Author: David Peterson Del Mar File Type: pdf Africa has long gripped the American imagination. From the Edenic wilderness of Edgar Rice Burroughss Tarzan novels to the black Zion of Garveys Back-to-Africa movement, all manner of Americans - whether white or black, male or female - have come to see Africa as an idealized stage on which they can fashion new, more authentic selves. In this remarkable, panoramic work, David Peterson del Mar explores the ways in which American fantasies of Africa have evolved over time, as well as the role of Africans themselves in subverting American attitudes to their continent. Spanning seven decades, from the post-war period to the present day, and encompassing sources ranging from literature, film and music to accounts by missionaries, aid workers and travel writers, African, American is a fascinating deconstruction of Africa as it exists in the American mindset. **Review Offers an intimate view of the intertwined relationship between Americans and Africans. Through a comprehensive yet sensitive analytical readingof fiction, autobiography and film, Del Mar shows just how much Africa has and continues to shape what it means to be American. (Catherine Mathers, Duke University) About the Author David Peterson del Mar is an associate professor of history at Portland State University in Oregon and the founding president of Yo Ghana!, a charity devoted to promoting friendship and understanding between students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest.

Author: J. M. May File Type: pdf This volume is intended as a companion to the study of Ciceros oratory and rhetoric, for both students and experts in the field for the neophyte, it provides a starting point for the veteran Ciceronian scholar, a place for renewing the dialogue about issues concerning Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric for all, a site of engagement at various levels with Ciceronian oratory scholarship and bibliography. The book is arranged along roughly chronological lines and covers most aspects of Ciceros oratory and rhetoric. A bibliography of the relevant items from the past 25 years, keyed to specific Ciceronian works, completes the volume.Review...Ciceronians are indeed all readers of Ciceros oratorical and rhetorical works will be happy to have this volumeAndrew R. Dyck, BMCR, 2003.About the AuthorJames M. May, is Professor of Classics at St. Olaf College. He has published extensively on Ciceronian oratory and rhetoric, including Trials of Character The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (North Carolina, 1988) and (with Jakob Wisse) Cicero On the Ideal Orator (Oxford, 2001).

Author: Daniel Krier File Type: pdf NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle maps the structure of economies of spectacle in stock car racing and large displacement motorcycle rallying. The book traces the historical development of economic spectacles and models the structural components and moving parts that sustain them. Economies of spectatorship emerge when activities and legends in the cultural commons are privatized or enclosed as immaterial property. Once privatized, a spectacular diegesis supports a triple-circuit of profit spectatorship markets (payments to see), sponsorship markets (payments to be seen) and trophy markets (payments to be seen enjoying). Vivid illustrations of legendary action in NASCAR and carnivalesque displays at Sturgis reveal how spectator events function as intensive sites of profit-making in contemporary capitalism.

Author: Matthew D. Tribbe File Type: pdf During the summer of 1969-the summer Americans first walked on the moon-musician and poet Patti Smith recalled strolling down the Coney Island Boardwalk to a refreshment stand, where pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy, and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register. Such was the zeitgeist in the year of the moon. Yet this holy trinity of 1960s America would quickly fall apart. Although Jesus and John F. Kennedy remained iconic, by the time the Apollo Program came to a premature end just three years later few Americans mourned its passing. Why did support for the space program decrease so sharply by the early 1970s? Rooted in profound scientific and technological leaps, rational technocratic management, and an ambitious view of the universe as a realm susceptible to human mastery, the Apollo moon landings were the grandest manifestation of postwar American progress and seemed to prove that the United States could accomplish anything to which it committed its energies and resources. To the great dismay of its many proponents, however, NASA found the ground shifting beneath its feet as a fierce wave of anti-rationalism arose throughout American society, fostering a cultural environment in which growing numbers of Americans began to contest rather than embrace the rationalist values and vision of progress that Apollo embodied. Shifting the conversation of Apollo from its Cold War origins to larger trends in American culture and society, and probing an eclectic mix of voices from the era, including intellectuals, religious leaders, rock musicians, politicians, and a variety of everyday Americans, Matthew Tribbe paints an electrifying portrait of a nation in the midst of questioning the very values that had guided it through the postwar years as it began to develop new conceptions of progress that had little to do with blasting ever more men to the moon. No Requiem for the Space Age offers a narrative of the 1960s and 1970s unlike any told before, with the story of Apollo as the story of America itself in a time of dramatic cultural change. **Review A persuasive, rollicking account of the moon landings as the final act in a post-war American love affair with science and rationalism. --The Economist Matthew Tribbes examination of American attitudes towards the Apollo space program in the 1960s is a giant leap away from the platitudes that dominate popular memory and too many historical accounts of the era-a first rate cultural history. --Maurice Isserman, co-author of America Divided The Civil War of the 1960s No Requiem for the Space Age is a wonderful read. Tribbes prose is witty, ironic, and at times refreshingly irreverent. His history is also extremely important. By taking readers on an exploration not only of NASAs Apollo program but also of the films, fiction, and even television advertisements depicting space travel during the 1960s and 1970s, Tribbe traces the gradual decline of Americans belief in technological progress and the subsequent rise of a new romantic spirit based on individual experience and subjectivity. --Neil M. Maher, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark Matthew Tribbes account of the Apollo program and its demise provides a penetrating glimpse at American values and priorities in the 1960s and the years that followed. The energy of the space effort began to dissipate even before the program ended, and this engaging book shows how doubts about technology and reservations about progress itself dominated the larger conversation. --Allan M. Winkler, Miami University of Ohio About the Author Matthew D. Tribbe is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.