scholarly journals Saving the Trumpeter Swan

Oryx ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 195-197
Author(s):  
Freda Davies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Cygnus Buccinator ◽  
Trumpeter Swan

Around the turn of the twentieth century, North American conservationists embarked on an intensive campaign to prevent the Trumpeter Swan (Cygnus buccinator) from following the Passenger Pigeon into extinction.

Tito Caula’s photographic imaginary and mid-century Caraqueño modernity

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Russell White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Urban Forms ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Physical Changes

The photography of the Argentinian photographer Francisco ‘Tito’ Caula tracked some of the key social and physical changes that Caracas underwent during the middle decades of the twentieth century. This period saw the country transition from dictatorship to democracy. Caula’s advertising photographs together with his images of spectacular spaces and buildings such as the Sabana Grande and the Centro Simón Bolívar presented Caracas as a mecca of mid-century ‘petro-modernity’ (LeMenager 2014). In contrast to late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernity, which was predominantly European in influence, Caraqueño modernity at mid-century was more cosmopolitan, taking particular inspiration from the United States. Caula’s photographs speak to the process of Americanization, defined as the adoption of North American cultural products, urban forms and patterns of living that Venezuela underwent during the years Caula spent in the country. Venezuela witnessed an economic boom in the 1960s and 70s, which was fuelled by the US acquisition of Venezuelan oil. In Venezuela, the boom facilitated the growth of a consumer society as well as the development of such quintessentially North American urban forms as freeways, shopping malls, drive-in movie theatres, suburbs and skyscrapers. It was also accompanied by the adoption of violent security tactics by the state’s security apparatus and the political marginalization of the radical left. Given that Caula held left-wing views, it is perhaps surprising that his photographs (at least those that have been published) do not explore the tensions at the heart of the Pacto de Punto Fijo, instituted to ensure that the transition from dictatorship to democracy would hold following elections in 1958. The celebration of North American influence within Caula’s photographs puts them in dialogue with critical perspectives that have seen US cultural influence rather more negatively. Moreover, their celebration of prosperity and their presentation of Caracas as an exciting city means that, for some, they have taken on a nostalgic hue.

The Cult of Beauty

2018 ◽  
pp. 192-224
Author(s):  
Robert Holland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
British Culture

This chapter details British engagement with the Mediterranean from 1890 to 1918. It has been argued that cultural despair was the distinguishing mark of modernism in the British compared to their European and North American counterparts, where a generally upbeat tone was more evident. Since the age of the Grand Tour, a pathology deeply marked by Mediterranean influences had characterized British culture. Thus, it was only logical that this remained true entering the twentieth century, and that despair and a sense of national fragility remained part of the mix. That hallmark characteristic had various roots, but critical to it was a continuing apprehension that the British remained unique as a leading European power in lacking an authentic, mature civilization of their own.

A Brief History of the Underworld and Organized Crime, c. 1750–1950

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Shore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
North American ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Criminal Organization ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores the evolution of concepts and definitions relating to criminal organization since 1750. Terms such as the “underworld,” “organized crime,” and “professional crime” have increasingly become part of the criminal justice lexicon in the modern period. However, while there has been a strong tradition of criminological and sociological investigation into the structures and hierarchies of syndicated crime and street gangs in the first half of the twentieth century, much of this work has been dominated and implicitly shaped by North American contexts. The hidden nature of such criminal activity means that most attention has been paid to those offenders whose recidivism and notoriety brought them into public disrepute. Thus, historians’ investigations into organized crime have been characteristically limited. This chapter provides a broader overview of the historical chronologies and geographies of the “underworld” and explores the key historical studies into the organization of crime in the modern period.

scholarly journals Kenneth Burke: Pioneer of Ecocriticism

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURENCE COUPE
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Know How ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
De Man

Nearly every handbook of critical theory acknowledges Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) to be the twentieth-century North American critic who was most ahead of his time. Yet he seems to have been so ambitious that we still do not know how to place him. Indeed, it would require the space of a whole book to trace the extensive but scarcely documented impact which he has had. Concepts for which many other critics became famous may be traced back to him: ‘‘the order of words’’ (Frye); ‘‘the rhetoric of fiction’’ (Booth); ‘‘blindness and insight’’ (De Man); ‘‘narrative as a socially symbolic act’’ (Jameson); ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ (Bloom). Indeed, it may well be that very anxiety which has led so many contemporary critics to repress his memory. But there is a change in the critical climate, corresponding to the global. This article is written in the hope that Burke will shortly be recognized as the first critic systematically to analyse culture and literature from an ecological perspective. As the dating of our epigraph indicates, he initiated this project over half a century before the rise of ecocriticism in the United States. Moreover, this was no passing phase for him; his whole career may be understood as a profound experiment in green thinking.

The Birth of the North American Home Improvement Store, 1905–1929

2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 687-728
Author(s):  
Richard Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Mail Order ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The North ◽  
Home Improvement ◽  
Housing Services ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trade Press

The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of themodern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. Themost important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

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