Schizophrenic City: Souvenirs of Minneapolis

Prospects ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 301-310
Author(s):  
Cristine M. Levenduski

Collecting souvenirs, an impulse nearly as universal as travel it-self, has spawned industries in tourist spots throughout the United States and most other nations of the world. Tourists purchase souvenirs both as commemorative artifacts, that at some future time will call to mind the experiences of the vacation and of the city visited, and as communicative artifacts. T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers proclaim, “this is where I've been” or “this is where I live” or “this is where my friends vacationed.” Some tourist spots lend themselves to this communicative function more easily than do others. Cities like San Francisco, for example, are highly imageable cities; they have a bridge or building or monument that serves as a symbol of the city consistent with the experience of visitors and residents alike.1 Minneapolis, however, lacks this kind of symbolic artifact. While any Twin Cities' resident, most Minnesotans, and many avid fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show will recognize the Minneapolis skyline, particularly the prominent IDS building, this same site shown to a New Yorker or Californian who has never visited the area, will fail to serve as an identifiable landmark. Lacking such a symbol, creators of Minneapolis souvenirs have had to find images that represent the city and that are consistent with the sense of the place that tourists and residents experience.

Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert

Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another, and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked primary source evidence. Consuming Identities charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The following chapters focus on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


1932 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-715
Author(s):  
John A. Fairlie

It is safe to say that very few people in the United States have any appreciation of the importance of the Netherlands Indies to Holland, to the world at large, or to the United States. Yet they constitute a major part in the economic prosperity of Holland, furnish a large element in the international trade of the world, and are significant factors in the foreign trade of the United States. They are also the seat of political developments, resulting from the political awakening of Asia, which are worth attention.From west to east, these islands extend more than 3,000 miles, or as far as from San Francisco to the longitude of the eastern end of Maine; and from north to south, more than 1,000 miles.


2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Aseem Inam

What do we mean by the changing nature of urban change? First of all, in the 20th and 21st centuries, cities have been changing in different and dramatic ways, whether through grassroots mobilizations, through technological leaps, or through profit-driven speculations. Second, our understanding of how cities change has also been evolving, in particularly through empirical work that challenges the broad-brush universalizations of conventional thinking. The authors of the six selected articles take us through an around-the-world tour of cities and regions that range from Mulhouse in France to Dakar in Senegal to Las Vegas in the United States to Bogota in Colombia and beyond. Each author carefully examines the nature of urban change and how planners, developers, and citizens are either dealing with that change or even shaping it. Together, what the articles suggest is that we need a more fine-grained understanding of the city as flux in order to obtain better theoretical insights as well as urban practices that can better manage and ultimately shape urban change to benefit citizens, especially those who are marginalized.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-57
Author(s):  
Teresa I. Fortoul van der Goes

Laura Burch was a self-taught artist, daughter of the hippie generation. It was not uncommon to see her on the streets of San Francisco in the United States selling her brilliantly colored, vibrant, and poignant, exquisitely adorned, handcrafted jewelry. That unmistakable style reflected her love for life and her strongly creative nature that transcended the business, financial and fashion circles around the world. Although she died from complications of a rare and painful bone disease, her legacy lives on in all kinds of decorative motifs that can be found on a range of objects for the home or kitchen. But her greatest legacy was her unstoppable creativity.


Author(s):  
Brian Cross

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Jacek ◽  
Anne Rozan ◽  
Maylis Desrousseaux ◽  
Isabelle Combroux

Urban development is often confronted with a lack of available space. Brownfield sites offer great potential for sustainable urban planning because of their often-central location and the benefits associated with their redevelopment. Although the interest in brownfield regeneration has led to a lot of research on this topic, there is not yet a comprehensive review of brownfield research. In this review, we analyze the research on brownfields and provide a picture of the published case studies. We focus primarily on brownfields research in the United States, Europe, and China. This exploratory research is based on an analysis of the published scientific literature available in the Web of Science database. Initially used in North America, the term brownfield quickly became popular in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe. However, with the exception of the United States, there is no specific legislation for these sites; their protection is often based indirectly on directives or laws related to soil pollution, biodiversity or the environment. The perception of the potential use of brownfield sites varies considerably from one part of the world to another, and international collaborations between researchers from different parts of the world remain limited. Most of the described reuses of brownfield sites are forms of soft reuse (53%), and the type of reuse of a site depends more on the surrounding urbanization levels and the specific region than on the past use of a brownfield site. Despite the continued interest in the rehabilitation of these sites, especially due to the increasing demand for nature in the city following the Covid-19 crisis, many questions regarding the future of brownfield sites remain unanswered. The factors influencing their successful redevelopment are unclear, and further research is urgently needed to ensure a truly sustainable re-use of these sites.


Author(s):  
Amy K. DeFalco Lippert

In the burgeoning urban centers of the United States in the nineteenth century, anonymous denizens interpreted one another and presented themselves through the visual medium. Publicly displayed and circulated imagery was broadly accessible to San Francisco’s diverse array of immigrants. Photographs and other illustrations provided newcomers with a universal language—a way to view and explore each other and a means of conceptualizing San Francisco. As the city developed and tents gave way to buildings, the modes of production, circulation, and display of visual ephemera grew apace, revealing their adaptability to the burgeoning market economy and their preeminence in San Francisco’s urban culture. A competitive commercial culture among San Franciscan photographers catered to and often exploited public anxieties over the divide between appearance and reality.


2019 ◽  
pp. 120-149
Author(s):  
John M. Thompson

Chapter 6 considers US-Japanese relations from 1905 to 1909. It examines several sources of tension, including an anti-Japanese movement that was particularly strong among organized labor in San Francisco, sensationalist newspapers in both countries, and concerns that Japan would attack the Philippines or Hawaii. The chapter argues that Roosevelt sought to strike a delicate balance in relations with Tokyo by protecting Japanese already in the United States, but also reducing the inflow of immigrants to mollify anti-Japanese sentiment. In an effort to upgrade US capabilities in the event of war, the president also convinced Congress to build additional battleships and sent the navy on a cruise around the world. TR also viewed the cruise as a way to increase public support for naval expansion.


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