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- Volume 36, Issue 1, 2017
European Journal of American Culture - Volume 36, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 36, Issue 1, 2017
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Artistic scarcity in an age of material abundance: President Lyndon Johnson, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Great Society liberalism
More LessAbstract1965 saw President Lyndon Johnson push an incredible number of reform bills through Congress as part of his quest for a Great Society – including legislation to create a National Endowment for the Arts (the federal agency that provides grants to artists and arts organizations in the United States). Public confidence was riding high, the economy was good, and Americans demonstrated a remarkable faith in the capacity of the federal government to solve domestic problems. And yet in this age of abundance, Johnson drew on the rhetoric of scarcity to promulgate his domestic policy. When the President spoke of the cultural aspects of the Great Society he typically emphasized qualitative and quantitative goals, i.e. the power of the arts to improve the quality of life of ordinary Americans and to reduce a perceived imbalance between the haves and the have-nots. Whereas other studies have relegated the cultural aspects of the Great Society to the side-lines, this study places such matters centre stage through an analysis of the rationales behind the creation and early programming of the Endowment. In so doing, it illuminates the inherent contradictions of, and tensions within, American liberalism in the mid-1960s.
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Rough riders in the cradle of civilization: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Italy and the challenge of American cultural scarcity at the fin-de-siècle
More LessAbstractComparisons with European culture have often generated feelings of discomfort and anxiety in the United States. Since the age of the Enlightenment, American culture has been associated with a desert or wasteland. This conceptual inclination persisted well into the 19th century − when several American writers picked up on the perceived dearth of culture that the American intellectual landscape offered − until the Gilded Age, when the United States powerfully asserted itself as an economic and industrial power. Cultural affirmation remained, therefore, the last frontier for America to conquer. In this context, the soft power operated by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show in Europe proved to be a tremendous tool for the assertion of American cultural vitality on a worldwide scale. America’s ultimate validation, I argue, was established when Cody’s show landed in Italy, ‘the cradle of western civilization’, a stage which exuded a powerful significance in the sphere of culture, and which Cody orchestrated as a symbolic translatio imperii, by picturing himself as a Novel Columbus and America as the vessel of human progress. The resonance of Cody’s Italian tours had a regenerating effect on America; witnessing Italian culture in a moment of profound decadence fostered America’s collective confidence in its cultural superiority and confirmed its newfangled ‘exceptionalism’.
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‘There are no people in these photographs’: Human scarcity, the Sierra Club aesthetic, and the politics of presence
More LessAbstractThe 1960s saw Californian environmental group the Sierra Club attempt to aestheticize conservation politics through an ambitious photographic publishing programme. Praised within the decade, prominent environmental organization leaders credited the initiative for increasing the ranks of conservation groups, catalysing public sympathy for the American wilds, and popularizing the idea of ecology. Yet critics contended that the programme created and popularized a landscape aesthetic predicated on human absence. In doing so, the Sierra Club was seen to obscure urban, class- and race-based environmental problems and help entrench a vision of nature that was separate, fantastical and elitist. In an attempt to communicate how such publications constructed nature, other studies have discounted the club’s own debates about human presence in their publishing content. This article places ideological debates about the inclusion of people within conservation photography in centre frame. It explores how the role of human presence in late 1960s conservation photography was simultaneously connected to a nostalgic desire for the return to pre-war preservationist practice and – somewhat paradoxically – to the emergent, broadened agenda of environmentalism. Furthermore, it connects disputes over presence to growing concerns about the public image of American environmentalism.
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The lost sounds of nature: The growing scarcity of natural sounds in the United States
More LessAbstractThe history of the United States has been closely related to its natural environment. Nature has provided instrumental resources for the nation’s growth and space for its recreation. The ‘great outdoors’ of the United States has offered generations of Americans access to visually spectacular landscapes, capturing the imagination of tourists, explorers, artists and writers. The visual experience of such natural wonders has been the subject of scholarly discussion, but peoples’ experience of the correlating natural soundscapes has gone largely unexamined. Natural sounds are a resource that has been historically overlooked, but a growing body of historical and scientific evidence has demonstrated its importance as a national resource. As with other natural resources in the United States, natural sounds, once abundant, have become increasingly scarce due to the pervasiveness of human activity. The abundance and scarcity of natural resources in the United States has been a frequently visited topic of discussion; however, the growing scarcity of natural sounds has been largely absent from this debate. This article places the opportunity to listen to natural sounds unimpeded by human-made noise at the centre of the debate.
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Reviews
Authors: Holly Cade Brown, Robert Yeates and Brian KennedyAbstractECOSICKNESS IN CONTEMPORARY U.S FICTION: ENVIRONMENT AND AFFECT, HEATHER HOUSER (2014) New York: Columbia University Press, pp. ix + 309, ISBN: 978023116514, h/bk, $65.00, ISBN: 9780231165150, p/bk, $30.00
STRANGER THINGS, MATT DUFFER, ROSS DUFFER AND SHAWN LEVY (2016) USA: Netflix
RETHINKING THE NEW DEAL
FEAR ITSELF: THE NEW DEAL AND THE ORIGINS OF OUR TIME, IRA KATZNELSON (2013) New York: Liveright, 720 pp., ISBN-13: 9780871404503, h/bk, £22.00, ISBN-13: 9780871407382, p/bk, £13.99
THE GREAT EXCEPTION: THE NEW DEAL & THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN POLITICS, JEFFERSON COWIE (2016) Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 273 pp., ISBN-13: 9780691143804, h/bk, £19.95, ISBN-13: 9780691175737, p/bk, £14.95
THE NEW DEAL: A GLOBAL HISTORY, KIRAN KLAUS PATEL (2016) Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 435 pp., ISBN-13: 9780691149127, h/bk, £24.95, ISBN-13: 9780691176154, p/bk, £19.95
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 42 (2023)
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Volume 41 (2022)
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Volume 40 (2021)
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Volume 39 (2020)
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Volume 38 (2019)
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Volume 37 (2018)
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Volume 36 (2017)
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Volume 35 (2016)
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Volume 34 (2015)
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Volume 33 (2014)
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Volume 32 (2013)
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Volume 31 (2012)
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Volume 30 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 29 (2010 - 2011)
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Volume 28 (2009)
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Volume 27 (2008)
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Volume 26 (2007 - 2008)
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Volume 25 (2005 - 2007)
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Volume 24 (2005)
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Volume 23 (2004)
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Volume 22 (2003)
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Volume 21 (2002)
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Volume 20 (2001 - 2002)