Cultural History

This book is a portrait of one of the most acerbic and distinctive voices in American literature, a complex individual at odds with his country, his family, his times, and himself. The only American writer of any stature to fight in and survive the Civil War, Bierce discovered in the conflict a bitter confirmation of his darkest assumptions about man and his nature. Profoundly disillusioned, Bierce spent the next 50 years struggling to disabuse his fellow Americans of their own cherished ideals—be they romantic, religious, or political. His groundbreaking short stories of the war, including his most famous work, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, have had a lasting influence on every subsequent American author dealing with war. And the heartless, hilarious aphorisms in his caustic lexicon The Devil's Dictionary have entered, often uncredited, our national consciousness. This biography accounts for both the influential art that Ambrose Bierce made from a harsh and unforgiving vision, and the high price he had to pay for it in loneliness, rancour, and spiritual isolation.

Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons but also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation has to be found in the combination of two powerful ideas, namely the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms which they valued and wanted to realize in their own societies but which did not yet exist. This book examines three imperial experiments—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Algeria—and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, namely, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonized nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection—articulated through the progressive theory of history—been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonized and colonizer, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.

Due to rationing and price control, Britain’s underground economy experienced a mid-century boom during the 1940s and early 1950s as producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to get ‘a little bit extra’ ‘on the side’, ‘from under the counter’, or ‘off the back of a lorry’. And yet widespread evasion of regulations designed to ensure ‘fair shares for all’ did not undermine the austerity policies that characterized those years. This book draws upon a wide range of source material, including recently declassified documents, to argue that all these little bits did not amount to a lot because Britons showed self-restraint in their illegal dealings. The means, motives, and opportunities for evasion were not lacking. The shortages were real and felt, regulations were not watertight, and enforcement was haphazard. Fairness, not patriotism and respect for the law, is the key to understanding this self-restraint. By invoking popular notions of a fair price, a fair profit, and a fair share, government rhetoric stymied black marketeering as would-be evaders had to justify their offences to themselves and others in terms of getting their fair share at no one else’s expense. The book emphasizes the importance of fairness to those seeking a richer understanding of economic life in modern Britain, and reminds us that all trade is fair trade and all consumers are ethical consumers, at least according to their own lights. We just need to discover what those lights are.

During the first half of the 20th century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort — the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress. This book uses the case of Atlantic City to discuss the boundaries of public space in urban America. It argues that in the past public space was not about democracy but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic and many middle-class Americans fled to suburban-style resorts such as Disneyworld. With the opening of the city's first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted and tourists were deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. The narrative of this book points to the troubling fate of urban America, and the observations and conclusions of this book to implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

Body by Weimar argues that male and female athletes fundamentally recast gender roles during Germany's turbulent post‐World War I years and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. Athletes in the 1920s took the same techniques that were streamlining factories and offices and applied them to maximizing the efficiency of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity — quite literally — in all of its competitive, time‐oriented excess and thereby helped to popularize, and even to naturalize, the sometimes threatening process of economic rationalization by linking it to their own personal success stories. Enthroned by the media as the new cultural icons, athletes radiated sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self‐determination. Champions in tennis, boxing, and track and field showed their fans how to be “modern,” and, in the process, sparked heated debates over the limits of the physical body, the obligations of citizens to the state, and the relationship between the sexes. If the images and debates in this book strike readers as familiar, it might well be because the ideal body of today — sleek, efficient, and equally available to men and women — received its first articulation in the fertile tumult of Germany's roaring twenties. After more than eighty years, we still want the Weimar body.

In the first half of the twentieth century Britishness was an integral part of the culture that pervaded life in the colonial Caribbean. Caribbean peoples were encouraged to identify with social structures and cultural values touted as intrinsically British. Many middle-class West Indians of color duly adopted Britishness as part of their own identity. Yet even as they re-fashioned themselves, West Indians recast Britishness in their own image, basing it on hierarchical ideas of respectability that were traditionally British, but also on their own expectations of racial and geographical inclusiveness. Britain became for these Caribbean people the focus of an imperial British identity, an identity which stood separate from and yet intimately related to their strong feelings for their tropical homelands. Moving from the heights of empire in 1900 to the independence era of the 1960s, this book argues that middle-class West Indians used their understanding of Britishness to establish a place for themselves in the British imperial world, and to negotiate the challenges of decolonization. Through a focus on education, voluntary organization, the challenges of war, radio broadcasting, and British royalty it explores how this process worked in the daily lives of West Indians in both the Caribbean and the British Isles. This book thus traces West Indians' participation in a complex process of cultural transition as they manipulated Britishness and their relationship to it not only as colonial peoples but also as Britons.

This book analyses the attempts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to use broadcasting as a tool of empire. From an early stage the corporation sought to unite home listeners with their counterparts in the wider British world, particularly in the British settler diaspora in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The BBC saw this as part of its public-service mandate, and also as a means to strengthen its position at home: by broadcasting to and about the empire, it built up its own broadcasting empire. The BBC encouraged overseas the spread of the British approach to broadcasting, in preference to the American commercial model. During the 1930s it tried to work with the public broadcasting authorities that were established in the ‘dominions’: initially, these efforts met with limited success, but more progress was made in the later 1930s. High culture, royal ceremonies, sport, and even comedy were used to project Britishness, particularly on the BBC Empire Service, the predecessor of today's World Service. Commonwealth broadcasting collaboration intensified during the Second World War, and reached its climax during the late 1940s and 1950s. Belatedly, at this stage the BBC also began to consider the role of broadcasting in Africa and Asia, as a means to encourage ‘development’ and to combat resistance to continued colonial rule. However, during the 1960s, as decolonization entered its final, accelerated phase, the BBC staged its own imperial retreat.

This book captures the intensity of the Brooklyn Dodgers' relationship to its community in the 1950s. Ethnic and racial tensions were part and parcel of a working-class borough; the Dodgers' presence smoothed the rough edges of ghetto conflict always present in Brooklyn. The Dodger-inspired baseball program provided a path for boys that occasionally led to the prestigious Dodger Rookie Team, and sometimes, via minor-league contracts, to Ebbets Field itself. Women were tied to the Dodgers no less than their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but they were less visible. A few, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore and working-class super-fan Hilda Chester, were regulars at Ebbets Field and far from invisible. The author explores the underside of the Dodgers—the “baseball Annies,” and the paternity suits that went with the territory. The Dodgers' male culture was played out in the team's politics, in the owners' manipulation of Dodger male egos, opponents' race-baiting, and the macho bravado of the team (how Jackie Robinson, for instance, would prod Giants' catcher Sal Yvars to impotent rage by signaling him when he was going to steal second base, then taunting him from second after the steal). The day in 1957 when Walter OʼMalley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, announced that the team would be leaving for Los Angeles was one of the worst moments in baseball history, and a sad day in Brooklyn's history as well.

Cannabis has never been a more controversial substance in Britain. Over the last decade it has been reclassified twice, has been the subject of a range of official investigations and scientific studies, and has provoked media campaigns and all manner of political gesturing. This book seeks to understand this period by placing it back into the historical context of the long-term story of cannabis and the British. It takes up where its predecessor, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition, 1800–1928 left off. It traces the story back into the last days of the Empire, when Britain controlled cannabis-consuming societies in Asia and Africa even while there was little taste for the drug back home. It shows that cannabis was caught up in control regimes established to deal with opium and cocaine consumption, while it fell out of favour as a medicine. As such, when migration after the Second World War brought the Empire's cannabis consumers to the UK, they faced hostile attitudes towards their favourite intoxicant. From that time on a growing number of groups and agencies took an interest in cannabis. Ambitious bureaucrats in the Home Office saw in it an opportunity to draw resources into the Drugs Branch, while the police began to use laws related to it for a number of other purposes. Experts ranging from pharmacologists to sociologists formed committees on the subject and its association with colonial migrants lent it an exotic aura to the politically minded of the 1960s counter-culture and the working-class youth of Britain's inner cities. Since the 1970s governments were content to devolve responsibility to the police for working out the best legal approach to the substance, and efforts to wrest this back from them proved difficult a decade ago. The volume considers all of these trends, details the often eccentric characters that have shaped them, and concludes that current positions and arguments on cannabis can only be properly assessed if their historical origins are clearly understood.

Americans in the early 19th century were, as one foreign traveler bluntly put it, “filthy, bordering on the beastly.” Yet gradually this changed, and today Americans are known for their obsession with cleanliness. This book provides a history of this transformation, from the pre-Civil War era to the 1950s. The book examines the work of early promoters of cleanliness, such as Catharine Beecher and Sylvester Graham; and describes how the Civil War marked a turning point in attitudes toward cleanliness, discussing the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and revealing how the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War inspired American women—such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and Louisa May Alcott—to volunteer as nurses. The postwar efforts of George E. Waring, Jr., a sanitary engineer who constructed sewer systems around the nation and who, as head of New York City's street-cleaning department, transformed the city from the nation's dirtiest to the nation's cleanest in three years, are also included. The book details the efforts to convince African-Americans and immigrants of the importance of cleanliness, examining the efforts of Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, and Lillian Wald. Indeed, we see how cleanliness shifted from a way to prevent disease to a way to assimilate, to become American. As the book enters the modern era, we learn how advertising for products such as soaps and deodorants showed people how to cleanse themselves and become part of the sweatless, odorless, and successful middle class.