From Counterculture to Anticulture

1972 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-193
Author(s):  
Donald P. Costello
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Anthony Burgess ◽  
Rolling Stone ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society

Three films circumscribe the counterculture of the last decade. These three films have as their subject the counterculture, and they themselves became cultural events. Woodstock, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange: they define, warn, and predict. Woodstock (the event) and Woodstock (the film, which became the event for millions of the young) defined the counterculture of the 1960's. Of course, that definition did not begin the phenomenon of a youth culture that runs counter. Nor was Woodstock the first description of it. Anthony Burgess wrote his counterculture novel A Clockwork Orange over 10 years ago, and he has told us in a June 8, 1972, Rolling Stone article that he planned the book nearly 30 years ago. The droogs in that novel were some version of Teddy Boys or greasers or hipsters projected into an apocalyptic future: “The work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier).” Some of those tendencies, and several others, were exposed by the counterculture itself in Easy Rider, just before Woodstock. But Woodstock purified and refined the counterculture—and successfully made it self-conscious, mythologized it. And thus defined it.

Explaining the Great American Crime Decline: A Review of Blumstein and Wallman, Goldberger and Rosenfeld, and Zimring

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (02) ◽  
pp. 489-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Barker
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Urban Sociology ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Workshop Report ◽  
Crime Drop ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
Crime Decline ◽  
American Society

This essay reviews three books as they document and explain the 1990s crime decline: Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman, eds., (2006) The Crime Drop in America; Arthur S. Goldberger and Richard Rosenfeld, eds., (2008) Understanding Crime Patterns: Workshop Report; and Franklin E. Zimring (2007), The Great American Crime Decline. It presents the empirical detail of the crime decline and examines the most commonly cited explanatory factors: imprisonment, policing, demography, and economic growth. It then suggests alternative lines of research in urban sociology—urban development, youth culture, and immigration—that may better explain the decline as the result of changes in the cultural and social fabric of American society, particularly in cities where the steepest declines occurred.

What Student Revolution?

Worldview ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 13-15
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Stupak
Keyword(s):  
Youth Culture ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Student Movement ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Generation

Many intellectuals sensed the dawning of a "new generation" in the activism, idealism, and moral pronouncements of the student movement of the 1960's. This movement seemed to be reaching fruition with the "revolutionary" tremors that the youth culture let loose on college campuses and throughout American society in the wake of Cambodia, Kent State, and Jackson State during the spring of 1970.But less than six months later, the "sounds of silence" on the college campuses became deadening, and the savants of the "new society" expressed disillusionment and bewilderment.

Sharing the Burden

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
International Role ◽  
American Society

The destruction of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire was an unprecedented tragedy. Theodore Roosevelt was adamant that it was the “greatest crime” of the First World War. The mass killing of approximately one million Armenian Christians was the culmination of a series of massacres that Winston Churchill would recall had roused publics on both sides of the Atlantic and inspired fervent appeals to see the Armenians “righted.” This book explains why the Armenian struggle for survival became so entangled with the debate over the United States’ international role as it rose to world power at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, it provides a fresh perspective on the role of humanitarian intervention in US foreign policy, Anglo-American relations and the emergence of a new international order after World War One. The clash over the US responsibility to protect the Armenians encapsulated the nation’s conflict over its global position and was a central preoccupation of both Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For American and British leaders, a US intervention in the Near East to secure an independent Armenia was key to establishing a revised international system and to their visions for the new League of Nations. The debate over safeguarding the Armenians reveals the values that animated American society during a pivotal period in its history. In forcing US politicians to grapple for the first time with atrocities on this scale, it also demonstrates dilemmas in humanitarian politics that continue to bedevil policymakers today.

Calvinism in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darryl Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society

The history of Calvinism in the United States is part of a much larger development, the globalization of western Christianity. American Calvinism owes its existence to the transplanting of European churches and religious institutions to North America, a process that began in the 16th century, first with Spanish and French Roman Catholics, and accelerated a century later when Dutch, English, Scottish, and German colonists and immigrants of diverse Protestant backgrounds settled in the New World. The initial variety of Calvinists in North America was the result of the different circumstances under which Protestantism emerged in Europe as a rival to the Roman Catholic Church, to the diverse civil governments that supported established Protestant churches, and to the various business sponsors that included the Christian ministry as part of imperial or colonial designs. Once the British dominated the Eastern seaboard (roughly 1675), and after English colonists successfully fought for political independence (1783), Calvinism lost its variety. Beyond their separate denominations, English-speaking Protestants (whether English, Scottish, or Irish) created a plethora of interdenominational religious agencies for the purpose of establishing a Christian presence in an expanding American society. For these Calvinists, being Protestant went hand in hand with loyalty to the United States. Outside this pan-Protestant network of Anglo-American churches and religious institutions were ethnic-based Calvinist denominations caught between Old World ways of being Christian and American patterns of religious life. Over time, most Calvinist groups adapted to national norms, while some retained institutional autonomy for fear of compromising their faith. Since 1970, when the United States entered an era sometimes called post-Protestant, Calvinist churches and institutions have either declined or become stagnant. But in certain academic, literary, and popular culture settings, Calvinism has for some Americans, whether connected or not to Calvinist churches, continued to be a source for sober reflection on human existence and earnest belief and religious practice.

Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Van Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Prosthetic Devices ◽  
British America ◽  
Political Identification ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society ◽  
Material Artifacts

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and, eventually, of American citizenship. Interweaving analysis of paintings and prints with furniture, architecture, textiles, and literary works, the book reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, this work illuminates that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to institute civility and to distance themselves from native Americans and African Americans. It also traces colonial women’s contested place in forging provincial culture in British America. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. Instead, they actively participated in making Anglo-American society.

Sky of blue, sea of green: a semiotic reading of the film Yellow Submarine

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIANNE TATOM LETTS
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Hero's Journey ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The Real ◽  
Cultural Events

AbstractThe Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine (1968) reflects conflicts between conventional society, represented by classical music, and rebellious youth culture, represented by other musical types, such as folk and pop (subsumed under the term ‘vernacular’). Taking their inspiration from the song ‘Yellow Submarine’ (Revolver, 1966), the filmmakers created a narrative for a psychedelic ‘hero’s journey’ from existing Beatles songs. This article discusses how the musical codes that symbolise different groups are used to mediate between divergent elements in both the film and contemporary society, by referring to such elements beyond the film as the Beatles’ comprehensive body of songs (which in itself forms a kind of mythology) and cultural events of the time. In Yellow Submarine, the Blue Meanies imprison Pepperland by immobilising all producers of music, whether ‘classical’ (the string quartet led by the elderly Lord Mayor) or ‘vernacular’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). The Beatles are able to free Pepperland by manipulating and ultimately uniting the musical codes – an idealistic message for the ‘real world’ to heed.

‘I’m an adolescent. And that’s how I’m going to stay’: Lessing and Youth Culture 1956–1962

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Youth Groups ◽  
Anthony Burgess ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Youth Subcultures ◽  
British Culture

The mid-to-late 1950s saw an explosion of youth subcultures in Britain – teenagers, Teddy Boys, jazz fans, hipsters, beatniks, mods and rockers. This range generated a series of moral panics and media fascination. The New Left in particularly were split on whether to see these new youth groups as indicative of a consumer-led Americanization of traditional working-class British culture or as potential sites for cultural (and political) rebellion. Lessing’s representation of youth is particularly interesting in this context, and it is a recurring theme in a number of works from this period including her plays Each to His Own Wilderness and Play With a Tiger, her documentary novel In Pursuit of the English, and her novels A Ripple From the Storm and The Golden Notebook. This chapter traces Lessing’s engagement with youth culture and argues that she articulates concerns within the New Left and British culture more broadly. Her work is read against contemporary cultural commentary from the New Left, especially in a series of articles in the Universities and Left Review, and against other fiction and commentary from the period, including works by Lynne Reid Banks, Anthony Burgess, Shelagh Delaney, Richard Hoggart, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe, and Muriel Spark.

The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Research ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Meaningful Connections

The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism sheds new light on the nature of evangelical religion by locating its rise with reference to those consequential changes in Anglo-American society we now routinely acknowledge with the terms Modernity, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Bringing together a wide range of sources, the book makes meaningful connections between the Protestant evangelical awakening and the history of science, law, art, and literature in the eighteenth century. There was a profound turn toward nature and the authority of natural knowledge in each of these discourses and a more democratic public sphere available for debating contemporary concerns. In this modern context, evangelicals forcefully pressed their agenda for “true religion,” believing it was still possible to experience “the life of God in the soul of man.” The results were dramatic and disruptive. This book provides a fresh perspective, and presents new research, on the religious thought of leading figures such as John Wesley and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards, but it also traces the significance of evangelical spirituality for elites and non-elites across multiple genres including not only theology, but also natural and moral philosophy, poetry, painting, literature, and music. Viewing devotion, culture, and ideas together, it is possible to see the advent of evangelicalism as a significant new episode in the history of Christian spirituality.

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