[PDF] The American Scene eBook

Author : Henry James
Publisher :
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 34,35 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN :

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In New York Revisited, first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in 1906, Henry James describes turn-of-the-century New York in vivid detail. Although written in 1904-1905, when James returned to the U.S. after living abroad for more than 20 years, the essay is as pertinent today as it was 100 years ago. The text appears as it was originally published and is enhanced with period illustrations and photographs. Beautifully bound and with a spectacular view of the Flatiron building on the cover, this book is a literary treasure.

Author : Seymour Martin Lipset
Publisher :
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 15,1 MB
Release : 2013-10-01
Category :
ISBN : 9780674424432

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Will American Jews survive their success? Or will the United States' uniquely hospitable environment lead inexorably to their assimilation and loss of cultural identity? This is the conundrum that Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab explore in their wise and learned book about the American Jewish experience. Jews, perhaps more than any ethnic or religious minority that has immigrated to these shores, have benefited from the country's openness, egalitarianism, and social heterogeneity. This unusually good fit, the authors argue, has as much to do with the exceptionalism of the Jewish people as with that of America. But acceptance for all ancestral groups has its downside: integration into the mainstream erodes their defining features, diluting the loyalties that sustain their members. The authors vividly illustrate this paradox as it is experienced by American Jews today--in their high rates of intermarriage, their waning observance of religious rites, their extraordinary academic and professional success, their commitment to liberalism in domestic politics, and their steadfast defense of Israel. Yet Jews view these trends with a sense of foreboding: "We feel very comfortable in America--but anti-Semitism is a serious problem"; "We would be desolate if Israel were lost--but we don't feel as close to that country as we used to"; "More of our youth are seeking some serious form of Jewish affirmation and involvement--but more of them are slipping away from Jewish life." These are the contradictions tormenting American Jews as they struggle anew with the never-dying problem of Jewish continuity. A graceful and immensely readable work, Jews and the New American Scene provides a remarkable range of scholarship, anecdote, and statistical research--the clearest, most up-to-date account available of the dilemma facing American Jews in their third century of citizenship.

Author : John R. Stilgoe
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,52 MB
Release : 1983
Category : HISTORY
ISBN : 9780300236330

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An engaging and delightfully illustrated account of the impact of railroads on the American built environment and on American culture from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. "One of the most important [books] of the season, a wonderful piece of social history."--Ivan R. Dee, Chicago Tribune "Stilgoe ransacks magazines, ads, novels, poems, to create what is really 10 books crammed into one, dense with vivid fact and alluring conjecture. The chapter on trolleys alone is worth the price of the book. So is the one entitled 'Cinema.' A classic-to-be."--Robert Campbell, Boston Sunday Globe "An impressive new study.... Here in wonderful detail are the trains and the built environment adjacent to the right-of-way they traveled.... A stunning spatial analysis of the transformations wrought by the railroads."--Delores Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review "A honey of a book: scholarly, joyous, absorbing in its detail, often arresting in its insights... and packed with vintage photos and drawings."--Kirkus Reviews "An original, engaging, instructive, and wonderfully evocative book."--Leo Marx, The New York Review of Books "Whether we are enthusiasts, scholars, buffs, commuters, or Amtrak riders, Stilgoe offers us a new way to look at railroads and railroading."--Keith L. Bryant, Jr., Railroad History.

Author : Diana L. Linden
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 36,45 MB
Release : 2015-10-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 0814339840

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A study of Ben Shahn’s New Deal murals (1933–43) in the context of American Jewish history, labor history, and public discourse. Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. InBen Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his murals’ creation and their sometimes complicated reception by officials, the public, and the press. In four chapters, Linden presents case studies of select Shahn murals that were created from 1933 to 1943 and are located in public buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri. She studies Shahn’s famous untitled fresco for the Jersey Homesteads—a utopian socialist cooperative community populated with former Jewish garment workers and funded under the New Deal—Shahn’s mural for the Bronx Central Post Office, a fresco Shahn proposed to the post office in St. Louis, and a related one-panel easel painting titled The First Amendment located in a Queens, New York, post office. By investigating the role of Jewish identity in Shahn’s works, Linden considers the artist’s responses to important issues of the era, such as President Roosevelt’s opposition to open immigration to the United States, New York’s bustling garment industry and its labor unions, ideological concerns about freedom and liberty that had signifcant meaning to Jews, and the encroachment of censorship into American art. Linden shows that throughout his public murals, Shahn literally painted Jews into the American scene with his subjects, themes, and compositions. Readers interested in Jewish American history, art history, and Depression-era American culture will enjoy this insightful volume.

Author : Adolph Reed Jr.
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 18,16 MB
Release : 2021-07-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1620977176

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The classic and deeply prescient collection that explores the multifaceted nature of race, class, and identity in America, from one of our most insightful and iconoclastic intellectuals Hailed by Publishers Weekly for its “forceful” and “bracing opinions on race and politics,” Class Notes is a collection of critic Adolph Reed Jr.’s clearest thinking on matters of race, class, and other American dilemmas. With barbed wit, Reed takes aim against the solipsistic, individualistic approaches of identity politics, and in favor of class-based political interpretation and action. Reed leaves no topic untouched, from the myth that there exists a particular kind of “Black Anti-Semitism,” to the grift perpetuated by commentators who claim to speak for groups solely based on their identity categories. Adolph Reed Jr. remains one of our most controversial and necessary interpreters of American politics. These essays illustrate why Reed is “the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender” (Katha Pollitt). Class Notes is a classic text that signposts a path for the Left—out of essentialist gridlock and into meaningful, goal-oriented mass politics.