Author: Paul Rutherford File Type: pdf With nearly sixty percent of Americans initially against a pre-emptive war without sanction from the United Nations, and even higher anti-war numbers in most other nations of the world, the 2003 war against Iraq quickly became an enormous public relations challenge for the George W. Bush administration. The subject of Weapons of Mass Persuasion is a war in which American patriotism became so mired in commercial jingoism that the demarcations between entertainment and political conduct disappeared completely. In this engaging and disturbing book, Paul Rutherford shows how the marketing campaign for the war against Iraq was constructed and carried out. He argues that not only was the campaign a new chapter in the presentation of real-time war as pop culture, but that its deeper implications have now come to constitute part of the history of modern democracy. Situating the war against Iraq within an existing tradition of war as narrative, spectacle, and, more broadly, commodity, Rutherford offers a brief overview of the history of civic advertising and propaganda, then examines in detail the different dimensions of three weeks of war presented to North Americans as it became a branded conflict, processed and cleansed to appeal to the well-established tastes of veteran consumers of popular culture. Including incisive analyses of visual material - speeches, editorial cartoons, and media political commentary, but particularly news reports of such sound bite events as the bombing of Baghdad, the toppling of the Hussein statue, and the rescue of captured soldier Private Jessica Lynch - as well as extensive polling data from around the world and interviews with the actual consumers of war, Weapons of Mass Persuasion chronicles the making of a Hollywood war fast-paced and heroic, pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil to achieve a triumphant, sanitized, and commodified outcome. Not since Naomi Kleins No Logo have the gods of marketing and the art of commercialism been so thoroughly disrobed.

Author: Carol Turkington File Type: pdf A collection of resources for understanding and coping with the complexities of modern health and social concerns. It provides an objective overview of the essential facts and wider social ramifications that have been established by experts about the afflictions covered. **

Author: Eden Medina File Type: epub In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chiles experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chiles economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allendes government ended with a violent military coup the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the networks Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts when we read them we are reading history.

Author: William L. Andrews File Type: pdf The distinction among slaves is as marked, as the classes of society are in any aristocratic community. Some refusing to associate with others whom they deem to be beneath them, in point of character, color, condition, or the superior importance of their respective masters. Henry Bibb, fugitive slave, editor, and antislavery activist, stated this in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849). In William L. Andrewss magisterial study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than 60 mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slave narrators disclosed class-based reasons for violence that broke out between impudent, gentleman, and lady slaves and their resentful mean masters. Andrewss far-reaching book shows that status and class played key roles in the self- and social awareness and in the processes of liberation portrayed in the narratives of the most celebrated fugitives from U.S. slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Noting that the majority of the slave narrators came from the higher echelons of the enslaved, Andrews also pays close attention to the narratives that have received the least notice from scholars, those from the most exploited class, the field hands. By examining the lives of the most and least acclaimed heroes and heroines of the slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers advantage, but at other times fueling pride, aspiration, and a sense of just deserts among some of the enslaved that could be satisfied by nothing less than complete freedom. The culmination of a career spent studying African American literature, this comprehensive study of the antebellum slave narrative offers a ground-breaking consideration of a unique genre of American literature.**ReviewWilliam Andrews has lifted the veil on class relations within the slave community in the antebellum South. Well-meaning scholars, mostly for political reasons, have far too often chosen to remain silent about distinctions of class drawn by black people among themselves, starting in slavery, choosing to discuss African Americans as if they were always a social monolith, and thereby reducing their complexity. Andrews reveals, in riveting detail, that this has never been the case, even well before the Civil War. This is a seminal work of scholarship, one destined to generate a new branch of literary studies, dedicated to studying how class mattered within the African American tradition.--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University William Andrews has given us an inestimable gift-the first sustained consideration of the totality of known antebellum slave narratives. Andrews provides new insight into the ways enslaved and oppressed people leveraged limited social and economic power to claw out a place for themselves in a system that was never meant to support their survival or success. This momentous work reveals more than we ever have known about the kinds of work these writers did before they made their way to freedom. This much-needed contribution will be used by literary scholars and historians and will help shape emerging scholarship for decades.--P. Gabrielle Foreman, Founding Faculty Director, The Colored Conventions Project No one knows the substance and range of slave narratives as well as William Andrews. The preeminent scholar of this genre here shows with brilliant clarity and new insights how much social class shaped the authors lives within slavery, as well as motivated their desires and methods of achieving freedom. Slavery and Class in the American South removes slave narrative authors from a flattened, mythic realm and probes their economic and social hierarchies. This is the most innovative book ever written on the first generation of African American writers.--David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom Andrewss deep familiarity with the narratives that enslaved and formerly enslaved people produced in the mid-nineteenth century enables him to conduct a nuanced interrogation of how enslaved people perceived social class and privilege in the wider society, but particularly within their own communities.--Heather Williams, University of Pennsylvania William Andrews is one of the leading scholars of American slavery and certainly one of our great authorities on the testimony of enslaved people. But here he has broken new ground by looking at how the enslaved understood and expressed social distinctions among themselves, notions of class within their own communities. Slavery and Class in the American South is a thought-provoking and unsettling read, though one that is important to grapple with.--Steven Hahn, author of A Nation Under Our Feet About the Author William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has authored, edited, or co-edited more than 40 books on African American literature and history. He is the recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in the study of American literature.