scholarly journals “This Is Ghetto Row”: Musical Segregation in American College Football

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-363
Author(s):  
JOHN MICHAEL MCCLUSKEY

AbstractA historical overview of college football's participants exemplifies the diversification of mainstream American culture from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. The same cannot be said for the sport's audience, which remains largely white American. Gerald Gems maintains that football culture reinforces the construction of American identity as “an aggressive, commercial, white, Protestant, male society.” Ken McLeod echoes this perspective in his description of college football's musical soundscape, “white-dominated hard rock, heavy metal, and country music—in addition to marching bands.” This article examines musical segregation in college football, drawing from case studies and interviews conducted in 2013 with university music coordinators from the five largest collegiate athletic conferences in the United States. These case studies reveal several trends in which music is used as a tool to manipulate and divide college football fans and players along racial lines, including special sections for music associated with blackness, musical selections targeted at recruits, and the continued position of the marching band—a European military ensemble—as the musical representative of the sport. These areas reinforce college football culture as a bastion of white strength despite the diversity among player demographics.

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Beckett ◽  
Lindsey Seidelman ◽  
William J Hanney ◽  
Xinliang Liu ◽  
Carey E Rothschild

Objective: To investigate the prevalence of musculoskeletal injury (MSI) in collegiate marching band and color guard members and the associated factors. Methods: An electronic survey was developed and delivered via the Qualtrics survey platform to collegiate marching band and color guard members in the United States. Information collected included demographics; years of experience; training and performance characteristics; footwear worn; instrument played/equipment used; participation in stretching/strengthening programs; injury prevalence and type; treatment sought for injury; and participation time lost due to injury. Results: There were 1,379 (792 female, 587 male) members of 21 collegiate marching bands who completed the survey. Respondents had an average age of 19.8 yrs, height 171.9 cm, weight 72.3 kg, and BMI 24.4 kg/m2. Twenty-five percent of respondents reported sustaining a MSI as a result of participating in marching band or color guard. Females were 20% more likely to sustain a MSI and 87.7% of MSI involved the lower extremity. A significant difference in BMI was found between those who did and did not sustain a MSI (p=0.014). Conclusions: Members of collegiate marching band and color guard may be at risk of sustaining a MSI due to the repetitive nature of the activities performed during practice and performance. The lower extremity is more prone to injury, and a higher BMI may be a risk factor for MSI in this population.


The Race Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle

This chapter uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century immigration laws barring Asian laborers. Although historians have long treated Asian American gambling as a minor phenomenon or exaggerated stereotype, gambling was a significant source of recreation and revenue for Chinese American communities and, further, took center stage in exclusion debates. Exclusionists depicted Chinese Americans as “inveterate gamblers” and dissolute cheaters whose “cheap labor” constituted not only unfair competition for other immigrant laborers but an affront to the “fair play” on which U.S. democracy was ostensibly founded. This chapter analyzes the congressional and literary record of these debates to show how ludo-Orientalist rhetoric crucially elevated economic arguments to the transcendent realm of ethics and ideals. By aligning (white) American values with ludic ideals and Asian immigrants with the degradation of these ideals, exclusionist rhetoric weaponized Asian Americans’ association with gambling, a process made possible in part through the “misreading” of satirical works like Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee.” This first chapter also sets the stage for the rest of the book by showing how Orientalist fictions about Asiatic threats are inextricable from national fictions about the United States as an idealized game space.


Author(s):  
Nathan D. Gibson

Drawing attention to the increasing study of “international country music,” this chapter attempts to define this field as well as provide a classification system for analyzing the different ways “international” and “country music” have been paired. It challenges the assertion that country music remains a purely American art form by tracing the international roots, international reach, and international representation within American country music and by presenting three different country music case studies in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. These case studies illustrate how national identity and country music are linked in places outside of the United States and how international permutations are often reflections of local, lived experience. Ultimately, this chapter presents alternatively interpreted identity associations with class, gender, race, and politics that are distinctly separate from the Nashville-based American country music industry and that lead to a more complex, multicentered understanding of country music throughout the world.


Sweet Thing ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 79-134
Author(s):  
Nicholas Stoia

The stanzaic form of “The Frog’s Courtship” represents a second major branch in the lineage of the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Chapter 2 concerns its progress from Elizabethan England all the way to late nineteenth-century ragtime and early twentieth-century blues and country music. The stanzaic form appears in the United States by the early nineteenth century and then largely disappears from print until reemerging in several songs collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century, demonstrating its strong endurance in oral tradition. More often than “Captain Kidd,” this second stanzaic form appears in extensively abbreviated versions, reflecting its oral mode of transmission, which allows for more flexibility in length of bars. In early ragtime, the form unites with the harmonic language of contemporaneous popular music and acquires melodic and textual content that subsequently imbues early blues and country music as pervasive elements of the twentieth-century “Sweet Thing” scheme.


Author(s):  
Martin Halliwell

Set against the history of slavery and abolitionism in the Atlantic world, the chapter first considers two essays of 1900 by African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois before addressing ways churches in the United States were often accused of complicity in perpetuating slavery. The chapter assesses the contested status of the ante-bellum black church and the covert worship slaves often needed to take in the South, before turning to the 1830 Southampton Insurrection and the 1831 Great Jamaican Slave Revolt. The focus switches to key texts that drew upon the Bible to oppose slavery, before considering how racial representations in the mid-century offered ambivalent views on racial equality. The chapter then turns to the shifting status of white and black churches during Reconstruction, and the re-entrenchment along racial lines in the late nineteenth century, before broadening out questions of identity and belonging by discussing missionary enterprises to Africa.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephen C. Eubanks

The purpose of this research study was to examine the influence of participation in Bands of America competitions (hereafter referred to as BOA) on one central Missouri high school marching band program. I chose to study a Missouri high school marching band that had been involved with BOA for a minimum of five years. Participants in this study were marching band members plus staff of the Camdenton High School marching band (N = 22). My goal was to produce a study that was descriptive of the influence, if any, that participation in BOA had on the Camdenton High School marching band. I sought to discover this through observations of their rehearsals and performances at their marching band contests. I chose to conduct a qualitative, single case study. Data were collected through structured and open-ended interviews, observations, field notes, and my participant researcher journal. To date, there has been limited research on BOA participation by high school marching bands. BOA claims to be the largest and most prestigious national marching competition available to high school marching bands in the United States. BOA has grown nationally from eight contests in 1985 to 20 contests in 2015. When BOA expanded in 1997 to include the St. Louis, Missouri regional championship, only five Missouri bands participated in the event. The number had grown in 2015 to include 25 Missouri bands. During my research, I assumed the role of an active participant and observed the band’s music and marching drill preparation, and attended their competitions in order to observe their BOA performances. My research questions focused on the following areas: (a) the key motivators for a high school marching band to participate in BOA, (b) how BOA influences the practices of a high school marching band, and (c) what barriers a rural marching band faces in order to participate in BOA. Through my investigation, I discovered that there were several motivators for the Camdenton High School marching band staff to elect to participate in BOA. The standard of excellence that exists at BOA marching contests is consistent from state to state, and provides the staff and students with an adjudication rubric that serves as a guide for them to rehearse and perform at a higher musical level. Participation in BOA has led the staff to change the design practices of their marching show design. In addition to the planning of the show, the staff has improved their teaching process. This, in turn, has affected the students’ attitude and approach toward their rehearsals. They have an increased work ethic and feel responsible for each other. All of these factors exist despite certain obstacles the band faces, including limited resources and an increased cost factor. Other high school band directors who are considering BOA participation might consider the Camdenton High School marching band program as a model. By looking into the reasons why Camdenton chose to participate in BOA and some of the resultant influences, directors might be able to apply them to their own school marching band programs.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Rosenberg

This paper explores trans temporalities through the experiences of incarcerated trans feminine persons in the United States. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has received increased attention for its disproportionate containment of trans feminine persons, notably trans women of colour. As a system of domination and control, the PIC uses disciplinary and heteronormative time to dominate the bodies and identities of transgender prisoners by limiting the ways in which they can express and experience their identified and embodied genders. By analyzing three case studies from my research with incarcerated trans feminine persons, this paper illustrates how temporality is complexly woven through trans feminine prisoners' experiences of transitioning in the PIC. For incarcerated trans feminine persons, the interruption, refusal, or permission of transitioning in the PIC invites several gendered pasts into a body's present and places these temporalities in conversation with varying futures as the body's potential. Analyzing trans temporalities reveals time as layered through gender, inviting multiple pasts and futures to circulate around and through the body's present in ways that can be both harmful to, and necessary for, the assertion and survival of trans feminine identities in the PIC.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi Kaufmann

As a white, American wife of an Iranian, I spent several months in Iran in 1979 and again in 1987. My experiences on these trips to my husband's home were profound and devastating. These experiences deeply troubled my understanding of what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. In this autoethnographic narrative, I work between experience, people's history, published history, theory, and poetry to trouble my position as an American.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Winton U. Solberg

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.


2019 ◽  
pp. 123-130

The scientific research works concerning the field of mechanical engineering such as, manufacturing machine slate, soil tillage, sowing and harvesting based on the requirements for the implementation of agrotechnical measures for the cultivation of plants in its transportation, through the development of mastering new types of high-performance and energy-saving machines in manufacturing machine slate, creation of multifunctional machines, allowing simultaneous soil cultivation, by means of several planting operations, integration of agricultural machine designs are taken into account in manufacturing of the local universal tractor designed basing on high ergonomic indicators. For this reason, this article explores the use of case studies in teaching agricultural terminology by means analyzing the researches in machine building. Case study method was firstly used in 1870 in Harvard University of Law School in the United States. Also in the article, we give the examples of agricultural machine-building terms, teaching terminology and case methods, case study process and case studies method itself. The research works in the field of mechanical engineering and the use of case studies in teaching terminology have also been analyzed. In addition, the requirements for the development of case study tasks are given in their practical didactic nature. We also give case study models that allow us analyzing and evaluating students' activities.


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