Critical intersections in popular culture

Is it possible for culture to be anything other than diverse? As with 'hybridity', a term so much in vogue in contemporary social science, 'cultural diversity' seems mildly tautological. Applied either to communities of people or individual identities, 'hybrldiry' assumes a pre-existing purity which, certainly in western countries, seems fanciful. Likewise, 'cultural diversity' gestures towards or, perhaps more accurately, away from communities of people which, presumably, are culturally monolithic. But could such a group of people ever exist? Of course, it all depends on how you define 'culture' and, as COmmentators such as Williams (1958 & 1981) and Bagleton (2000) have shown, this is far from a straightforward matter, particularly in a historical moment where 'culture' can mean a way of life (as in 'cafe culture'), a work of art (as in 'high culture') or an episode of The Simpsons (as in 'popular culture'). Perhaps one way of bringing these various meanings together is to think in terms of the things people do. That is, culture is a matter of social practice. In the case of The Sirnpsons, then, we might say that its cultural significance derives from the socially located ways in which the program is made, watched, advertised, consumed, and talked about. In this sense, it is hard to imagine any community of people (as opposed to robots!) not 'doing' their lives in diverse ways. Indeed, are we not told from the moment of our births that we are each 'special' 'individuals', and that it is this particularity which makes us human?

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

The intersection of classes, cultures, and ethnic identities occur in public spaces (Robbins, 1993). Schools are public spaces that foster social solidarity, group identification, and community (Carlson & Apple, 1998). Depending upon the culture and climate of schools, these public spaces may also produce alienation for some students (Delpit, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1997). Some schools are, in fact, sites of ongoing conflict and struggle for control (Gause, 2009; Weis, 1988). Public school administrators and teachers who seek to transform schools must operate from a position of understanding how critical pedagogy forces educators to critique the fundamental issues of power and its relationship to the greater societal forces that affect schools (Weis, 1988). Teaching and learning are a part of real life, and real life includes politics and people (Freire, 1970). Within the construct of real life is scripted and unscripted reality. This is the generation of The Millenials. They are the benefactors of the by-products of technology and science. This is the first generation to grow up in the digital age and with popular culture as the “background noise” of their very existence (Gause 2005b). There were many events of the last decade that caused this nation great pain; however, the economic crisis and the election of a man whose mother was a White academician from Kansas and whose father was a Kenyan reminded us as human beings to always remain hopeful. The United States of America continues to be a special jewel in the eyes of our global citizens because of the very historic moments that exist in our young history. On January 20, 2009, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and White mother from Kansas, was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. The first time ever in the history of this land, a self-identified African American with a diverse background is the leader of this nation. The first 18 months of his presidency have been mired in double-digit unemployment, failed public policy, and national political unrest. The development of ultra-conservative grassroots movements like the Tea Party (Taxes Enough Already) have utilized the sting of racism and religious fundamentalism to further divide this nation into a binary construct—White religious conservative patriots versus “the other.”

Data becomes something of a mirror in which people see themselves reflected. (Sorapure 270)In a 2014 essay for The New Yorker, the humourist David Sedaris recounts an obsession spurred by the purchase of a Fitbit, a wearable activity-tracker that sends a celebratory “tingle” to his wrist every 10, 000 steps. He starts “stepping out” modestly but is soon working hard, steadily improving on the manufacturer’s recommended baseline. “But why?” asks Sedaris’ partner Hugh: “Why isn’t twelve thousand enough?” “Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit thinks I can do better” (n.p.).The record of daily, incidental activity that the Fitbit collects and visualises is important to Sedaris as a record of his (increasing) bodily fitness but it is also evidence in another way, a testament to virtue and a correlate of self-improvement: “The tingle feels so good,” Sedaris says, “not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment” (n.p.). Improvement is presented as both traceable and quantifiable; data and self are inextricably, though also ironically, linked. With his Fitbit, Sedaris accesses new and precise degrees of bodily information and he connects himself to a visible community of wearers. At first, Sedaris is smug and optimistic; by the time he begins “rambling” compulsively, however, and achieving his “first sixty-thousand-step day,” he has also had an epiphany: “I staggered home with my flashlight knowing that I’d advance to sixty-five thousand, and that there will be no end to it until my feet snap off at the ankles. Then it’ll just be my jagged bones stabbing into the soft ground” (n.p.). When the device finally “dies,” Sedaris experiences an immediate feeling of freedom; within five hours he has “ordered a replacement, express delivery” (n.p.).In their book Self-Tracking, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus note that both digital technology and a turn to biomedicalisation in the broader culture have amplified the capacity and reach of quantification practices in everyday life. Wearable activity trackers, of which the Fitbit is arguably the most iconic, offer individuals the ability to track minute or previously imperceptible permutations of bodily sensation within an everyday and non-medical context. It is a technological capacity, however, thoroughly embedded in a mobilising rhetoric of “health,” a term which itself has “become a loaded word, not merely a description of a bodily state but also a euphemism for what the speaker believes is desirable” (Neff and Nafus 19). The Fitbit measures movement, but it also signals something about the wearer’s identity that is framed, in the device’s marketing at least, in positive and desirable terms as an indication of character, as a highly desirable aspect of self.In a recent discussion of new forms of online life writing, Madeline Sorapure argues that acts of interpretation and representation in relation to biometric data are “something very similar to autobiographical practice. As in autobiography, subject and object, measurer and measured, are collapsed” (270). In its capacity to track and document over time and its affective role in forming a particular experience of self, the Fitbit bears a formal resemblance to autobiographical practice and specifically to modes of serial self-representation like diaries, journals, or almanacs. The discursive context is crucial here too. Early self-trackers use the pre-formatted almanac diary or calendar to better organise their time and to account for expenditure or gain. The pocket calendar was an innovation that had mass-market appeal and its rapid circulation in the early twentieth century directly shaped diary and account-keeping habits amongst historical populations, and to this day (McCarthy). Such forms are not simply passive repositories but bear cultural ideology. As popular templates for practices of accounting, self-documentation, and affecting, pocket calendars shape what content an individual across their individual day or week is coaxed to attend to or record, and effects what might then be relegated “marginal” or less consequential in relation.How do the technological affordances of the Fitbit similarly coax and shape self-knowledge or ideas of value and worth in relation to personal experience? What kinds of formal and discursive and resonance might there be drawn between wearable personal devices like the Fitbit and historical forms of tracking self-experience, like the diary? Is a Fitbit a diary? In this discussion, I consider pre-formatted diaries, like the almanac or pocket calendar, as discursive and technological precursors or adjuncts to wearable personal trackers like the Fitbit and I explore some assertions around the kinds of subject that digital forms and modes of self-tracking and personal data might then seem to coax or imagine.Tracking SelvesSelf-tracking is a human activity, one far more interesting than the gadgets that have made it easier and far more widespread. (Neff and Nafus 2)In 1726, at the age of 20, the inventor and polymath Benjamin Franklin recorded in his journal the inception of a plan to improve his character. In a chart created to track goals of virtue and progress in character, “black marks” are literal and symbolic, denoting when he has failed to live up to his expectations—two black marks represent a particularly bad effort (Rettberg 438). At age 79, Franklin was still tracking his progress when he wrote about the project in his Autobiography:It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. (89)Franklin’s desire to document and chronicle the self-conscious development of his character drives his interest in the form. He was as an almanac devotee and an innovative publisher of the form, which gained immense popularity at this time. Franklin added blank pages to the almanacs he helped produce in the mid eighteenth century and this addition expanded the possibilities for the kinds of data that might be recorded, particularly personal and anecdotal material. The innovation also earned the publishers a good deal more money (McCarthy 49). The mass production of printed almanacs thus had a profound effect on how individuals engaged in various kinds of daily and temporal and social regulation and documentation, including of the self:At the same time as it kept readers aware of the outside world, the almanac could also direct them to the state of their own being. Almanacs were all about regulation, inside and out. Almanacs displayed a regulated universe governed by the laws of planetary motion, by the church calendar, by the zodiac. It seemed natural, then, that some readers might turn to an almanac to regulate themselves. What better way to do that than in a text that already possessed its own system? All one had to do was insert one’s own data in that printed form, like connecting the dots. (McCarthy 53)Mass-market forms that engender habits of accounting are also cultural templates: pre-formatted journals are systems for private documentation that reflect broader cultural and social ideologies. Rebecca Connor observes that historical gender assumptions in relation to time “well-spent” are frequently visible in eighteenth-century mass-market journals explicitly aimed at women, which tended to allocate more space for “social” engagements versus, for example, financial accounting (18).In the twenty-first century, technologies like the Fitbit promise access to data in relation to personal experience but they also reveal dominant cultural and social attitudes to bodies and selves. Deborah Lupton argues that self-tracking as a phenomenon is essentially connected to specific ideological imperatives: “Underlying many accounts of self-tracking is a barely hidden discourse of morality, which takes the form of championing those who take action to improve themselves” (74). Within these influential discourses, acts of self-tracking, no less than Franklin’s virtue chart, acquire significance as moral activities and as the outward sign of good character.Neither self-tracking nor the ideology of virtue that underwrites it are new phenomena. In their cultural study of weight measurement devices, Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingl, and Tero Karpii have explored how both weight scales and wearable devices “emphasize self-knowledge and control through external measurements” (479). Similarly, Lupton has noted that, the “metrics” generated by personal self-tracking devices are “invested with significance” because “data visualisation” is “viewed as more credible and accurate by participants than the ‘subjective’ assessments of their bodily sensations” ("Personal Data" 345).In various historical cultures, objectivity about one’s self is seen as a desire (if not a fact) in relation to conscious self-examination; externalisation, through written or oral confession, is both a virtue and a discipline. While diary writing is, particularly in popular culture, often derided as an overly subjective and narcissistic mode, the diary is also framed within contexts of therapy, or spiritual development, as a possible methodology for self-improvement. For Puritans, though, the act was also understood to entail risks; recording one’s thoughts into a written journal could enable the individual to see patterns or faults in everyday behaviour, and so to identify and rectify habits of mind holding back personal spiritual development. In the twentieth century, “how-to write a diary” self-help guidebooks remediate the discourse of self-knowledge as self-improvement, and promised to refine the method, advising adherents on the kinds of writing practices that might best circumvent problems of individual bias or subjectivity (a claim of an ever-more objective methodology that reverberates to the current moment). Invariably, the more “unconscious”

Women (Re)Writing Milton

This exploratory article relies upon a historical-interpretive approach to understanding the relationship between legal narrative and popular consciousness in particular historical moments, focusing especially on “troubled times,” in which the legitimacy of a hegemonic worldview embodied in law comes under challenge from a newly ascendant ideology in the popular domain. To discern the nature of that relationship and its implications, I offer a three-pronged analysis, drawing on two original data sets. Initially, each data set is analyzed individually to elaborate the nature of, and changes in, (1) representations of homosexuals circulating in popular culture, and (2) constructions of homosexuals in defendants' narratives in “homosexual advance” homicide cases between 1946 and 2003. Findings from these two analyses are thereafter combined to explore the relationship between the two constructions of homosexuals across that time period. In combination, these three analyses provide empirical evidence that, rather than mirroring changes in popular discourse about homosexuality, the changes revealed in the defense narratives actually opposed them. I use these findings to argue that, in what Swidler (1986) has called “unsettled times,” ideological pluralism is pronounced and may be discerned in the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationships that exist within and between legal narrative and popular discourse.

<i>Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space and Sound in American Cultural History</i>, by Christopher J. Smith

Reviewed by: The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson by Mark R. Cheathem Jacob T. Wood (bio) The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson. By Mark R. Cheathem. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 248. $64.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $14.72 ebook) In a historical moment where presidencies and politics are defined as much by Saturday Night Live and Twitter as they are from bills in Congress, one could be forgiven in assuming that the intersection of politics, entertainment, and popular culture is a new phenomenon. However, Mark Cheathem, current editor of the Martin Van Buren Papers and biographer of Andrew Jackson and family, presents the [End Page 504] early republic as a period where “entertainment, things such as music, public events, and cartoons, held important political meaning” for Americans (pp. 2–3). Cheathem focuses The Coming of Democracy on the five presidential elections that occurred between the controversial election of 1824 to the apotheosis of cultural politics in the election of 1840. Through each election, Cheathem covers how the confluence of informal entertainment and politics facilitated the rise of Jacksonian democracy through the creation of partisan clubs, political media such as cartoons and music, and appeals to women. He admits these factors all existed prior to the election of 1824 but argues that it was the period between 1824 and 1840 where they became far more widespread and accessible to Americans at large (p. 9). The Coming of Democracy synthesizes previous historical works to contribute to the field a succinct précis of Jacksonian politics. He draws upon the most recent scholarship of the past twenty years, including expanding upon his previous books on Jackson, Van Buren, and the rise of the Democratic Party. A credit to Cheathem’s research is the numerous political cartoons and excerpts from contemporary songs poking fun at the leading men and issues of the antebellum period. His coverage of the use and spread of print culture notably during the 1836 election portrays a United States where the average American could see their presidential candidates before them in cartoons, read about those candidates and their stances in new biographies and newspapers, and celebrate their impending victory with clubs and songs and Liberty Balls rolling through the streets. Cheathem also demonstrates the prominent role previously excluded women played in influencing the political process, especially for Whig candidates. The democratic impulse extended beyond discussions of policy; it entered the realms of popular culture, pushing 80 percent of eligible voters to participate in 1840 (p. 175). The key year for both the coming of democracy in the abstract and The Coming of Democracy in the literal sense was 1840. Perhaps the greatest strengths of this work, its extensive chronology and readable page length, also act as its major drawback. Friends [End Page 505] of Tippecanoe rejoice with the Whig triumph in 1840 as Harrison and allies outmaneuver Van Buren and the Democrats through their use of cultural politics; yet The Coming of Democracy could elaborate further as to why the Democrats in 1836 and 1840 utterly failed to take advantage of an arena that seemed perfectly suited to them following Jackson’s successes. After successfully electing Jackson twice along with Van Buren, the work can explain more of the rationale or circumstances that prevented Democrats from fully embracing music, lithographs, or women’s participation in Van Buren’s campaigns (pp. 108, 162, 168). Despite cutting off his study at the election of 1840, Cheathem’s work demonstrates a breadth of subject matter that would benefit upper level history majors and early graduate students in understanding the changes that occurred in how Americans participated in their presidential politics. By consolidating the latest scholarly works on the intersection of three cultures—political, print, and material—Cheathem offers readers an introduction into the world of Jacksonian politics that future scholars can expand upon. Jacob T. Wood JACOB T. WOOD is a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. He is currently researching the role of fluid political boundaries in the partisan debates of the election of 1844. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Goblin Modernism:Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic James Gifford (bio) The longstanding conflict between Marxism and anarchism as scholarly methodologies shapes how we read the modernist canon in modernist studies and in particular the new modernist studies. More importantly, it has just as strongly shaped the formation of that canon itself. What we conceive as belonging under the designation of modernist and understand as a manifestation of the conditions of modernity is itself pliably configured by the critical paradigms on which we rely and the inherited legacies of their development. This means that we are also shaped by the critical scotoma or blind spot each methodology demands. But this is not a new idea in the new modernist studies, and as much as it is metacritical, it is also simply a rephrasing of Susan Stanford Friedman's sense of definitional excursions and the purposes that differing definitions serve: these purposes being perhaps of greater interest than the definitions themselves.1 In the new modernist studies, the prevalence of Marxist methodologies has made working class popular culture, film noir, science fiction, and both hardboiled pulp and detective fiction visible and vital. They are forms particularly conducive to Marxist analyses, perhaps best evidenced through Fredric Jameson's work across them all in connection with his writings on modernism.2 The symptomatic critical scotoma that accompanies this methodology, however, covers and blinds modernist studies to the deep entanglements between anarchism, modernism, and the apparent anathema to Marxism: fantasy. Even as magic and the occult have become normalized elements of modernist studies [End Page 551] that are recognized as essential components of the print cultures in which modernist little magazines flourished, the overlaps among modernism and magical fantasy have been eclipsed by Jameson and by the ur-critic of science fiction Darko Suvin's argument that fantasy is "socio-pathological" when set in comparison to its cousin in genre pulp: science fiction.3 Fantasy's "pathology" is supposedly even more visible in relief against both genres' ego ideal: modernist literature.4 Moreover, it is socio-pathological in the same way as Jameson and Suvin see anarchism through their critical lens. The problem goes beyond merely recognizing that the same moment of the late modernists also saw the emergence of hobbits and the New Apocalypse, or that the reactionary nostalgia in reviving Grail romances shapes the literary events of 1922 in a vision of resurgent Romance and Arthuriana widespread in popular Romances of the same time, both playing to imperial nostalgia and ideological certainties of a passing (or passed) historical moment. The problem is larger, more enchanting, and more unruly than that. Innovative modernist writers such as John Cowper Powys and Hope Mirrlees transitioned seamlessly to writing fantasy fiction, and there is a long thread of anarchist thought embedded in the genre, as if these were not really transitions after all but merely continuations in another form.5 What I call "goblin modernism" comes from this overlap and provides a powerful corrective through direct action to the critical habits generated by the chummy camaraderie of the new modernist studies, science fiction studies, and Marxist studies (despite how productive their contiguity has been and continues to be). My term deliberately blurs Marx's specter or hobgoblin from the opening of The Communist Manifesto with a magical spell and the notion of fantasy.6 Modernist writers were doing a great deal in genre writing, as has been long recognized, and if we have the modernist middlebrow in our critical field, we also have the lowbrow pulp, and likewise if we have a modernist historicization of the class struggle we also find the role of anarchism in modernist poetics runs deep.7 More to the point, this pulp has every potential to be radical, disruptive, and self-reflexive for its historical moment if we can only get past the tribalism of the critical body built up around it and that creates a blind spot occluding our view.8 The crux of my argument is that the development of the new modernist studies, and in particular the concept of late modernism within it, is remarkably congruent with the development of fantasy studies, and in particular the concept of...

Today, there is an extensive body of work on deception and its detection. This chapter primarily focuses on theoretical ideas about emotional aspects of deception. A popular notion is that liars fail to suppress emotions associated with deception, such as guilt, fear, and anxiety (or other hidden emotions). This so-called leakage hypothesis has been (and is) highly influential in media, popular culture, and law enforcement. The chapter offers a critical discussion of the leakage hypothesis, including its rationale and empirical support. We find the empirical support for the leakage hypothesis severely lacking, and we are critical of its theoretical conceptualization. We conclude that although the leakage hypothesis lacks scientific support, it is an interesting phenomenon in itself. That is, it may be worth studying why the notion of emotional leakage is so influential in both scientific research and popular culture.

This chapter provides a review of research in sport, leisure, tourism and popular culture that discusses whiteness. This review probably needs a book of its own to be able to discuss the breadth of literature in any critical depth — so instead of a comprehensive literature review, this chapter will focus only on some emblematic example of the kinds of research that has been done across the broad subject field of leisure studies relevant to the aims of this book. The chapter is arranged into two sections. The first will be a critical discussion of research across the broad remit of leisure studies that explicitly engages with whiteness. Specific research examples from sport, leisure, tourism and popular culture are considered in this section in more detail. The second section of the chapter will critically analyse research from leisure studies that has a focus on blackness, but where whiteness is implied or invoked without any consistent attempt to problematize the concept. I will argue in this chapter that leisure studies, while providing a strong set of research examples that demonstrate the whiteness of leisure, is yet to provide a coherent account of whiteness and leisure.KeywordsPopular CultureRacial IdentityWhite PeopleMinority Ethnic GroupCritical Race TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

&lt;p&gt;During World War Two the peaceful “occupation” of the Samoa Islands by US Forces combined with existing colonial conditions to transform the lives of Samoans in important yet also subtle ways. Drawing on thirty two oral history interviews and the papers of the colonial administrations this thesis examines the wartime lives of Samoan women. Their accounts of their experiences reveal how they understood the war at the time and after years of life experience. Using approaches from social history and women’s history this thesis illustrates women’s agency in finding ways to manage the new social contexts and situations created by the war. The central argument of this thesis is that it was the ordinary business of negotiating daily life during the war that engaged and normalised social changes. These mundane everyday acts were significant historical moments that wove new and unique motifs into the tapestry of Samoan women’s history. The war brought to Samoa a multitude of American servicemen who saw Samoa through a ‘romantic’ lens as an arcadia of unrestrained social mores. In contrast, through this research Samoan women reveal their wartime experiences in their own words. The women’s narratives indicate that the war interrupted lives in many ways causing them to rethink their roles in response to the changes. The four areas of Samoan women’s lives that this thesis examines are their roles in their families and communities, their involvement with the churches, their engagement with wartime popular culture and lastly their wartime sexual encounters. The discussion opens with a portrait of Samoan society during the 1920s and 1930s, depicting the social and political forces that shaped women’s lives and influenced their understandings of their wartime experiences. This discussion highlights how colonial entanglements had a bearing on the different trajectories that women’s lives took during the war. The thesis then turns to explore the arrival of the war, examining the women’s initial experiences and reactions with a particular focus on what they learnt from their experiences and how they adapted to change in the context of their communities and families. The study finds that social transformation was a response to the war’s disruption of physical and cultural space and the critical structures and ideologies that are central to Samoans’ way of life. The second part of this enquiry examines how wartime circumstances affected Samoan women’s sometimes tense relations with the Christian churches. The churches occupied a central place in Samoan society as a provider of both spiritual nurture and secular education for women during the war years, so they deserve specific attention. Wartime conditions created opportunities that expanded and rejuvenated the scope of Samoan women’s agency which had been marginalised and narrowed by Christian influence before the war. At the same time, the war heightened the pre-war tensions between Samoan women’s agency and the power of the churches. Despite the clergy’s reluctance, the churches provided spaces in which American troops socialised with the Samoan population, creating social situations that were difficult to control. The third area analyses Samoan women’s engagement with wartime popular culture and how the consumption of introduced material culture galvanised their autonomy and enabled them to tailor social transformation to suit their personal perceptions. Wartime popular culture in its many forms contributed to the rapid absorption of new ideas and the adaptation of cultural practices. Women’s engagement with this popular culture resulted in ‘on the ground changes’ that stimulated social transformation and which should be appreciated as significant historical moments in their own right. The fourth area of discussion investigates Samoan women’s wartime sexual encounters. The perception that Samoan women’s sexual encounters with American servicemen were characterised by an unrestrained morality on their part ignores other factors that shaped these encounters, including violence and their own bodily knowledge and preparedness. This study shows that Samoan women had a variety of sexual encounters during the war and their narratives speak volumes about the pains of such life-changing moments. There was no single or archetypal wartime experience. The thirty two interviewees experienced the war in different parts of the Samoa islands and their social and political alignment has influenced their perceptions and understanding of their wartime lives. The social transformation brought by the war involved considered responses from the women who sought to balance personal and family interests and Samoan values. Exploring the women’s wartime lives reveals their resilience and their ability to overcome difficulties and effect change for the better of their community.&lt;/p&gt;

Reviewed by: A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memoryby Joseph F. Stoltz Thomas A. Chambers A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory. By Joseph F. Stoltz III. Johns Hopkins Books on the War of 1812. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 176. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2302-9.) The War of 1812 bicentennial recently passed with little notice from the American public and paltry official nationwide commemoration. Even the battle of New Orleans, which Joseph F. Stoltz III identifies as the most recognizable War of 1812 event, garnered relatively little attention in 2015 beyond a battle reenactment, academic symposiums, and a museum exhibit. This book seeks to recover past commemorations of the event with the overall thesis that "Each generation of Americans made the history of the Battle of New Orleans their own" (p. xiii). Print sources, institutional records, site histories, and popular culture demonstrate the changing meaning of the battle and its star, Andrew Jackson. Stoltz effectively traces the evolving memory of the battle. The chapters generally begin with a gracefully written vignette of a historical moment relevant to that chapter's time period. A synopsis of the chapter's content follows, and a concluding few paragraphs recap the chapter's content before a few transition sentences introduce the next chapter's theme. After a crisp recounting of the 1814–1815 Gulf of Mexico campaign and the January 8, 1815, battle, Stoltz delves into how various historical eras remembered the battle of New Orleans. In the immediate postwar period a flurry of print sources celebrated the battle as evidence of republican virtue and the ability of agrarian citizen-soldiers to repel a foreign invader. This ideology became personified in the commanding general, Andrew Jackson, and January 8 commemorations evolved into celebrations of Jackson and the Democratic Party. As the Civil War approached, the battle of New Orleans gained new relevance and was depicted as a distinctly southern victory, although many Democrats still invoked the battle and Jackson as symbols of national and party unity. When Union general Benjamin Butler added the inscription "The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved" to the pedestal of the equestrian Andrew Jackson statue in New Orleans, he literally rewrote the battle's history. In the decades that followed, fewer and fewer January 8 events were held, and the monument fell into disrepair. As the battle's centennial approached, women's heritage associations revived interest in a moment of national purpose and unity. The Daughters of 1812 helped preserve the Chalmette battlefield and erect a monument there, while the Ladies Hermitage Association cared for Andrew Jackson's plantation in Nashville, Tennessee. The varied successes of these two groups led the War Department to take over management of the battlefield site, while the Hermitage deemphasized the battle in favor of commemorating Jackson. The most innovative and intriguing chapters focus on twentieth-century remembrances, especially in popular culture, such as Cecil B. DeMille's film [End Page 979] The Buccaneer(1938, 1958) and Johnny Horton's 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans." Here Stoltz keenly reveals the changing cultural uses of the battle and the nation's increased comfort with a more complex history of the battle. Also excellent are sections on the lack of African American participation in commemorations and the removal of the African American Fazendeville neighborhood to preserve the battlefield. By 2015 the battle served as a local economic development vehicle to boost heritage tourism. The book's writing and organization are consistent and effective. The subtitle of chapter 3, "The Battle of New Orleans in the Age of Jefferson," seems oddly mismatched in this chapter that discusses historical memory during the 1820s and 1830s. "The Age of Jackson" might have been more accurate. Greater attention to theoretical works on memory might have strengthened the argument, and manuscript sources of visitor responses to the battlefield are lacking. These are quibbles, though. Stoltz's book is a comprehensive study of the battle of New Orleans's presence in the American historical imagination and will serve as the definitive book on the topic. Thomas A. Chambers Niagara University Copyright © 2018...

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi