false 8 361 323 true 5710428 read 12 true 2121374 currently-reading 26 true 2121373 to-read 86 false 2645150 20th-century-u-s- 57 false 2645151 19th-century-u-s- 44 false 2645152 comparative-women-and-gender 28 false 3010572 20th-century--1960s 27 false 2645194 u-s--west 27 false 2645155 middle-east 21 false 2645266 atomic 19 false 3010561 20th-century--great-depression 16 false 2645232 world-history 15 false 3010691 economic 9 false 3010604 20th-century--1980s 9 false 3010629 fiction 8 false 3010555 20th-century-cultural 7 false 3010551 20th-century-environmental 3 false 4383219 theory http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45770857 to: Culture and Politics in the Great Depression (Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures) by Alan Brinkley
bookshelves: 20th-century--great-depression
The most prevalent cultural aspect of the GD was shame. Men were ashamed to stand in bread lines, ashamed that they could not find work. Gender roles were being challenged during the Great Depression as well, because many of the jobs women were relegated to (teaching, nursing, laundry) were not immediately vulnerable to depression pressures—the exception being black women who, as domestic maids, readily lost jobs. One industry that thrived during the depression was entertainment—escapism held more allure during the depression than in times of affluence. Comedies were especially successful, such as the Marx Brothers, who were trying to get rich quick but failing, thereby exercising some of the demons for audiences. Books didn’t sell as well, but the exception as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which pushed for conformity to get ahead in society. Conformity was what Sinclair Lewis satirized with his character Babbitt, whose conformity was “complete and pathetic.” (12)

In the 1930s, common Americans became a group unto themselves. This point is mimicked by Cohens Consumers Republic in showing that a distinct working class culture solidified previously disparate groups who identified themselves based on ethnicity. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Ma Joan exemplify this notion of the common people when she states that “we are the people, and the people always go on.” Previously, Mecken had called these people the “boobeoisie,” showing a clear distinction (snobbish) between the intellectuals and the working class. In the 1930s, the two met, especially through the lens of Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, a period in which the working class “labored” to create American culture. This Popular Front blurred the lines between intellectual and working class artist.

Brinkley points out that Pare Lorentz’s The River was a documentary film that shares the sentiments of Worster’s Dust Bowl: That for the industrial excesses of the 1920s there were ecological prices to pay in the 1930s. Of course, Dorothea Lange captured in pictures this sentiment as well. Her pictures conveyed the poor sharecroppers and exodusters, the victims of industrialization. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) appropriated these images to endorse their methods of socially engineered management of the land. The TVA was their resounding success (although Shales argues against the TVA in The Forgotten Man, stating that Wendel Wilke could have done a better job by privatizing the operation). Brinkley concludes his first section with a lengthy analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book that does quite the opposite. Agee and Evans’ book takes the same subjects as Lange, but does not depict them as victims of progress’s temporary failure; instead, it questions progress as a notion itself, something that the Great Depression never shook free from America’s grip. Perhaps, according to Agee and Evans, it should have.
Part II focuses on rebellion. Edmund Wilson had, by 1933, allied himself with the Communist Party (his To the Finland Station, first published in 1940s, speaks to this sympathy). Other leading writers of the 1930s were also “forming some kind of relationship to the Communist party: Jon Dos Passos, Lincoln Stefferns, Lewis Mumford, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hugehes, Richard Wright, Malcolm Cowley.” “Most important intellectuals succumebed in one way or another to the allure, the romance of the left. Intellectuals were only a small part of the Party in the 1930s; many more…came from the labor movement, African American communities, landless farmers, and the unemployed.”
Herbert Cowley wrote a memoir, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, that described his life (and other’s) as an intellectual that sympathized with the communist party. The vacuousness of 1920s consumerism quelled intellectualism, and many intellectuals turned into artists; they chose not to shape society, but find meaning in their own lives. Nothing in the 1920s could challenge “the primacy of capitalism, consumerism, and Babbittry.” But in the 1930s, that changed. The Soviet Union was a beacon because it jumped from a feudal society into a planned social order, thereby bypassing the messy industrial capitalism that was plaguing (and destroying) American life. In America, everything was going downhill; in the Soviet Union, jobs were being created not for wealth, but for the people as a whole.
1920s intellectuals engaged in modernism, in which they remained outsiders to boorish popular culture and insulated themselves from the mainstream. This existence was lonely, esp. for intellectuals. The communist party bridged this gap; it was communitarian but also detached from popular culture. (Again Denning). Brinkley cites The Grapes of Wrath, both the film and the book, as “among a relatively small number of popular works of the Great Depression centrally concerned with issues of social and economic justice,” a direct affront to Denning’s later work, The Cultural Front.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49426684 to: American History: A Survey, with Primary Source Investigator and Powerweb (Hardcover) by Alan Brinkley
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21172682 to: Culture and Imperialism (Paperback) by Edward W. Said
bookshelves: middle-east, world-history
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that dominant cultures of imperialistic powers are connected through strong ideological ties to their nation. To Said, the artistic is power, and because of this often unforeseen connection, the repression of colonies has been subtly endorsed through poetry, prose and philosophy. Said mostly utilizes works from 19th century English literature to support his arguments. It is important to note that Said does not argue that authors such as Austin and Conrad machinated colonialism as their explicit purpose for writing. Instead, Said argues that the ideology of these authors’ times helped to determine experiences, and thus their stories.
It is the nature of their artistic medium—the novel—that helped to both explicitly and implicitly shape colonial thought. For example, Said analyzes Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which he feels displays an inexorability of European domination as well as the inevitable subordination of those being colonized. But the analysis goes deeper. To Said, it is not simply through what was written that supported imperialist attitudes, but what also what was left out. Akin to criticisms of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which almost completely leaves out the issue of race, Said argues that Conrad’s exclusion of natives and their unique perspectives in the story are proof enough of imperialist attitudes. In other words, this is an extension of how Europe, or any colonizing nation for that matter, represents the “other”: as ineffectual, passive people who become nothing more than a background for dominant actors with agency.
Said examines the structure of the novel as a whole. A novel’s structure is equally important as a novel’s themes and topics. To Said, the novel holds a level of omnipotence that almost subliminally subdues the reader into accepting its arguments. Through a strict narrative, readers follow the story instead of question or engage it. Authority is not simply bestowed to the author exclusively, but to the story’s narrator as well. The language of the novel—and the 19th century English novel in particular—speaks with such unwavering confidence that the worldview of its narrator is taken as proper and absolute. Hence, when Kipling writes about India, or Conrad tells about Africa, or even when Coppola appropriates Conrad’s story to represent Vietnam, the reader accepts those representations even though they may have no actual experiences with those places (in some cases, neither have the authors).
The framework for such arguments revolve around the definition of the word “culture,” which Said asserts as encompassing all practices of pleasure, which include but are not exclusive to “the arts of description, communication, and representation that have relative autonomy from economic, social, and political realms.” (xi) It is in this loosely constructed definition that one finds issues with Said’s analysis. Said’s lose construction of the term “culture” leaves some holes in Culture and Imperialism’s analysis.
The autonomy of culture is a spurious notion at best, and to focus an entire book on the connections between imperialism and culture, such a broad interpretation may not suffice. Any nation’s dominant world view is one often affected through political ideology, and perhaps more notably though the predominance of an economically derived weltanschauung. Culture is most certainly not immune to these influences, and the simple inclusion of the term “relatively” before “autonomous” should not give Said free reign to assert what is “culture”. If in fact the works in question were produced relatively free from outside (read: monetary) influences, one should question the exclusivity of this case study. If these authors could not remove themselves from societal pressures, then perhaps they wrote novels with imperialistic tendencies only by noting the style, and mindset, of their day. In fact, Said goes on to say (on page 83) that the Robinson Crusoe’s protagonist is “explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas expansion.” This is not to say Said is contradicting himself when essentially stating that culture is autonomous, but his arguments may have been more precise if his definition of culture were clearer.
Said makes the bold declaration on page 82 that “without empire, there is no European novel as we know it.” Five pages later, in an attempt to reassert his argument that British power was both “durable and continually reinforced” through 19th century literature, he contends that the novel was not simply “reducible to sociological current[s:]” but also was not a “product of lonely genius…to be regarded only as manifestations of unconditioned creativity.” Furthermore, he states that being a British writer meant something completely different than being an author in France or the United States. But empire and sociological currency aside, one can still read a quintessential English novel mostly removed from these influences: Emily Bronte’s only work, Wuthering Heights. This work fits nicely into Said’s timeframe, and it is an irrefutably “British” (however bucolic) novel, as well as a “product of lonely genius.” To pick and chose works to support one’s argument is only one part of the process, and sources that contest, or like Bronte’s engage his thesis may have been usefully analyzed and utilized to his advantage; its outright neglect may hurt his arguments.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/29217700 to: The 60's: From Memory to History (Hardcover) by David R. Farber
bookshelves: 20th-century--1960s, to-read
Chester Pach has argued for the importance of understanding TVs influence during Vietnam in two articles. The first appears in this collection. Entitled “And That’s the Way it Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News”, Pach's chapter argues that Johnson lost public support for the war, in part, because of network night news broadcasts of body bags and sensational battles. Television did not, however, show grizzly images of combat or death; censors in Washington and Saigon forbade any such images to be let into the homes of families, especially during dinner hour. If reporters did get into the thick of battle, they were usually pinned down. In short, the audience at home felt some of what troops on the ground felt: namely, that their enemy was invisible. Without a clear front on which to advance, or without tangible victories in this war of Attrition, policymakers had only numbers to go on feeling their way through this quagmire. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/21176269 to: Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Paperback) by Jeremi Suri
All over the globe, ’68 marked a year of riots that sparked global concern. In France, Germany, China, and America, protest movements worried global leaders about the possibilities of revolution. Jeremy Suri’s Power and Protest argues that these events led to the era of détente, or lessening of global tensions amongst the superpowers and other nuclear powers. In short, he is arguing that domestic strife can influence and shape diplomatic relations. Suri’s argument is wide—and perhaps too wide—but convincing. He argues that intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sarte (France), Alexander Solzeneytzian (USSR), J.K. Galbraith, Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt School) and Mao (China) published influential works that questioned capitalism. These works were translated into a number of languages and absorbed by would be protesters. Dissent of capitalism was noting new, but questioning the materialism of the post war world threatened cold war consensus. The Vietnam war then acted as the solidifying act, an event that gave dissent purpose and direction. Facing a “global revolution,” governments colluded to quell revolutionary fervor and regain order. They responded with détente, a conservative approach to international relations that stressed the easing of nuclear tensions and warfare.
Critics of Suri point out that correlation does not lead to causation. Because the Prague Spring, the Cultural Revolution, the Chicago Riots of ’68, and French protests happened in close temporal proximity does not mean that they followed a similar pattern. Still, mass media’s ability to connect these global protests should not be discredited. Protests in Czechoslovakia, France, the United States, and elsewhere, were seen around the globe through satellite or video. Television captured these protests in ways that brought them into the homes of common people, diplomats, and presidents alike. What they saw influenced the future of the political groups involved in these movements as well as public opinion home and abroad.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/45773611 to: Nixon Reconsidered (Paperback) by Joan Hoff
bookshelves: 20th-century--1960s
Never an apologist for Nixon, Hoff dug through the archives to find, surprisingly, that Nixon’s domestic achievements are more memorable than his foreign policy gaffs or Watergate. Nixon was actually “more liberal than conservative in economic matters, confounding both his friends and enemies, as he also did on other issues of domestic reform, especially civil rights and welfare. As a Republican, he was willing to move beyond the twin boundaries of the New Deal and the Great Society.” (144) Nixon spent more on social welfare programs than LBJ. Under Nixon, for the 1st time, social spending exceeded defense spending since since before WWII.
Ohio University's Alonzo Hamby rips Hoff a new one, especially regarding the Vietnam issue. At length, he ponders “if historians writing fifty or a hundred years from now will view Nixon’s Vietnam policy as the needless continuation of a war. Or will they see a president who inherited a conflict in which 550,000 American troops were embroiled, weighed domestic political imperatives agasint the national interest, wound the American commitment down by 500,000 troops, ended the military draft, preserved American credibility, and negotiated a peace agreement that gave a U.S. client state a chance to survive?”

In short:
- Nixon was liberal by today’s standards
- Kissinger is to blame for many foreign policy failures. Nixon readily ignored him up until 1973.
- Nixon’s domestic achievements deserve more merit than his foreign policy “failures” or Watergate.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49426184 to: Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75 (American Culture Series) by Alice Echols
bookshelves: 20th-century--1960s, comparative-women-and-gender
Alice Echols’s Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975.
Radical Feminism Emerged in 1967 but by 1975 internal contradictions within the movement diluted its radicalism into a tamer cultural feminism. The National Organization of Women (NOW) stands for liberal, NOT RADICAL, feminism. Radical feminism was a “political movement dedicated to eliminating the sex-class system.” (6) It aimed to “fundamentally restructure private and public life.” (11) It did not look for gender equality within the already unequal society; instead, it aimed to vilify men—and not capitalism, racism or imperialism—as the cause of women’s inequality.
Echols agrees with Evans in that male chauvinism in the Civil Rights and New Left movements prompted a separate Female Consciousness. To Echols, however, this was more a reaction, and not a setting in which valuable organization skills and confidence was found. SDS was especially sexist. Oppression in these groups and movements prompted a separate women’s movement. Women felt further excluded by the sub-groups within these movements that emerged, including Black Power and men’s involvement in the military draft. Radical women took a cue from Black Power. It inspired them and “enabled them to argue that it was valid for women to organize around their own oppression and to define the terms of their struggle.” (49) In short, Echols adds to the historiography by emphasizing the radicalism of these movements.

The book, in short:
- Early feminists did not call themselves feminists. They were Radical Women.
o The first split (of many) within this movement was between the “feminists” and the “politicos.”
 Feminists felt that men were the enemy.
 Politicos felt that capitalism was the enemy; women should partake in a larger revolution to overthrow the system.
o Problematically, all forms of organization, because they were formed mostly by men, were oppressive.
- Lesbian-Feminism is not a part of feminist/radical feminism. Instead, it came from the politico camp. When leftists were leaving political life, lesbianism became the most radical approach.
o There ensued a “gay-straight split”
o Lesbians argued that only by being lesbian could a radical feminist truly realize their place in society. They would no longer be beholden to men for sex, pay, or required to use birth control.
o This alienated heterosexual feminists, who diverged with this group.
o Arguments over whether or not lesbianism was socially vs. biologically constructed arose, deepening the divide.
 Lesbian issue conflicted with the universal female model pushed by radical feminists. In this way, it helped lead to cultural feminism.

- Radical Feminism focused on men, and not any other construct, as the cause of their oppression
- With pushing the gender issue to the fore of social critiques, liberal women were forced to address their arguments.
- Gender trumped class or race.
- Abortion should be legal across the board.
- It claimed that all women were equal, that sisterhood could overcome class and race. This claim has proved to be false.
o Class and Race differences were there from the beginning.
o Bickering over them led to the movement’s infighting
o Lesbianism questioned the claim that all women were equal
- Culture feminism took radical feminism’s place.
o Focuses on a female counterculture, not struggles against the structural forces that create inequality.
o Is okay with capitalist exploitation of women while pushing for women’s rightful place of moral superiority above men.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49426178 to: Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (Paperback) by Alice Echols
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/49426097 to: Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (Paperback) by Sara Evans
bookshelves: 20th-century--1960s, comparative-women-and-gender
She does not use a personal account like Friedan. Instead, she makes a historical argument that the roots of 2nd wave feminism come from women’s experiences in earlier social movements. Black power and the experiences of organizing, protesting, and cross gender involvement in the Civil Rights movement shaped 2nd wave feminism. The New Left also shaped the Women’s Liberation movement both positively and negatively. Positively in that organizational skill, self-confidence, political acumen, and a language by which to espouse dissatisfaction were all found in the New Left. Negatively because the Machismo of the New Left often did not treat women as equals; it relegated them to making coffee and copies. In short, they were exploited in the New Left as well as outside of it.
Evans discovers that, in a telling example, one prominent SDSer could not recall the name of a single female member, while a comparison with meeting minutes reveals that many women played a number of important roles in the very same meeting. Problematically, Personal Politics has a limited scope. It is convincing in showing the effects SDS had on its members, but these experiences do not speak to the larger American population of the 1960s. Evan’s cites women’s trend of decentralization and short-lived groupings as a failure in organization. Yet as Linda Gordon points out, feminist thought and New Left thought both endorsed these approaches as critiques to bureaucratization and over-management inherent in the US society, government, and universities.

The first to draw comparisons between racial and gender inequality were southerners in the 1830s-1840s. Missionizing brought whites women into black communities where they first discovered equality (soc book review). This mimics the pattern of the 1960s, when southern white women got involved with Civil Rights. White women were expelled from the center of a campaign meant to end discrimination. Male-Female relationships in Civil Rights were compounded by race; not so in the New Left. IN this white middle-class movement, “reactions to sexism could not be labeled racism.” (711 contemporary sociology, sept. 1980, 9, no. 5). The New Left pushed for personal politics—a way to motivate activists by having them self-identify with social issues. Women within the movement also began to focus on the personal as political. Their personal experiences with discrimination (sexism) were more authentic than say, that of white middle class males engaged in political actions against a war they never fought or against discrimination they never felt. Turning the personal into the political was a powerful way for women to exert agency. The New Left failed to acknowledge women’s place in their movement, and women began to break with the New Left. In 1967, women made a clean break with the New Left and began to build the radical feminist movement. BECAUSE WOMEN WERE EXCLUDED FROM CIVIL RIGHT AND THE NEW LEFT, THEY FORMED THEIR OWN MOVEMENT. STILL, IT WAS WITHIN THE NEW LEFT AND CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS THAT WOMEN ORGANIZED. So, not necessarily a response to these movements, but an offshoot of them.

(According to a review in Contemporary Sociology) five factors shaped women’s consciousness.

1. Protest movements (Civil Rights, New Left) allowed for women to realize their capabilities and self-worth.
2. With success, certain women became role models for other women. The movement built upon itself.
3. Ideology that explained the sources of injustice were in place by the New Left and Civil Rights movement. Feminists need only to adopt this model, not create a new one.
4. Women involved in movements attempted to change a culture of passivity; these movements did not allow for such changes.
5. Civil Rights and New Left provided a network by which women could meet and later organize.
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