drug market through boyfriends & husbands, but most are excluded from participation. Sexwork is the only income-generating activity consistently available to women drug users in this community. It is concluded that the division of labor in the street-level drug economy & broader systems of social stratification work together to produce & maintain the status of women drug users in this community. A Preface accompanies 8 Chpts. 1 Appendix, 452 References. D. M. Smith
The New York Police Department is an iconic symbol of one of the world's most famous cities. The blue uniforms of the men and women who serve on the force have long stood for integrity and heroism in ...the work to serve and protect the city's residents. And yet, as in any large public organization, the NYPD has also suffered its share of corruption, political shenanigans, and questionable leadership.
InThe NYPD's First Fifty Years Bernard Whalen, himself a long-serving NYPD lieutenant, and his father, Jon, consider the men and women who have contributed to the department's past, both positively and less so. Starting with the official formation of the NYPD in 1898, they examine the commissioners, politicians, and patrolmen who during the next fifty years left a lasting mark on history and on one another. In the process, they also explore the backroom dealings, the hidden history, and the relationships that set the scene for the modern NYPD that so proudly serves the city today.
A Wild Idea Edmondson, Brad
2021, 2021-05-15, 2021-04-15
eBook
A Wild Idea shares the complete story of the difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The Adirondack region of New York's rural North Country forms the nation's largest State Park, with a ...territory as large as Vermont. Planning experts view the APA as a triumph of sustainability that balances human activity with the preservation of wild ecosystems. The truth isn't as pretty. The story of the APA, told here for the first time, is a complex, troubled tale of political dueling and communities pushed to the brink of violence. The North Country's environmental movement started among a small group of hunters and hikers, rose on a huge wave of public concern about pollution that crested in the early 1970s, and overcame multiple obstacles to save the Adirondacks. Edmondson shows how the movement's leaders persuaded a powerful Governor to recruit planners, naturalists, and advisors and assign a task that had never been attempted before. The team and the politicians who supported them worked around the clock to draft two visionary land-use plans and turn them into law. But they also made mistakes, and their strict regulations were met with determined opposition from local landowners who insisted that private property is private. A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with five dozen insiders who are central to the story. Their observations contain many surprising and shocking revelations. This is a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents. It shows how the Adirondacks were saved, and also why that campaign sparked a passionate rebellion.
College in Prison Karpowitz, Daniel
2017, 20170201, 2017-02-01
eBook
Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and ...women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.College in Prisonchronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI's development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions-the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary-College in Prisonmakes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.
