Health and Health Systems in the United States

Author(s):  
Parin Dossa

The long history of Islam in the United States is not well understood. The first Muslims to come to this country were African slaves followed by Muslims from the Ottoman Empire. As time went by, other Muslims from different parts of the world followed suit. Today, Muslims form part of the sociocultural and religious diversity of US society. A unique feature of this community is its diversity, a function of different schools of thought as well as different migration trajectories in terms of ethnicity, gender, age, class, and countries of origin. Its diversity has generated a rich body of knowledge on health care that can enrich the American biomedical model. Yet, this knowledge has been subjugated and remains unrecognized owing to structural exclusion of Muslims exacerbated by 9/11. The aim of this article is to highlight health beliefs and practices of American Muslims with the view to recognizing their contribution to American society, leading to greater acceptance of this community. In sum, beyond addressing systemic exclusion, it is important to recognize that American Muslims have a long history and richness in understanding health in diverse sociocultural milieus in Islam that can and should be recognized in clinical care.

Author(s):  
Craig Allen

The first completely researched history of U.S. Spanish-language television traces the rise of two foremost, if widely unrecognized, modern American enterprises—the Spanish-language networks Univision and Telemundo. It is a standard scholarly history constructed from archives, original interviews, reportage, and other public materials. Occasioned by the public’s wakening to a “Latinization” of the U.S., the book demonstrates that the emergence of Spanish-language television as a force in mass communication is essential to understanding the increasing role of Latinos and Latino affairs in modern American society. It argues that a combination of foreign and domestic entrepreneurs and innovators who overcame large odds resolves a significant and timely question: In an English-speaking country, how could a Spanish-speaking institution have emerged? Through exploration of significant and colorful pioneers, continuing conflicts and setbacks, landmark strides, and ongoing controversies—and with revelations that include regulatory indecision, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war, and the internationalization of U.S. mass media—the rise of a Spanish-language institution in the English-speaking U.S. is explained. Nine chapters that begin with Spanish-language television’s inception in 1961 and end 2012 chronologically narrate the endeavor’s first 50 years. Events, passages, and themes are thoroughly referenced.


Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.


1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 472
Author(s):  
Wilbert H. Ahern ◽  
Richard A. Gerber ◽  
Edwin C. Rozwenc ◽  
Judith Mara Gutman

Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield

HOW DID THE corporate organizations that play such an important role in American society come to be? This book attempts to answer that question. Corporate Spirit is not a study of corporate organization everywhere; it focuses on the development of corporate institutions in the United States, and on the earlier history of corporate organization out of which American institutions emerged....


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).


1976 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
T. Michael Ruddy ◽  
G. D. Lillibridge

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Jan E. Stets

Abstract: The chapter provides an overview of this book on religious non-affiliation in American society. It first offers some social science background on the non-affiliated in the United States, so that readers will have some general knowledge before they embark on the book. Then it provides a brief overview of each chapter, so that readers will be familiar with what is to come. The chapter’s author is an identity scholar, so there follows a discussion of how we might understand the changing nature of the religious identity in American society. The chapter ends on a personal note with the author’s own experience and a brief evaluation of religious non-affiliation.


Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Kippenberg

AbstractThe document found with three of the four cells responsible for the crimes of 9/11 is unique in providing specific information about how the Muslim suicide terrorists conceived of their action. The document shows that they found justification for violence by emulating the moment in early Islamic history when Muhammad cancelled contracts with non-Muslims and organized raids (ghazwa) against the Meccans in order to establish Islam as a political order. No statement in the Manual explicitly identifies the United States as the financial, military, and political center of today's paganism; rather, such identification is tacitly assumed, as was shown by the action itself. Instead, the Manual prescribes recitations, prayers and rituals by which each member of the four cells should prepare for the ghazwa, purify his intention and anticipate in his mind the successive stages of the struggle to come. Not the objective aim but the subjective intention is at the center of the Manual. The article places this type of justification of violence in the history of Islamic activism since the 1980s.


Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey

Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, the origin of Catholicism in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and disciplinary changes initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). The history of the Catholic theology and practice of penance is analyzed within the larger context of American Protestant penitential theology and discipline and in connection with divergent interpretations of biblical penitential language (sin, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation) that Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics shared in the American body politic. The overall argument of the text is that the Catholic theology and practice of penance, so much opposed by the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, kept alive the biblical penitential language in the United States at least until the mid 1960s when Catholic penitential discipline changed and the practice of sacramental confession declined precipitously. Those changes within the American Catholic tradition contributed to the more general eclipse of penitential language in American society as a whole. From the 1960s onward penitential language was overshadowed increasingly by the language of conflict and controversy. In the current climate of controversy and conflict, such a text may help Americans understand how much their society has departed from the penitential language of the earlier American tradition and consider what the advantages and disadvantages of such a departure are.


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