Bill Finegan's Gershwin Arrangements and the American Concept of Hybridity

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVAN RAPPORT

AbstractBill Finegan's arrangements of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1942 and of Concerto in F for the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1952 provide a basis for interpreting Gershwin's compositions. Finegan's treatments suggest that techniques central to popular forms were foundational to Gershwin's style in these pieces. Furthermore, Gershwin's and Finegan's works shed light on the concept of hybridity in the United States, especially as it concerns the label of “symphonic jazz” or “concert jazz” and ideas about race. Hybrid terms such as “symphonic jazz” manage to challenge musical and social categories while simultaneously reinforcing them.

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Stephen Gageler

James Bryce was a contemporary of Albert Venn Dicey. Bryce published in 1888 The American Commonwealth. Its detailed description of the practical operation of the United States Constitution was influential in the framing of the Australian Constitution in the 1890s. The project of this article is to shed light on that influence. The article compares and contrasts the views of Bryce and of Dicey; Bryce's views, unlike those of Dicey, having been largely unexplored in contemporary analyses of our constitutional development. It examines the importance of Bryce's views on two particular constitutional mechanisms – responsible government and judicial review – to the development of our constitutional structure. The ongoing theoretical implications of The American Commonwealth for Australian constitutional law remain to be pondered.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1467-1499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirlee Lichtman-Sadot

Abstract Conditioning a monetary benefit on individuals’ family status can create distortions, even in individuals’ seemingly personal decisions, such as the birth of a child. Birth timing and its response to various policies has been studied by economists in several papers. However, pregnancy timing – i.e. the timing of conception – and its response to policy announcements has not been examined. This paper makes use of a 21-month lag between announcing California’s introduction of the first paid parental leave program in the United States and its scheduled implementation to evaluate whether women timed their pregnancies in order to be eligible for the expected benefit. Using natality data, documenting all births in the United States, a difference-in-differences approach compares California births to births in states outside of California before the program’s introduction and in 2004, the year California introduced paid parental leave. The results show that the distribution of California births in 2004 significantly shifted from the first half of the year to the second half of the year, immediately after the program’s implementation. While the effect is present for all population segments of new mothers, it is largest for disadvantaged mothers – with lower education levels, of Hispanic origin, younger, and not married. These results shed light on the population segments most affected by the introduction of paid parental leave and on the equitable nature of paid parental leave policies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 120-157
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carnes

This chapter aims to shed light on the gates that keep workers out of office in the United States. Elections themselves appear to be the root cause. The analysis focuses on the two features of elections that seem to be behind the micro-level inequalities documented in Chapter 3, namely, the high and rising burdens associated with campaigning and the insular world of candidate recruitment. The practical anxieties that keep individual workers from running appear to stem from the very nature of elections in a representative democracy. The encouragement gaps that workers experience seem to arise from the basic logic of the candidate recruitment process, the fundamental challenges that lead many recruiters to simply look for new recruits within their own mostly white-collar personal networks.


Author(s):  
Hans G. Kippenberg

An instruction manual consisting of four sheets in Arabic was found with three of the four teams that performed the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. The writing conceived of the action as a raid (ghazwa), as we know it from early Islamic history. It instructed the teams how to perform the ghazwa correctly. Purifying their intentions by recitals, rituals, and bodily cleaning, they turn their attack into an act of worship. A part called the “second stage” anticipates the issue of assuring divine protection at the airport. Finally “a third stage” urges the teams to act in the plane according the practice of the Prophet and to achieve martyrdom. To understand the manual and its framing of the violence, six dimensions will be analyzed: (1) Arguments for and against the authenticity of the document are discussed. (2) The attack happened in the wake of a declaration of war by the “World Islamic Front for the Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” in 1998, signed by Osama bin Laden and leaders of other jihadist groups. (3) The message spread across the Internet and was accepted by various groups that regarded the situation of Islam as threatened, among them a group of young Muslim men in Hamburg. A network called al-Qaeda emerged. (4) The present world is dominated by the power of ignorance and hubris (jahiliyya). The manual prescribed an attack in terms of the raids (ghazwa) of the Prophet in Medina. (5) The manual presumes a particular communal form of organizing militant Muslims. (6) It celebrated militancy of Muslims and presupposed a fighter’s ethos in the diaspora. An argument is made that the American concept of terrorism as a manifestation of evil and immorality destined to be eradicated militarily by the United States and their allies ignores the secular character of conflict and accelerates the cycle of violence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde ◽  
Mary Kathryn Ketch

Naturalization, or the process through which citizenship is granted to a foreigner, is a process that has begun to increasingly look like that of the school. In the United States, as in many other countries, one of the main features of the naturalization is the civics test. This paper aims to document the historical development of naturalization procedures in the United States and shed light on how schoolish tools were introduced to decide who can be offered or denied American citizenship. Much of past research has critiqued the civics test for its unreliability, or difficulty for even natives. We argue, however, that the current civics test is rather a product of a system that began without a solid foundation. In an attempt to avoid fraud and control efficiency, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has promoted the use of a test that devalues the importance of the choice to re-align loyalties to a country and regulates it to memory testing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-52
Author(s):  
Haleigh R Williams

Abstract Historically, female patienthood has been defined by an expectation of passivity and the concession of bodily autonomy. After Birth by Elisa Albert (2015) and Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens (2016) shed light on the status of the modern female patient through the lens of her treatment throughout the process of childbirth in a clinical setting. The increasing medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth in the United States has added a compelling layer to the existing tension between women and the institution of medicine. Positioning these texts in conversation with the treatment of women at the hands of healthcare workers allows us to contextualize the fictional narratives, which themselves offer a dialectal framework to facilitate our understanding of female patienthood.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147892992093212
Author(s):  
Darin DeWitt

In this article, I present a portrait of the American power elite and their relationship with the party system. I focus on occupational categories as institutional positions and take up three questions: Which occupational categories wield social influence? How politically mobilized is each of these occupational categories? And what partisan tilt is exhibited by each category? My results help clarify the contemporary structure of American electoral competition. Furthermore, they also shed light on which social groups have a voice in American politics and, thus, speak to questions of political equality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 237802311773917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Smith

Where do individuals identifying as Hispanic fit in the racial landscape of the United States? The answer offered by past work is complex: The empirical results do not lend themselves to simple interpretation as no single hypothesis fits the Hispanic case very well. Instead, Hispanic integration is described as mixtures of different archetypical hypotheses, like panethnic formation, white assimilation, and racialized assimilation. My goal is to develop a formal framework to help make sense of this complex picture. I extend past work by showing which combination of integration processes (panethnic formation, white assimilation, etc.) best characterizes Hispanic marriage patterns. I make two analytical contributions. First, I organize past Hispanic hypotheses, both archetypical and blended, into a single theoretical framework defined by the salience of race and Hispanic ethnicity. Second, I parametize this theoretical framework using latent social space models. In this way, I am able to specify a set of interconnected, complex hypotheses in a tractable manner. I follow past work and use marriage/cohabitation data to test the hypotheses. Using American Community Survey data (2010–2012), I find that Hispanic marriage/cohabitation patterns suggest high salience on both race and Hispanic ethnicity. Thus, categories like black-Mexican or white-Cuban represent relationally distinct social categories—distinct from both non-Hispanic racial categories (e.g., black or white) and Hispanic categories of a different racial identity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mai’a K. Davis Cross ◽  
Teresa La Porte

A resilient actor is one with the capacity to recover from setbacks and obstacles, whether stemming from endogenous or exogenous factors. Beyond actual recovery, this article argues that there is also an important perceptional dimension. Image resilience is the capacity on the part of actors to overcome and deal with the widespread negative perceptions that often follow on the heels of these setbacks. The article argues that the ability to cultivate image resilience rests significantly on the power of public diplomacy. Through establishing a strong image for an actor over the longer term, public diplomacy enables that actor to be more resilient during times of crisis. The European Union is a particularly good case study to shed light on this. Using original interview evidence, this article examines a specific example of how the European Union was ultimately able to strengthen its image resilience in the United States through public diplomacy.


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