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Elsewhere, U.S.A.
by Dalton ConleyOver the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. InElsewhere, U. S. A. , acclaimed sociologist Dalton Conley connects our day-to-day experiences with occasionally overlooked sociological changes, from women's increasing participation in the labor force to rising economic inequality among successful professionals. In doing so, he provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality.
Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event
by Trinh T. Minh-haWinner of the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) World-renowned filmmaker and feminist, postcolonial thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha is one of the most powerful and articulate voices in both independent filmmaking and cultural politics. Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders--as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee—in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which "every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries," Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this "epoch of global fear." Elsewhere, Within Here is essential reading for those interested in contemporary feminist thought and postcolonial studies.
Elsie and Mairi Go to War
by Diane AtkinsonThe incredible story of two courageous and spirited women who were the only female participants to serve on the Western Front during World War I When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic. Little did they know that theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of World War I. In 1914, they roared off into the thick of things in Belgium, driving ambulances to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy bombardment for months at a time. As news of their courage and expertise spread, the "Angels of Pervyse" became celebrities, but returning home and adjusting to peacetime life was to prove more challenging than even the war itself.
Eltern-Guide Digitalkultur: Alternativen zu Smartphone, Spielkonsole & Co.
by Kathrin HabermannDieser Ratgeber hilft Eltern, mit der allgegenwärtigen Präsenz von Smartphone, Tablet und Co. gelassen und kreativ umzugehen. Erfahren Sie, weshalb Smartphones gerade Ihre Kinder magisch anziehen, wie wichtig Langeweile für die Entwicklung Ihres Kindes ist und welche Auswirkungen der Medienkonsum auf die Gehirnentwicklung hat. Dieses Buch zeigt Ihnen zahlreiche spannende und gleichzeitig entwicklungsfördernde Alternativen zum Medienkonsum, die Sie täglich anbieten können. Praxistipps für herausfordernde Situationen wie der Restaurantbesuch, lange Autofahrten oder die fünfstündige Bahnfahrt: Mit dieser Lektüre sind Sie optimal gerüstet.Plus:• Wissenschaftliche Hintergründe und aktuelle Studien übersichtlich und verständlich aufbereitet• Fragebögen und Checklisten zur Ermittlung des Medienkonsums• Material- und Spiellisten, Mediennutzungsvertrag u.v.m. zum Download und als Kopiervorlage
Elternbeteiligung und Gewaltprävention in kommunalen Bildungs- und Erziehungslandschaften
by Anne Grossart Heinz Müller Liv-Berit Koch Victoria Schwenzer Hans-Josef Lembeck Sabine Behn Tilman Lutz Vera LanzenDie gesellschaftspolitische Bedeutung gelingender Bildungs-, Betreuungs- und Erziehungsprozesse verweist auf eine der zentralen Herausforderungen für Kommunen: Die Weiterentwicklung ihrer Bildungs- und Erziehungslandschaften. Wie wird das Zusammenspiel von Jugendhilfe, Schule, jungen Menschen und insbesondere Eltern gefördert? Wie wird das Thema Gewaltprävention systemübergreifend zum integralen Bestandteil der Weiterentwicklung und wie gelingt die Kooperation von allen professionellen und nicht professionellen Akteuren, insbesondere der Eltern? Die AutorInnen fokussieren Elternbeteiligung und Gewaltprävention im Rahmen eines Praxisforschungsprojekts als Schlüssel- und Querschnittsthemen für die Gestaltung von Bildungs- und Erziehungslandschaften. Sie stellen "Gute Praxis" vor, insbesondere Modelle und Instrumente, die in Bildungs- und Erziehungslandschaften eingesetzt werden können.
Elusive Adulthoods: The Anthropology of New Maturities
by Deborah Durham Jacqueline SolwayOver the past decade, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have rung out around the world. Young people across the globe, burdened with debt and unsatisfactory job prospects, are struggling to establish households, marry, and, perhaps most significantly, own up. For them, achievement of adulthood has become increasingly elusive. Elusive Adulthoods poses the question What is adulthood?s how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful life transition. Through diverse case studies, contributors explore a variety of means by which adulthood can be recognized, such as negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. Contributors also grapple with the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood rapid social change or reluctance to embrace the necessary subordination to job and family. In each case, changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experiences and understandings of what it means to reach adulthood as globalization dictates changes to traditional rites of passage.
Elusive Archives: Material Culture in Formation (Material Culture Perspectives)
by Julian Yates Wendy Bellion Julie L. McGee Torsten Cress Cindy Ott Laura E. Helton Jennifer Van Horn Kiersten Thamm Alexandra Ward Alexander Lawrence Ames Halina Adams Rosalie Hooper Sarah Wasserman Spencer Wigmore Catherine Morrissey Michelle Everidge Kaila T. Schedeen Lu Ann Cunzo Natalie Elizabeth Wright Oliver Scheiding J. Ritchie Garrison Jesse Kraft Michael J. Emmons Jessica Conrad Bernard L. HermanThe essays that comprise Elusive Archives raise a common question: how do we study material culture when the objects of study are transient, evanescent, dispersed or subjective? Such things resist the taxonomic protocols that institutions, such as museums and archives, rely on to channel their acquisitions into meaningful collections. What holds these disparate things together here are the questions authors ask of them. Each essay creates by means of its method a provisional collection of things, an elusive archive. Scattered matter then becomes fixed within each author’s analytical framework rather than within the walls of an archive’s reading room or in cases along a museum corridor. This book follows the ways in which objects may be identified, gathered, arranged, conceptualized and even displayed rather than by “discovering” artifacts in an archive and then asking how they came to be there. The authors approach material culture outside the traditional bounds of learning about the past. Their essays are varied not only in subject matter but also in narrative format and conceptual reach, making the volume accessible and easy to navigate for a quick reference or, if read straight through, build toward a new way to think about material culture.
Elusive Citizenship: Immigration, Asian Americans, and the Paradox of Civil Rights (Critical America #72)
by John S. ParkSince the late nineteenth century, federal and state rules governing immigration and naturalization have placed persons of Asian ancestry outside the boundaries of formal membership. A review of leading cases in American constitutional law regarding Asians would suggest that initially, Asian immigrants tended to evade exclusionary laws through deliberate misrepresentations of their identities or through extralegal means. Eventually, many of these immigrants and their descendants came to accept prevailing legal norms governing their citizenship in the United States. In many cases, this involved embracing notions of white supremacy. John S. W. Park argues that American rules governing citizenship and belonging remain fundamentally unjust, even though they suggest the triumph of a "civil rights" vision, where all citizens share the same basic rights. By continuing to privilege members over non-members in ways that are politically popular, these rules mask injustices that violate principles of fairness. Importantly, Elusive Citizenship also suggests that politically and socially, full membership in American society remains closely linked with participation in exclusionary practices that isolate racial minorities in America.
An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment)
by Karen E. RignallAn Elusive Common details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. Karen Rignall considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. Her book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage labor economy. An Elusive Common follows these diverse strategies ethnographically to show how land became a site for conflicts over community, political authority, and social hierarchy. Rignall makes the provocative argument that land enclosures can be an essential part of communal governance and the fight for autonomy against intrusive state power and historical inequalities.
Elusive Consumption
by Karin M. Ekström Helene BrembeckIn the context of rising consumerism and globalization, books on consumption are numerous. These tend to be firmly rooted in particular disciplines, however sociology, anthropology, business or cultural studies and as a result often present a blinkered view. Charged with the mission of unravelling what consumption means and how it operates, the worlds leading experts were flown to a secluded location in Sweden to 'battle it out'. This pioneering book represents the outcome. Ranging from the 'little black dress' to on-line communities, Elusive Consumption challenges our very understanding of consumerism. How successful is the advertising world in manipulating our buying patterns? Does the global marketplace promote cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity? Is the West really more of a 'consumerist civilization' than other countries? Does the advertising of certain products influence a voters choice of political party? How are products associated and marketed to different genders? These controversial topics and many more are discussed. Covering virtually every aspect of the word 'consumerism', Elusive Consumption provides a state-of-the-art view of the highly commercialized society we inhabit today. Some might have it that consumers are unwitting pawns, completely lacking in agency. Others might argue that consumer choices are empowering and subtly shape production. Richard Wilk, Colin Campbell, John F. Sherry, Richard Elliott, Russell Belk, and Daniel Miller who offers the most persuasive argument in this battle royal?
Elusive Jannah
by Cawo M. AbdiAs a Somali working since high school in the United Arab Emirates, Osman considers himself "blessed" to be in a Muslim country, though citizenship, with the security it offers, remains elusive. For Ardo, smuggled out of Somalia to join her husband in South Africa, insecurities are of a more immediate, physical kind, and her economic prospects and legal status are more uncertain. Adam, in the United States--a destination often imagined as an earthly Eden, or jannah, by so many of his compatriots--now sees heaven in a return to Somalia.The stories of these three people are among the many that emerge from mass migration triggered by the political turmoil and civil war plaguing Somalia since 1988. And they are among the diverse collection presented in eloquent detail in Elusive Jannah, a remarkable portrait of the very different experiences of Somali migrants in the UAE, South Africa, and the United States. Somalis in the UAE, a relatively closed Muslim nation, are a minority within a large South Asian population of labor migrants. In South Africa, they are part of a highly racialized and segregated postapartheid society. In the United States they find themselves in a welfare state with its own racial, socioeconomic, and political tensions. A comparison of Somali settlements in these three locations clearly reveals the importance of immigration policies in the migrant experience.Cawo M. Abdi's nuanced analysis demonstrates that a full understanding of successful migration and integration must go beyond legal, economic, and physical security to encompass a sense of religious, cultural, and social belonging. Her timely book underscores the sociopolitical forces shaping the Somali diaspora, as well as the roles of the nation-state, the war on terror, and globalization in both constraining and enabling their search for citizenship and security.
Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature
by Christopher KrentzCharacters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship. Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight’s Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds. Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights. Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.
The Elusive Messiah: A Philosophical Overview Of The Quest For The Historical Jesus
by Raymond MartinWhat might the findings of researchers engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus mean to Christians? In posing this question and others, The Elusive Messiah opens a window for looking anew at the age old problem of faith vs. reason.To fully understand the implications of the historical search, Raymond Martin suggests we must first examine the inquiries of the individual scholars. In the book's first section, he provides an insightful overview into the major players who have written on the subject, among them E. P. Sanders, John Meier, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, J. D. Crossan, and Luke Timothy Johnson.In his second section, Martin discusses various Christian responses to the challenges presented by the historians' work. Martin goes on to argue philosophically that faith and reason are able to coexist alongside each other, and then suggests how this may be the key to Christianity's future.Through readily understandable language and examples, Martin poses basic questions, looks for the answers, and explains how these answers correspond to the overall problem. His accessible writing synthesizes complex academic arguments in ways that bring them down to earth, enabling Christians and other readers to understand what is being claimed and to test these claims for meaningfulness.
The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century (Routledge Revivals)
by William R. PolkThe Elusive Peace, first published in 1979, highlights the crucial developments in the Middle East during the twentieth century: the coming of nationalism, the struggle for independence, the effects of the Cold War and the four ‘hot wars’ in the Middle East. The numerous attempts to solve the conflicts, and the ultimate failure of such attempts, are discussed with particular reference to the war in Lebanon, and its relation to larger conflicts. As an American emissary during the Kennedy, Johnston and Nixon years, William Polk is unique in his ability to assess the key personalities and provide thorough analysis, considering Sadat and Begin, and the American policies of Dulles and Kissinger. This is a fascinating and inclusive study which provides essential background to the on-going turmoil in the Middle East.
The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy
by Karen EngleAround the world, indigenous peoples use international law to make claims for heritage, territory, and economic development. Karen Engle traces the history of these claims, considering the prevalence of particular legal frameworks and their costs and benefits for indigenous groups. Her vivid account highlights the dilemmas that accompany each legal strategy, as well as the persistent elusiveness of economic development for indigenous peoples. Focusing primarily on the Americas, Engle describes how cultural rights emerged over self-determination as the dominant framework for indigenous advocacy in the late twentieth century, bringing unfortunate, if unintended, consequences. Conceiving indigenous rights as cultural rights, Engle argues, has largely displaced or deferred many of the economic and political issues that initially motivated much indigenous advocacy. She contends that by asserting static, essentialized notions of indigenous culture, indigenous rights advocates have often made concessions that threaten to exclude many claimants, force others into norms of cultural cohesion, and limit indigenous economic, political, and territorial autonomy. Engle explores one use of the right to culture outside the context of indigenous rights, through a discussion of a 1993 Colombian law granting collective land title to certain Afro-descendant communities. Following the aspirations for and disappointments in this law, Engle cautions advocates for marginalized communities against learning the wrong lessons from the recent struggles of indigenous peoples at the international level.
Elusive Promises
by Simone Abram Gisa WeszkalnysPlanning in contemporary democratic states is often understood as a range of activities, from housing to urban design, regional development to economic planning. This volume sees planning differently-as the negotiation of possibilities that time offers space. It explores what kind of promise planning offers, how such a promise is made, and what happens to it through time. The authors, all leading anthropologists, examine the time and space, creativity and agency, authority and responsibility, and conflicting desires that plans attempt to control. They show how the many people involved with planning deal with the discrepancies between what is promised and what is done. The comparative essays offer insight into the expected and unexpected outcomes of planning (from visionary utopias to bureaucratic dystopia or something in-between), how the future is envisioned at the outset, and what actual work is done and how it affects people's lives.
The Elusive Quest for Equality: 150 Years of Chicano/Chicana Education (HER Reprint Series)
by Jose F. MorenoThe Elusive Quest for Equality documents both the plight and the struggle of Chicano communities over the past 150 years, using the guiding themes of segregation, Americanization, and resistance in the history of education for Chicanos/Chicanas. The history of the Chicano community's quest for educational equality is long and rich. Since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formalized the conquest of half of Mexico's territory into what is now the U.S. Southwest, Chicanos have fought to claim what was promised them in the Treaty—the enjoyment of all the rights of U.S. citizens. In terms of education, they certainly have never had equal access, opportunity, or resources, despite legal victories. In this volume, some of the leading scholars analyze why the quest for equality in education has remained so elusive. They do so by documenting both the plight and the struggle of Chicano communities over the past 150 years, using the guiding themes of the role of language, segregation, Americanization, and resistance in the history of education for Chicanos/Chicanas. "In the cover painting of this book, Manuel Hernandez Trujillo captures...the dualistic nature of the U.S. conquest of Northern Mexico, reflecting both the losses and opportunities represented in his camino de espinas (road of thorns). This tension between cynicism and optimism pervades the essays in this volume...something I see over and over again in discussions that focus on the significance of race in a democratic society. To what extent does the past determine our future, and to what degree do our own expectations of the future influence our interpretations of the past? It seems to me that these two interdependent questions continue to shape both our experience as Chicanos/Chicanas and our understanding of what it means to be Chicano/Chicana in the United States at the end of the twentieth century."Manuel N. Gómez, Vice Chancellor, Student Services, University of California, Irvine, from the Foreword
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William EasterlySince the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education, controlling population growth, and making aid loans as well as forgiving those loans on condition of reforms. None of these solutions has delivered as promised. The problem is not the failure of economics, William Easterly argues, but the failure to apply economic principles to practical policy work. In this book Easterly shows how these solutions all violate the basic principle of economics, that people--private individuals and businesses, government officials, even aid donors--respond to incentives. Easterly first discusses the importance of growth. He then analyzes the development solutions that have failed. Finally, he suggests alternative approaches to the problem. Written in an accessible, at times irreverent, style, Easterly's book combines modern growth theory with anecdotes from his fieldwork for the World Bank.
Elusive Refuge
by Laura MadokoroLaura Madokoro recovers the lost history of millions of displaced Chinese who fled the Communist Revolution and recounts humanitarian efforts to find homes for them outside China. Entrenched bigotry in predominantly white countries, the spread of human rights, Cold War geopolitics, and the Vietnam War shaped refugee policies that still hold sway.
Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War
by Laura MadokoroThe 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution is a subject of inexhaustible historical interest, but the plight of millions of Chinese who fled China during this tumultuous period has been largely forgotten. Elusive Refuge recovers the history of China’s twentieth-century refugees. Focusing on humanitarian efforts to find new homes for Chinese displaced by civil strife, Laura Madokoro points out a constellation of factors—entrenched bigotry in countries originally settled by white Europeans, the spread of human rights ideals, and the geopolitical pressures of the Cold War—which coalesced to shape domestic and international refugee policies that still hold sway today.Although the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were home to sizeable Asian communities, Chinese migrants were a perpetual target of legislation designed to exclude them. In the wake of the 1949 Revolution, government officials and the broader public of these countries questioned whether Chinese refugees were true victims of persecution or opportunistic economic migrants undeserving of entry. It fell to NGOs such as the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches to publicize the quandary of the vast community of Chinese who had become stranded in Hong Kong.These humanitarian organizations achieved some key victories in convincing Western governments to admit Chinese refugees. Anticommunist sentiment also played a role in easing restrictions. But only the plight of Southeast Asians fleeing the Vietnam War finally convinced the United States and other countries to adopt a policy of granting permanent residence to significant numbers of refugees from Asia.
The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity (Game Histories)
by Jon PetersonHow the early Dungeons & Dragons community grappled with the nature of role-playing games, theorizing a new game genre.When Dungeon & Dragons made its debut in the mid-1970s, followed shortly thereafter by other, similar tabletop games, it sparked a renaissance in game design and critical thinking about games. D&D is now popularly considered to be the first role-playing game. But in the original rules, the term "role-playing" is nowhere to be found; D&D was marketed as a war game. In The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson describes how players and scholars in the D&D community began to apply the term to D&D and similar games--and by doing so, established a new genre of games.
Elusive Unity: Factionalism and the Limits of Identity Politics in Yucatán, Mexico
by Fernando Armstrong-FumeroIn Elusive Unity, Armstrong-Fumero examines early twentieth-century peasant politics and twenty-first-century indigenous politics in the rural Oriente region of Yucatán. The rural inhabitants of this region have had some of their most important dealings with their nation’s government as self-identified “peasants” and “Maya.” Using ethnography, oral history, and archival research, Armstrong-Fumero shows how the same body of narrative tropes has defined the local experience of twentieth-century agrarianism and twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Through these recycled narratives, contemporary multicultural politics have also inherited some ambiguities that were built into its agrarian predecessor. Specifically, local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped by tensions between the vernacular language of identity and the intense factionalism that often defines the social organization of rural communities. This significant contribution will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and political scientists studying Latin America and the Maya.
Elusive Unity
by Fernando Armstrong-FumeroIn Elusive Unity, Armstrong-Fumero examines early twentieth-century peasant politics and twenty-first-century indigenous politics in the rural Oriente region of Yucatán.The rural inhabitants of this region have had some of their most important dealings with their nation's government as self-identified "peasants" and "Maya." Using ethnography, oral history, and archival research, Armstrong-Fumero shows how the same body of narrative tropes has defined the local experience of twentieth-century agrarianism and twenty-first-century multiculturalism. Through these recycled narratives, contemporary multicultural politics have also inherited some ambiguities that were built into its agrarian predecessor. Specifically, local experiences of peasant and indigenous politics are shaped by tensions between the vernacular language of identity and the intense factionalism that often defines the social organization of rural communities. This significant contribution will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, and political scientists studying Latin America and the Maya.
Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World)
by Edward Bartlett Rugemer Gary Kornblith Richard J. Blackett Carol LasserBefore the Civil War, Oberlin, Ohio, stood in the vanguard of the abolition and black freedom movements. The community, including co-founded Oberlin College, strove to end slavery and establish full equality for all. Yet, in the half-century after the Union victory, Oberlin’s resolute stand for racial justice eroded as race-based discrimination pressed down on its African American citizens. In Elusive Utopia, noted historians Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser tell the story of how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Oberlin residents, black and white, understood and acted upon their changing perceptions of race, ultimately resulting in the imposition of a color line.Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin's egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society.Drawing from newspapers, pamphlets, organizational records, memoirs, census materials and tax lists, Elusive Utopia traces the rise and fall of Oberlin's idealistic vision and commitment to racial equality in a pivotal era in American history.
Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend
by Gilbert B. Rodman'For a dead man, Elvis Presley is awfully noisy. His body may have failed him in 1977, but today his spirit, his image, and his myths do more than live on: they flourish, they thrive, they multiply.'Why is Elvis Presley so ubiquitous a presence in US culture? Why does he continue to enjoy a cultural prominence that would be the envy of the most heavily publicized living celebrities?In Elvis after Elvis Gil Rodman traces the myriad manifestations of The King in popular and not-so-popular culture. He asks why Elvis continues to defy our expectations of how dead stars are supposed to behave: Elvis not only refuses to go away, he keeps showing up in places where he seemingly doesn't belong.Rodman draws upon an extensive and eclectic body of Elvis 'sightings', from Elvis's appearances at the heart of the 1992 Presidential campaign to the debate over his worthiness as a subject for a postage stamp, and from Elvis's central role in furious debates about racism and the appropriation of African-American music to the world of Elvis impersonators and the importance of Graceland as a place of pilgrimage for Elvis fans and followers.Rodman shows how Elvis has become inseparable from many of the defining myths of US culture, enmeshed with the American dream and the very idea of the 'United States', caught up in debates about race, gender and sexuality and in the wars over what constitutes a national culture.