This 2003 book reports the only national, random sample survey of US children and adolescents' use of all of the various media available to them conducted in at least the past 30 years. In addition ...to providing the first comprehensive look at how media-saturated our young people's lives have become, it is the first study to examine young people's overall media budgets, and the first to attempt to describe distinctly different types of young media users. Extensive background information and chapters devoted to each of the various media, to the overall media budget, and to particular types of media users, enables the authors to describe perhaps the most detailed map of US young people's media behavior ever assembled.
Wars are not fought by politicians and generals--they are fought by soldiers. Written by a combat veteran of the Vietnam War,Not a Gentleman's Waris about such soldiers--a gritty, against-the-grain ...defense of the much-maligned junior officer.Conventional wisdom holds that the junior officer in Vietnam was a no-talent, poorly trained, unmotivated soldier typified by Lt. William Calley of My Lai infamy. Drawing on oral histories, after-action reports, diaries, letters, and other archival sources, Ron Milam debunks this view, demonstrating that most of the lieutenants who served in combat performed their duties well and effectively, serving with great skill, dedication, and commitment to the men they led. Milam's narrative provides a vivid, on-the-ground portrait of what the platoon leader faced: training his men, keeping racial tensions at bay, and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, all in a war without fronts. Yet despite these obstacles, junior officers performed admirably, as documented by field reports and evaluations of their superior officers.More than 5,000 junior officers died in Vietnam; all of them had volunteered to lead men in battle. Based on meticulous and wide-ranging research, this book provides a much-needed serious treatment of these men--the only such study in print--shedding new light on the longest war in American history.
Is American Jewish support for Israel waning? As a mobilized diaspora, American Jews played a key role in the establishment and early survival of the modern state of Israel.They created a centralized ...framework to raise funds, and a powerful, consensus-oriented political lobby to promote strong U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic support. But now, as federation fundraising declines and sharp differences over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process divide the community, many fear that American Jews are distancing themselves from Israel. InThe New American Zionism, Theodore Sasson argues that at the core, we are fundamentally misunderstanding the new relationship between American Jews and Israel. Sasson shows that we are in the midst of a shift from a mobilization approach, which first emerged with the new state and focused on supporting Israel through big, centralized organizations, to an engagement approach marked by direct and personal relations with the Jewish state as growing numbers of American Jews travel to Israel, consume Israeli news and culture, and connect with their Israeli peers via cyberspace and through formal exchange programs. American Jews have not abandoned their support for Israel, Sasson contends, but they now focus their philanthropy and lobbying in line with their own political viewpoints for the region and they reach out directly to players in Israel, rather than going through centralized institutions. As a result, American Jews may find Israel more personally meaningful than ever before. Yet, at the same time, their ability to impact policy will diminish as they no longer speak with a unified voice. Theodore Sassonis Professor of International Studies at Middlebury College and Senior Research Scientist at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. He is also Visiting Research Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University and a consultant to the Mandel Foundation.
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Expresstakes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the ...United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso's chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed-not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang's and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe.Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese,From Canton Restaurant to Panda Expressrepresents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.
Andrea Wiley contrasts the practices of the world's leading milk producers, India and the United States. In both countries, milk is considered to have special qualities. Drawing on ethnographic and ...scientific studies, popular media, and government reports, she shows that the cultural significance of milk goes well beyond its nutritive value.
If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don't we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits-Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire-Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex ...explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism. How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil's role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life-the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil's celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction. Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.
The struggle to pay for college is a defining feature of middle-class life in America. Caitlin Zaloom takes readers into homes of families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of ...student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed our most sacred relationships. She describes the profound moral conflicts for parents as they try to honor what they see as their highest parental duty--providing their children with opportunity--and shows how parents and students alike are forced to gamble on an investment that might not pay off. Superbly written and unflinchingly honest, "Indebted" breaks through the culture of silence surrounding the student debt crisis, exposing the unspoken costs of sending our kids to college.
In American political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historical and mythical figures. InThe Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler and Ed White examine the Founders as imaginative ...fictions, characters in the specifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elements clustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founders took shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race, and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase and the Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deep anxieties about the United States as a slave nation.Drexler and White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the time is the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in the literature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, his machinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treason trial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionary America to suggest that the figure of Burr was fundamentally a displaced fantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how the historical and literary fictions of the nation's founding served to repress the larger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of that repression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics, tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculate that this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap in U.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.
Coming of age in America Waters, Mary C; Carr, Patrick J; Kefalas, Maria J ...
2011., 20110821, 2011, 2011-09-20, 20110101
eBook
What is it like to become an adult in twenty-first-century America? This book takes us to four very different places—New York City, San Diego, rural Iowa, and Saint Paul, Minnesota—to explore the ...dramatic shifts in coming-of-age experiences across the country. Drawing from in-depth interviews with people in their twenties and early thirties, it probes experiences and decisions surrounding education, work, marriage, parenthood, and housing. The first study to systematically explore this phenomenon from a qualitative perspective, Coming of Age in America offers a clear view of how traditional patterns and expectations are changing, of the range of forces that are shaping these changes, and of how young people themselves view their lives.
Almost since the beginning of the republic, America's rigorous separation of powers among Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches has been umpired by the federal judiciary. It may seem ...surprising, then, that many otherwise ordinary cases are not decided in court even when they include allegations that the President, or Congress, has violated a law or the Constitution itself. Most of these orphan cases are shunned by the judiciary simply because they have foreign policy aspects. In refusing to address the issues involved, judges indicate that judicial review, like politics, should stop at the water's edge--and foreign policy managers find it convenient to agree! Thomas Franck, however, maintains that when courts invoke the "political question" doctrine to justify such reticence, they evade a constitutional duty. In his view, whether the government has acted constitutionally in sending men and women to die in foreign battles is just as appropriate an issue for a court to decide as whether property has been taken without due process. In this revisionist work, Franck proposes ways to subject the conduct of foreign policy to the rule of law without compromising either judicial integrity or the national interest. By examining the historical origins of the separation of powers in the American constitutional tradition, with comparative reference to the practices of judiciaries in other federal systems, he broadens and enriches discussions of an important national issue that has particular significance for critical debate about the "imperial presidency."
