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Whether as wine, beer, mead, or spirits, alcohol has had a constant and often controversial role in human life. This book surveys the attitudes and consumption of alcohol and examines a 9,000 year cultural and economic history, uncovering the tensions between alcoholic drinks as a nutritious and potable staple of daily diets and as an object of political and religious regulation. It argues that brewing was one of the earliest and most common forms of water purification, which further integrated alcohol into the dense population centers in Europe and the Americas. Despite this practical use, no commodity has been more regulated by governmental and religious authorities than alcohol. As a potential source of social disruption, alcohol created volatile boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable consumption, breaking through barriers of class, race, and gender. This book follows ever-changing cultural meanings of these potent potables and makes the surprising argument that fewer people are quaffing alcoholic drinks than ever before. The book examines and explains the importance and effect of alcohol's production, consumption, and meaning across the globe.

In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings. This book explores the forces that sparked a dramatic “prison art renaissance,” shedding light on how incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. These included everything from George Jackson's revolutionary Soledad Brother to Miguel Pinero's acclaimed off-Broadway play and Hollywood film Short Eyes. An extraordinary range of prison programs—fine arts, theater, secondary education, and prisoner-run programs—allowed the voices of prisoners to influence the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican writers, “New Journalism,” and political theater, among the most important aesthetic contributions of the decade. By the 1980s and 1990s, prisoners' educational and artistic programs were scaled back or eliminated as the “war on crime” escalated. By then these prisoners' words had crossed over the wall, helping many Americans to rethink the meaning of the walls themselves and, ultimately, the meaning of the society that produced them.

What is Americanism? The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity—as an ideology, an articulation of the nation's rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political meaning. In response to the pervasive vision of Americanism as a battle cry or a smug assumption, this book stirs up new questions and debates that challenge us to rethink the model currently being exported, too often by force, to the rest of the world. This book is divided into two sections. The section addresses the understanding of Americanism within the United States over the past two centuries, from the early republic to the war in Iraq. The second section provides perspectives from around the world in an effort to make sense of how the national creed and its critics have shaped diplomacy, war, and global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approaching a controversial ideology many of the chapters call for a revival of the ideals of Americanism in a new progressive politics that can bring together an increasingly polarized and fragmented citizenry.

This intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. The author addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of the study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these “critical Americans” articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. The author argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country's first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. This book argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat. It weaves together cultural history and the history of science to bring readers into the strange and complex world of the American Progressive Era. The era's emphasis on science and self-control left a profound mark on American eating, one that remains today in everything from the ubiquity of science-based dietary advice to the tenacious idealization of thinness.

What southerners do, where they go, and what they expect to accomplish in their spare time, their “leisure,” reveals much about their cultural values, class and racial similarities and differences, and historical perspectives. This book offers a reference to the culture of sports and recreation in the American South, surveying the various activities in which southerners engage in their nonwork hours, as well as attitudes surrounding those activities. The book explores activities from the familiar (porch sitting and fairs) to the essential (football and stock car racing) to the unusual (pool checkers and a sport called “fireballing”). The text also profiles major sites associated with recreational activities (such as Dollywood, drive-ins, and the Appalachian Trail) and prominent sports figures (including Althea Gibson, Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, and Hank Aaron).

The development of the American nation has typically been interpreted in terms of its expansion through space, specifically its growth westward. This book posits time, not space, as the most significant territory of the young nation. It argues that beginning in the nineteenth century, the actual geography of the nation became less important, as Americans imagined the future as their true national territory. The book explores how transformations in the perception of time shaped American conceptions of democratic society and modern nationhood. It focuses on three ways of imagining time: the romantic historical time that prevailed at the outset of the nineteenth century; the geological “deep time” that arose as widely read scientific works displaced biblical chronology with a new scale of millions of years of natural history; and the technology-driven “clock time” that became central to American culture by century's end. The book analyzes cultural artifacts ranging from clocks and scientific treatises to paintings and literary narratives to show how Americans made use of these diverse ideas about time to create competing visions of American nationhood.

America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. The author of this book examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to “try” the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William Mac-Creary Burwell, she argues that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the slavery debate in the courts and in print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches, this book provides an alternative to the official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents, legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. The author invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many antebellum Americans did—through the lens of popular print culture.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an emerging consumer culture in the United States promoted constant spending to meet material needs and develop social identity and self-cultivation. This book examines the key players who are active in shaping this cultural evolution: advertisers and consumer advocates. It argues that even though these two professional groups invented radically different models for proper spending, both groups propagated mass consumption as a specifically American social practice and an important element of nationality and citizenship. Advertisers, the book shows, used nationalist ideals, icons, and political language to define consumption as the foundation of the pursuit of happiness. Consumer advocates, on the other hand, viewed the market with a republican-inspired skepticism and fought commercial incursions on consumer independence. The result, it argues, was a redefinition of the citizen as consumer. The articulation of an “American Way of Life” in the Depression and World War II ratified consumer abundance as the basis of a distinct American culture and history.

Vegetarianism has been practiced in the United States since the country's founding, yet the early years of the movement have been woefully misunderstood and understudied. Through the Civil War, the vegetarian movement focused on social and political reform, but by the late nineteenth century, the movement became a path for personal strength and success in a newly individualistic, consumption-driven economy. This development led to greater expansion and acceptance of vegetarianism in mainstream society. So argues this lively history of early American vegetarianism and social reform. From Bible Christians to Grahamites, the American Vegetarian Society to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, it explores the diverse proponents of reform-motivated vegetarianism and explains how each of these groups used diet as a response to changing social and political conditions. By examining the advocates of vegetarianism, including institutions, organizations, activists, and publications, the author explores how an idea grew into a nationwide community united not only by diet but also by broader goals of social reform.

If you grew up in the era of mood rings and lava lamps, you probably remember Free to Be … You and Me—the groundbreaking children's record, book, and television special that debuted in 1972. Conceived by actress and producer Marlo Thomas and promoted by Ms. magazine, it captured the spirit of the growing women's movement, and inspired girls and boys to challenge stereotypes, value cooperation, and respect diversity. In this lively collection marking the fortieth anniversary of Free to Be … You and Me, thirty-two contributors explore the creation and legacy of this popular children's classic. Featuring a prologue by Marlo Thomas, the book offers an insiders' view by the original creators, as well as accounts by activists and educators who changed the landscape of childhood in schools, homes, toy stores, and libraries nationwide. Essays document the rise of nonsexist children's culture during the 1970s and address how Free to Be still speaks to families today.

Tracing the history of intercultural struggle and cooperation in the citrus belt of Greater Los Angeles, the author of this book explores the social and cultural forces that helped make the city the expansive and diverse metropolis that it is today. As the citrus-growing regions of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys in eastern Los Angeles County expanded during the early twentieth century, the agricultural industry there developed along segregated lines, primarily between white landowners and Mexican and Asian laborers. Initially, these communities were sharply divided. But Los Angeles, unlike other agricultural regions, saw important opportunities for intercultural exchange develop around the arts and within multi-ethnic community groups. Whether fostered in such informal settings as dance halls and theaters or in such formal organizations as the Intercultural Council of Claremont or the Southern California Unity Leagues, these interethnic encounters formed the basis for political cooperation to address labor discrimination and solve problems of residential and educational segregation. Though intercultural collaborations were not always successful, the author argues that they constitute an important chapter not only in Southern California's social and cultural development but also in the larger history of American race relations.