Caroline Ware,Consumer Activism and American Democracy During the New Deal, 1933–45

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how the New Deal consumer activist Caroline F. Ware crafted an ambitious consumerist vision for the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. This vision aimed to end the Depression and bring post-war prosperity and to create a new kind of American democracy and citizenship, one suited to the promises and perils of an industrialized, urbanized America. One member of a loose cohort of like-minded intellectuals, and self-styled consumer ‘experts', Ware made one of the most persuasively articulated intellectual contributions of the period to a particular kind of liberal consumer activism.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

J.B. Priestley,the ‘Modern’ and America

ABSTRACT

J.B. Priestley has often been seen as representative of a nostalgic Englishness which rejected the modern world and, in the process, embraced anti-Americanism. However, as this article suggests, Priestley had a more complicated relationship with both America and modernity than has been accepted. Focusing on the 1930s, it shows how Priestley travelled widely in the United States and came to admire the democratic and collective aspects of American culture, whilst also developing a critique of what he saw as the lack of individuality and creativity in other elements of the ‘mass' society, anticipating arguments he would develop after 1945.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

Late Colonial Estrangement And Miscegenation

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to reassess the work of two contemporary writers in the 1930s: Gilberto Freyre in Brazil and E. du Perron in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Their famous narratives (respectively, Casa-Grande e Senzala and Het Land van Herkomst) present a (post) colonial world where inequality, violence and racism are almost as conspicuous as mixing and contact across the colour lines. In fact, although one work is a sociological and historical interpretation of colonial and imperial Brazil and the other a literary reworking of personal reminiscences related to Indies society in the early twentieth century, both construct worlds that present several important similarities.     

Chains of Gold: Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. By Marcelo J. Borges

ABSTRACT

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterley's Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.     

Eric Hobsbawm and the Significance of Jazz

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Eric Hobsbawm’s interest in Jazz, and argues that he helped popularise the music, gave it intellectual credibility and that his jazz writings are still relevant for jazz scholars and cultural historians. Jazz also influenced his view of history. Drawing on his recently catalogued private papers, it suggests Hobsbawm consistently argued for the historical significance of jazz, was flexible in the use of genre and subgenre and was aware of the role of the music business, and the way critics and writers helped shape the music’s meanings. The paper also argues that Hobsbawm wrote partly as fan, and that his penetrating analysis of jazz sometimes led him to undervalue other popular music forms.     

A regional gateway: Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong, 1990–2005

Abstract

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most “Japanese city” outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city in the early 1990s. Hong Kong's emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan's cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks at the organizational aspect of popular culture during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the marketing strategies and promotional efforts used by agents of Japanese popular culture in Hong Kong and the role of popular culture piracy in this process. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of popular cultures across markets in East and Southeast Asia, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.     

Cultural Continuities

ABSTRACT

This article studies the Nazis' enthusiastic embrace of theatre in the period before and during the Second World War, and places this in a longer tradition of political power and the theatre in Germany. It argues that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels oversaw a ‘restoration’ of German theatre in the later 1930s, aiming to restore the emotional link between audience, Kultur and nation, for their own political purposes.     

Revel,Riot and Rebellion and The Social History of Politics

ABSTRACT

This article considers the ties between soldiers and civilian life in First World War Britain. Previous assumptions about soldierly alienation and disillusionment from civilian society have been questioned in recent years. This article adds to this discussion by examining the part played by National War Aims Committee propaganda in fostering links between soldiers and the home front. Representation of civilian activities, community, rurality and domesticity offered reassurance that Britain remained largely the same as soldiers remembered. The involvement of soldiers as propagandists also shows that attitudes cannot be deduced solely from the perspective of literary depictions of alienation.     

Women,Education and Social Mobility in Britain during the Long 1970s

ABSTRACT

Through analysis of oral history interviews and quantitative source material, this article offers a gendered model of social mobility in the post-war decades. It argues that women born between the late 1930s and early 1950s achieved social mobility through entering post-secondary education after a period of employment, followed by occupational movement into the welfare professions. Women’s mobility primarily occurred in the long 1970s, facilitated by the Wilson government’s investment in the welfare state and its expansion of further education and creation of the polytechnics. This challenges the predominantly masculinised trope of the grammar school as the driver of post-war mobility.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism Robert L. Gale, A Mickey Spillane Companion Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Art and Thought Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds.), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema Joseph L. Coulombe, Mark Twain and the American West Mark H. Zanger, The American History Cookbook Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy (eds.), Athena's Daughters: Television's New Women Warriors Susan J. Matt, Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930 David J. Cole, Eve Browning and Fred E. H. Schroeder (eds.), Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings James W. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering Peter C. Rollins and John O'Connor (eds.), Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History     

Book Reviews

William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetz-mann . The West of the Imagination Clarke Garrett . Spirit Possession and Popular Religion: From the Camisards to the Shakers J. Ronald Oakley . God's Country: America in the Fifties Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling . American Wildlife in Symbol and Story Alan M. Wald . The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left From the 1930s t o the 1980s Frederick F. Siegel . The Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, Virginia, 1780–1865 Allan Bloom . The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students Rob Ruck . Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh Dan C. Hazen . Latin American Masses and Minorities: Their Images and Realities Kenneth Lincoln with Al Logan Slagle . The Good Red Road: Passages Into Natiue America Spiro Kostof . America By Design: Companion Volume to the PBS Television Series William J. Baker . Jesse Owens: A n American Life Robert Pattison . The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism     

The Prince of Wales Versus Clark Gable

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s and 1930s Americans avidly consumed news of Edward, Prince of Wales, through a variety of media: mass circulation newspapers and magazines, radio, the gramophone and film. This article argues that the Prince of Wales' popularity in the United States between the wars sheds light on key changes in the meaning of citizenship following mass enfranchisement in the Anglo-American world. It argues also that media representations of the Prince of Wales contributed to the creation of an Anglophone culture of celebrity, which would become a primary means by which Britons and Americans came to know each other in the inter-war years.     

Keep Fit and Play the Game

ABSTRACT

This article provides new insight into the modernization of the monarchy after the First World War by exploring how George VI promoted fitness and outdoor recreation during the interwar years. Sport functioned as a site of cross-class male bonding which formed part of a wider strategy by the monarchy to strengthen social cohesion. The new royal charities raised substantial funds, and they established a national fitness movement during the 1930s which was supported by the National Government, Labour leaders and the Trades Union Congress, but eschewed extremes on both left and right.     

Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Radical Conservatism and International Nationalism: The Peasant Arts Movement and Its Search for the Country Heart of England

ABSTRACT

The Peasant Arts Movement (fl. 1890s–1930s) was dedicated to reviving traditional country life in England. This article analyses its key educational tools, its magazine and museum, to explore its underlying ideologies. Sometimes seen as eccentric, it was nonetheless connected, practically and intellectually, with the broader Arts and Crafts and folk revival movements in England and Europe. It shared with these a largely radical spirit but was nonetheless essentially conservative in its views on class and gender. However, it demonstrated an internationalist spirit in its concern for peasantry worldwide and in its use of European models to re-invigorate English culture.     

Changing Emotional Landscapes?

ABSTRACT

The popular Italian photo-romance magazine Grand Hotel – famed for its stories about love – is studied here as a kind of school for the emotions, in a society where social change was bringing about redefinitions of love, jealousy, courtship and marriage. Both the love stories and the advice columns of the magazine are closely examined for their representations and negotiations of changing gender codes and changing rituals and experiences of courtship, in the context of the rapidly modernizing society of the 1950s. Migration, the rise of mass media, consumerism and changing gender roles were transforming everyday life, with a particularly strong impact on the generation coming of age during this period.     

Popular Politicians: The Interaction Between Politics and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1950s–1980s

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s onwards, the Netherlands witnessed a transformation of the emotional codes of politics. A culture of political leadership marked by notions of duty and restraint, made way for self-expression and authenticity. This article argues that the interaction between the spheres of politics and popular culture played a vital role in this transformation. The practices and discourses of popular culture became a significant part of the repertoire through which politicians articulated representative claims. The article traces how politicians negotiated their interaction with popular culture, started to cultivate a private persona and eventually turned into political celebrities.     

Book Reviews

How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Stephen Aron Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852. David Schuyler The National Road. Edited by Karl Raitz Possessed by the Past. David Lowenthal The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes a Public History. Delores Hayden Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration from America's Favorite Magazine. The Mountain West: Interpreting the Folk Landscape. Terry G. Jordan, Jon T. Kilpinen and Charles F. Gritzner American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930-1969. Gerald Bordman Herman Melville: A Biography Vol. 1, 1819-1851. Hershel Parker Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution. Holly A. Mayer The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Martin Barker and Roger Sabin American Sacred Space. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds Tokens of Affection: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter in the Old South. Carol Bleser, ed Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies. James Seaton Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings. James Barbour and Tom Quirk, eds Seeking Pleasure in the Old West. David Dary Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. Rhona J. Berenstein Abandoned In The Wasteland: Children, Television, and the First Amendment. Newton N. Minow and Craig L. Lamay