California Mennonites Froese, Brian
Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks,
2015, 2014, 2015-02-19
eBook
Odprti dostop
How did California Mennonites confront the challenges and promises of modernity?Books about Mennonites have centered primarily on the East Coast and the Midwest, where the majority of Mennonite ...communities in the United States are located. But these narratives neglect the unique history of the multitude of Mennonites living on the West Coast. In California Mennonites, Brian Froese relies on archival church records to examine the Mennonite experience in the Golden State, from the nineteenth-century migrants who came in search of sunshine and fertile soil to the traditionally agrarian community that struggled with issues of urbanization, race, gender, education, and labor in the twentieth century to the evangelically oriented, partially assimilated Mennonites of today.Froese places Mennonite experiences against a backdrop of major historical events, including World War II and Vietnam, and social issues, from labor disputes to the evolution of mental health care. California Mennonites include people who embrace a range of ideologies: many are historically rooted in the sixteenth-century Reformation ideals of the early Anabaptists (pacifism, congregationalism, discipleship); some embrace twentieth-century American evangelicalism (missions, Billy Graham); and others are committed to a type of social justice that involves forging practical ties to secular government programs while maintaining a quiet connection to religion. Through their experiences of religious diversity, changing demographics, and war, California Mennonites have wrestled with complicated questions of what it means to be American, Mennonite, and modern. This book—the first of its kind—will appeal to historians and religious studies scholars alike.
In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the ...early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love.Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of “Pacific Rim discourse" by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or “creaturely" sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.
Immigration has been a contested issue for decades. This distinctive volume of essays on Southern Californian immigration is inspired by Michael Burawoy’s call for academic consideration to be more ...open and accessible to people in what he calls “public sociology.” The essays in Scholars and Southern Californian Immigrants in Dialogue: New Conversations in Public Sociology bridge the gap between scholars and undocumented persons themselves in an interdisciplinary and vibrant dialogue. The conversations include sociologists, lawyers, and community and religious leaders, alongside first-hand stories of immigrant survival in hostile and exploitive environments. This volume serves as a model for genuine public engagement of the immigration battle.
Can philanthropy alleviate inequality? Do antipoverty programs work on the ground? In this eye-opening analysis, Erica Kohl-Arenas bores deeply into how these issues play out in California's Central ...Valley, which is one of the wealthiest agricultural production regions in the world and also home to the poorest people in the United States.Through the lens of a provocative set of case studies,The Self-Help Mythreveals how philanthropy maintains systems of inequality by attracting attention to the behavior of poor people while shifting the focus away from structural inequities and relationships of power that produce poverty. In Fresno County, for example, which has a $5.6 billion-plus agricultural industry, migrant farm workers depend heavily on food banks, religious organizations, and family networks to feed and clothe their families. Foundation professionals espouse well-intentioned, hopeful strategies to improve the lives of the poor. These strategies contain specific ideas-in philanthropy terminology, "theories of change"- that rely on traditional American ideals of individualism and hard work, such as self-help, civic participation, and mutual prosperity. But when used in partnership with well-defined limits around what foundations will and will not fund, these ideals become fuzzy concepts promoting professional and institutional behaviors that leave relationships of poverty and inequality untouched.
This volume of original essays by leading scholars is an innovative, thorough introduction to the history and culture of California. Includes 30 essays by leading scholars in the field Essays range ...widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history Essays with similar approaches are paired and grouped to work as individual pieces and as companions to each other throughout the text Produced in association with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West
In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less ...than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, determined to promote class equality.
InGendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of these three women who led the California branches of the Communist Party from its founding in 1919 to its near dissolution in 1992. Separately, each woman represents a generation of the membership and activism of the party. Collectively, Slutsky argues, their individual histories tell the story of one of the most infamous organizations this country has ever known and in a broader sense represent the story of all women who have devoted their lives to radicalism in America. Slutsky considers how gender politics, California's political climate, coalitions with other activist groups and local communities, and generational dynamics created a grassroots Communist movement distinct from the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Europe. An ambitious comparative study,Gendering Radicalismdemonstrates the continuity and changes of the party both within and among three generations of its female leaders' lives.
Foreword / William E. Simon, Jr. -- Introduction / Brian C. Anderson -- The politics and economics of decline -- The beholden state / Steven Malanga -- The big-spending, high-taxing, lousy-services ...paradigm / William Voegeli -- The golden state's war on itself / Joel Kotkin -- Cali to business. get out! / Steven Malanga -- The long stall / Wendell Cox -- The pension fund that ate California / Steven Malanga -- Flatten taxes! / Arthur B. Laffer -- The radical reform that California needs / Troy Senik -- The urban fiscal crisis -- Lost Angeles / Joel Kotkin -- How the road to bell was paved / William Voegeli -- Broken windows, broken city / Steven Greenhut -- Public order -- The reclamation of skid row / Heather Mac Donald -- The LAPD remade / John Buntin -- The sidewalks of San Francisco / Heather Mac Donald -- Of energy and environment -- A crude awakening / Tom Gray -- The water wars / Victor Davis Hanson -- Immigration dilemmas -- The rainbow coalition evaporates / Steven Malanga -- The demographic revolution / Heather Mac Donald -- Education -- The worst union in America / Troy Senik -- The bilingual ban that worked / Heather Mac Donald -- The union's occupation / Ben Boychuk -- Triggering school reform in California / Ben Boychuk -- Grading the teachers / Larry Sand -- UC two / Heather Mac Donald -- The culture -- The lost art of war / Andrew Klavan -- Radical graffiti chic / Heather Mac Donald -- Tom Wolfe's California / Michael Anton -- Keep hope alive -- The silicon lining / Guy Sorman -- California, here we stay / Victor Davis Hanson.
California in the 1930s Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers
2013., 20130302, 2013, 2013-04-23
eBook
Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his ...spirited introduction, "anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming." Describing the history, culture, and roadside attractions of the 1930s, the WPA Guide to California features some of the very best anonymous literature of its era, with writing by luminaries such as San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer-writer- hobo Harry Partch, and authors Tillie Olsen and Kenneth Patchen.
Just after the Civil War, two states prominently laid claim to being America's paradise destinations. Private companies, state agencies, and journalists all lent a hand in creating a seductive, ...expansionist imagery that promoted semitropical California and Florida and helped "sell" Americans on the idea of an attainable paradise within the United States.
In Tropic of Hopes, Henry Knight examines the promotion of California and Florida from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Great Depression, a period when both states were transformed from remote, sparsely populated locales into two of the most publicized and dreamed-about destinations in America. Using the discussion of climate, geography, race, and environment to link agricultural, tourist, and urban development in these regions, Knight provides a highly original and informative account.
It is now commonplace to say that the future happens first in California, and this book, the first biography of legendary governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, tells the story of the pivotal era when that ...idea became a reality. Set against the riveting historical landscape of the late fifties and sixties, the book offers astute insights into history as well a fascinating glimpse of those who charted its course-including Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and the Brown family dynasty. Ethan Rarick mines an impressive array of untapped sources-such as Pat Brown's diary and love letters to his wife-to tell the unforgettable story of a true mover-and-shaker within his fascinating and turbulent political arena.California Risingilluminates a singular moment in time with surprising intimacy. John Kennedy laughs with Pat Brown. Richard Nixon offers the governor a schemer's deal. Lyndon Johnson sweet-talks the governor on the phone and then ridicules him behind his back. And as context for the human drama, key events of the era unfold in gripping prose. There is Brown's struggle with the fate of Caryl Chessman, the convicted kidnapper who gained international attention by writing best-selling books on death row. There is the tale of intrigue and politics surrounding the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, and the violence and horror of the Watts Riots in 1965. Through the story of the life and times of Pat Brown, we witness an extraordinary period that changed the entire country's view of itself and its most famous state.
