Journal of American & Comparative Cultures最新文献

{"title":"The Metaphysics of Star Trek","authors":"A. C. Smith","doi":"10.5860/choice.35-3227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.35-3227","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"322 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133827047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Collis' Zouaves: The 114th Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Civil War","authors":"M. Fishwick","doi":"10.5860/choice.35-5260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.35-5260","url":null,"abstract":"Collis' Zouaves: The 114th Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Civil War. Edward J. Hagerty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 352 pp., maps, index, photographs. $29.95. Edward J. Hagerty makes an important contribution to Civil War social history in Collis' Zouaves: The 114th Pennsylvania Infantry in the Civil War. Combining extensive primary research with quantitative analysis, Dr. Hagerty tells the story of a special volunteer regiment: the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry. Its distinctive Zouave uniform, adopted from the elite Algerian troops, and the social background of its members distinguished the 114th from other regiments. In contrast to typical Union soldiers, the majority of the 114th Pennsylvania Volunteers were neither farmers nor foreigners. Colonel Charles Henry Tucker Collis was a Philadelphia lawyer and most of his enlisted soldiers were skilled laborers. Because of their skilled background, the Pennsylvania Volunteers were more highly educated and more financially stable than the typical Union soldiers. As a result, Hagerty finds reasons for enlisting other than monetary gain. Hagerty shows that family members and professional associates enlisted in groups. With the small bounties offered at the time of the regiment's mustering in April, 1862, Hagerty finds that ideology and peer pressure induced most of the 114th Pennsylvania Volunteers to forsake stable, if not lucrative, jobs and families for the field. He shows through the Zouaves' letters that they joined either for such idealistic reasons as preserving the Union, ensuring liberty and democracy, and maintaining the American example, or out of family and professional loyalty. One especially motivated enlistee experiences a vision of George Washington entering his home and commanding him to join the Union Army. The Zouaves participated in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Petersburg. While these campaigns provide the historical backdrop for their story, Hagerty tells the soldiers' stories through their letters and journals. The little events-picket duty, hut building, parade, and drill-related through the soldiers' letters capture the reader and draw him into the soldiers' world. The reader empathizes for the soldiers as they relate the struggle of the march, the frustration of retreat and the disappointment of a meager 1864 Thanksgiving dinner. Hagerty conveys the soldiers' pride in themselves and their unit in combat. Hagerty meticulously describes the Zouaves' combat but is best at telling the stories around the battles-such as an episode of two shivering Zouaves huddled under a blanket on the field of Chancellorsville, soundly sleeping within a few feet of their dead and dying comrades. …","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117131444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"They Sang for Roosevelt: Songs of the People in the Age of FDR","authors":"Patrick J. Maney","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_85.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_85.X","url":null,"abstract":"In 1936 Jack Davis was washing dishes in a Burlington, Iowa, diner for $6 a week plus board. But he really wanted to write music for a living. He had high hopes for his latest composition, \"The World Has Ended (You've Said Good-Bye),\" which he took to a local music store to have printed on sheet music. He put $5 down and promised to pay the remaining $20-about three-weeks worth of salary-when he picked up the printed songs. In the meantime he lost his job at the diner. The only thing he could think to do was to write the president of the United States. After congratulating Franklin D. Roosevelt on his recent reelection victory, Davis told him about the song and about losing his job, and he asked FDR for a $20 loan to pay for the sheet music. Just so the president would know that everything was on the up-andup, Davis assured the president that he could send the money directly to the music store. \"I do want my song to get before the public,\" he explained, \"and I know that if it is known by the public that it was financed by you it will sell a million copies. I am very poor and I need this so very bad.\" It had occurred to Davis to write the president, he explained, because he'd recently heard about an elderly black man someplace in the South who was about to lose his home when FDR personally intervened to save it for him. \"So if you can't help me,\" Davis wrote, \"then let me thank you for having helped one other in need. I hope you won't think I'm too nervy or mean for asking you for the help. I only wish I could explain how badly I need this one thing.\"1 Davis's is no rags-to-riches story. So far as we know, he never published his song, and he probably lived out his life in obscurity. He is nevertheless important because he exemplifies one of the most curious phenomena of the 1930s and 40s: He was one of the many Americans who either asked FDR to help them get their songs published or, more often, was inspired to write music or poetry in his honor. And they wrote in equal or greater numbers about Eleanor Roosevelt. Most of them were nonprofessionals, and many of them were barely literate. I. I first learned about this song-writing tendency fifteen years ago while researching a biography of FDR at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York. I went to Hyde Park thinking I might model a chapter of my book on John William Ward's classic study, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age.2 From Jackson-related ballads, speeches, poems, and stories, Ward discerned a kind of national ideology, a set of ideals and myths that many Americans believed about themselves and their country. Perhaps FDR would yield similar treatment, I thought, although I wondered if there would be enough material to work with. Where, for example, would I find songs and poems about FDR? And would there be enough of them to draw any conclusions? Once in Hyde Park, however, I found that the problem was not the lack of sources, but their overwhelming abundance. FDR's papers alone contain some","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"118750167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The Darktown Series","authors":"B. L. Beau","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_71.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_71.X","url":null,"abstract":"Today most Americans recognize them as the creators of the Christmas card and calendar Americana. In the nineteenth century, however, Currier and Ives called their company \"The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints.\" They proudly advertised themselves as \"the best, cheapest, and most popular firm in a democratic country,\" providing \"colored engravings for the people.\" In the process they created a legacy of over 7000 prints that sold in the uncounted millions of copies-at one time 95% of all lithographs in circulation in the United States (Currier and Ives I: xxxviii-xxxxi, Karshan 31). Currier and Ives never intended to create or promote fine art, or even to produce prints of great value. Rather, they sought to produce images of nineteenth-- century America that would be attractive to their largely middle-class clientele. As Harry T. Peters, the most prominent collector of Currier and Ives prints and related materials, wrote decades ago: \"Currier and Ives were businessmen and craftsmen ... but primarily they [were] mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes.... In their prints can be found the whole florid panorama of our national life in the mid-nineteenth century\" (Peters 7). Currier and Ives created a pictorial record of nineteenth-century America, but not as conscious historians. They operated on terms the buying public-certainly a huge number-would accept. By-and-large they avoided conflicting reality and controversy, and when persuaded to take a stand on such subjects, they chose \"the side of the heaviest artillery.\" But they were not entirely positive, either. Many prints conveyed critical, negative, or at least cautionary messages, in obvious and subtle ways, again reflecting the concerns or fears of their audience. This was especially true of Currier and Ives's images of African Americans, few of which have been included in the many published collections and retrospective exhibitions of the past century. I do not have the space-nor is it necessary-to review the history of American attitudes toward African Americans in the nineteenth century. Instead, I would like to briefly examine Currier and Ives's representation of African Americans from the 1840s through the 1880s which, in fact, reflects that history in all its twists and turns and complexities. What we find in that fifty-year run of prints is an initial inclination to picture the horror of slavery, from which the company quickly retreated; the withdrawal of African Americans into the background of prints on life in antebellum America; their being summoned during the 1850s, '60s, and '70s as the cause of sectional politics and civil war; and finally, at the end of the century, their being pictured as completely incapable of advancing beyond their previous condition of servitude to live like \"civilized whites.\" My primary focus will be on the final stage of this pictorial narrative as told in the company's best-sellin","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128129636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Civil War as a Model for the Scope of Popular Culture, or the United States Civil War Center and the Popular Culture Association: Myriadminded Interdisciplinarians","authors":"David Madden","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_1.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_1.X","url":null,"abstract":"Pursuing research for my tenth novel, Sharpshooter, I gathered around me, over many years, more than 1,500 books, and from those books I gathered thousands of facts about every facet of the Civil War. The first draft was over 2,000 pages long; the published book is less than 160 pages short. During the 15 years between the first long draft and the final short draft, the mere accumulation of facts proved less and less meaningful; but the selection of facts and the placement of facts in contexts that ignite the reader's emotions, imagination, and intellect produced a novel that looks at the war in many unusual ways. Only 13 when he took up his rifle, the hero of Sharpshooter, at the age of ninety, is still trying to focus the war in his sights. \"Why,\" he wonders repeatedly, \"since I was in every battle, East and West, with General Longstreet, do I feel that I missed the war?\" The veteran sharpshooter and I had the same mission -to target the facts. But the more facts we got on target the more we felt-he as a participant looking back and I as a space age American citizen bemused and beguiled and bewitched by the facts-that we missed the war. Sharpshooter's theme is that all the participants, soldiers and civilians, missed the war as it happened and in memory. The vision out of which I created and developed the United States Civil War Center in 1992 derives from the same conviction. (I resigned in 1999.) Today, individually and collectively, no matter how many books we read or write, we miss the war to the extent that we fail to place the facts we know in the richest possible contexts and to illuminate them by personal emotional involvement, imaginative conceptualization, and complex intellectual implication. Possession of the facts and the artifacts alone is not enough. And it is not the dull recital of facts only that makes history dry and remote for many American children and adults, it is dull imagination. The Civil War Center's mission is to facilitate the study of the war from the perspective of every conceivable academic discipline, profession, and occupation. I myself am not an academic historian; I am a novelist and a teacher of literature and creative writing in all genres. The Center strives to help all American citizens, young and old, North and South, avoid missing the war by urging them to imagine fresh perspectives that will enable them to make the war that most profoundly shaped the American character an integral part of their own individual identities today. The Civil War Center has taken leadership in this new approach. In the spring of 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and the President signed a resolution designating the United States Civil War Center and its partner Gettysburg's College Civil War Institute as the institutions charged with planning and facilitating the Sesquicentennial. The long-range implementation of our interdisciplinary mission will materialize in projects such as publications, conferences, and exhibits up to and","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124371638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Evolution of a Gladiator: History, Representation, and Revision in Spartacus","authors":"Carla Hoffman","doi":"10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_63.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1537-4726.2000.2301_63.X","url":null,"abstract":"The revolt led by the gladiator Spartacus (73-71 B.C.) mushroomed into the largest slave insurrection in western history and shook the Roman Republic. But, almost as remarkably, more than 2000 years later, it stormed the popular culture of the Cold War United States with a pair of contrasting representations which recast the uprising in terms of twentieth-century politics. Howard Fast's 1951 novel Spartacus imagined the rebellion as a Marxist war of oppressed proletarians against their decadent overlords. Kirk Douglas's1 1960 film, based on the novel, aimed for a mass audience by portraying the insurrection as a populist episode in the struggle for human freedom. The contrast between these two versions of Spartacus, emphasizing as they do different aspects of the historical record, exemplifies the way that popular interpretations of history change according to their cultural context. The following pages detail the ways that the novel and the film served different thematic purposes in the Cold War United States.2 Spartacus the book, contrasted with Spartacus the movie, reveals the evolution of a gladiator. History into Fiction, Fiction into Myth Howard Fast, bestselling author and self-proclaimed \"card-carrying member of the Communist Party\" (Fast, Being Red 1) wrote the novel Spartacus following a three-month stint in a federal prison camp in 1950. The charge was contempt of Congress, based on his refusal to testify before the House Un-- American Activities Committee. Viewing himself as the victim of an anti-red witch hunt during an era he later dubbed the \"small terror\" (Fast, Being Red 156) because of its obsessive anti-Communism, Fast inscribed his novel for the purpose of inspiring leftists like himself during times of persecution. His dedication of the book records that he wishes \"those who read [Spartacus], my children and others, [to] take strength for our troubled future . . . that they may struggle against oppression and wrong-so that the dream of Spartacus may come to be in our own time\" (Spartacus v).3 To inspire modern readers, Fast employs two strategies. One comes from his awareness that Spartacus's story had been largely forgotten in the United States of the early 1950s. His first strategy, therefore, involves simply telling the tale of the gladiator and his uprising in a readable, exciting fashion which will gain large numbers of readers from across the political spectrum, and \"educate the masses\" about this forgotten historical event. The fact that Spartacus has proven an international bestseller for almost a half-century shows that Fast succeeded wildly in this important goal. Fast's second strategy reaffirmed a longstanding Communist tradition of viewing Spartacus as an early leftist. This second strategy takes \"educating the masses\" one step further, into leftist mythmaking. Several times in the course of its 360+ pages, Spartacus refers to a past golden age, \"where all men and women too had been equals and there was neither m","PeriodicalId":134380,"journal":{"name":"Journal of American & Comparative Cultures","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"118474944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}