The Music of Gordon Binkerd

Tempo ◽  
1975 ◽  
pp. 2-13
Author(s):  
Rudy Shackelford
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
South Dakota ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
World War ◽  
Indian Reservation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Sand Hills ◽  
Classroom Study ◽  
The Rose ◽  
Walter Piston

Klaus George Roy, in a profile of Gordon Binkerd's Harvard mentor, Walter Piston, spoke of that composer's musical ‘mental health’, of his work as ‘sane and un-neurotic; he does not hand on to us his problems, but his solutions’. Although these are scarcely qualities one acquires by classroom study, they have proved equally characteristic of Binkerd himself. He recalls that the knowledge of Bach fugues gained under Piston's tutelage was ‘the most decisive single factor in my preparation as a composer’. Binkerd came to Harvard as a candidate for the Ph.D. in musicology, directly after the end of World War II and naval service in the Pacific theatre. Earlier, he had worked with Bernard Rogers, ‘that orchestral genius’, at Eastman, and with Russell Danburg and Gail Kubik at Dakota Wesleyan University. He was born 22 May 1916 on the Ponca Indian Reservation in Lynch, Nebraska, a few miles below the South Dakota border. Grandparents on both sides of his family had homesteaded in the Sand Hills during the 1860's, and Binkerd's parents lived in various small towns in Nebraska before moving to the Rose Bud Sioux Reservation at Gregory, South Dakota.

Before the summit: News media framing, scripts and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima

2021 ◽  
pp. 175063522199094
Author(s):  
Matthew Pressman ◽  
James J Kimble
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Framing ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Cognitive Scripts ◽  
New Interpretation

Drawing upon media framing theory and the concept of cognitive scripts, this article provides a new interpretation of the context in which the famous World War II photograph ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ appeared. This interpretation is based primarily on an examination of American newspaper and newsreel coverage from the Pacific island battles prior to Iwo Jima. The coverage – especially the pictorial coverage – often followed a three-step sequence that showed US forces proceeding from a landing to a series of skirmishes, then culminating with a flag-raising image. This created a predictable cognitive script. That script, combined with other framing devices found in the news coverage (such as metaphors and catchphrases), conveyed the misleading message that the Allies’ final victory over Japan was imminent in early 1945. The Iwo Jima photo drove home that message more emphatically than anything else. This circumstance had profound implications for government policy at the time and, in retrospect, it illustrates the potency of media framing – particularly in times of crisis or war.

The Melting Pot of the Pacific

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Asian Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Racial Harmony

This chapter deals with the concept of Hawaiʻi as a racial paradise. In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals began to tout the islands' ethnically diverse composition—including the indigenous population, white settler colonists, and imported labor from Asia and other locales—as a Pacific melting pot free of the mainland's social taboos on intermingling. After World War II, the association of Hawaiʻi with racial harmony and tolerance received unprecedented national attention as Americans heatedly debated the question of whether or not the territory, annexed to the United States in 1898, should become a state. Statehood enthusiasts tagged the islands' majority Asian population, with its demonstrated capability of assimilation, as a forceful rationale for admission.

William Gerald Beasley 1919–2006

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Nish
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Great Book ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
University College ◽  
Teacher Researcher ◽  
University College London

William Gerald Beasley (1919–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was the pioneer in introducing Japanese history into British academic circles as teacher, researcher, and author. He was born in Hanwell, Middlesex on December 22, 1919, and moved to Brackley, Northamptonshire, where he was educated at Magdalen College School. In 1937, Beasley registered for a degree in history at University College London. In the last weeks of World War II, he was in the Pacific Islands interrogating Japanese naval prisoners who were few in number and ‘never seemed to possess important information’. Late in June 1945, Beasley was ordered to join the flagship of the British Pacific Fleet, the HMS King George V, so as to be ‘available for duty in Japan, if needed’. In 1947, he began to teach at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which was the beneficiary of financial help under the recommendations of the Scarbrough Commission. In his great book Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945 (Oxford, 1987), Beasley re-examined the nature of Japan's imperialism.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
David J Ulbrich
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Pacific Basin ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.

On “Nationalism and the Imagination”

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 504-506
Author(s):  
Jean Franco
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Memories ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Military ◽  
Depression Era

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.

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