Jay Gatsby, Justice Douglas, and the Significance of Class in American Society

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
Justin Driver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
American West ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
American Society ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter juxtaposes the tales of two ambitious men, both born in the American West, who moved east to New York in an effort to make names for themselves during the 1920s. The ambitions of Jay Gatsby—as recounted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—and William O. Douglas—as recounted in his autobiography, Go East, Young Man—led the two men in very different directions. Where Gatsby turned to lawlessness, Douglas instead turned to law. The distinct journeys and distinct fates that Gatsby and Douglas experience yield insight into the significance of class within the United States, and also offer significant complications of the American Dream.

scholarly journals »Heimat im Koffer.« – »Oder über das Emigrantendasein. (Falls nicht zu traurig).«

Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.

Introduction: Immigration and Incorporation

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén G. Rumbaut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Society

In at least one sense the “American century” is ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. But the diversity of the “new immigration” to the United States over the past three decades differs in many respects from that of the last period of mass immigration in the first three decades of the century. The immigrants themselves differ greatly in their social class and national origins, and so does the American society, polity, and economy that receives them—raising questions about their modes of incorporation, and challenging conventional accounts of assimilation processes that were framed during that previous epoch. The dynamics and future course of their adaptation are open empirical questions—as well as major questions for public policy, since the outcome will shape the future contours of American society. Indeed, as the United States undergoes its most profound demographic transformation in a century; as inexorable processes of globalization, especially international migrations from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, diversify still further the polyethnic composition of its population; and as issues of immigration, race and ethnicity become the subject of heated public debate, the question of incorporation, and its serious study, becomes all the more exigent. The essays in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives tackle that subject from a variety of analytical vantages and innovative approaches, covering a wide range of groups in major areas of immigrant settlement. Several of the papers focus specifically on Los Angeles and New York City, where, remarkably, fully a quarter of the total U.S. immigrant population resides.

Presidential Voting Across the American States

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 379-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT A. JACKSON ◽  
THOMAS M. CARSEY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
National Survey ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vote Choice ◽  
Marked Variation ◽  
American States ◽  
Election Studies ◽  
Insight Into

In this article, we examine the variation in the importance of partisanship and ideology in structuring citizens' presidential vote choice across the United States. We use CBS/ New York Times Exit Polls from 18 states in 1984 and 24 states in 1988, along with the national polls from each year. Underlying national survey-based examinations of presidential voting (e.g., those based on the American National Election Studies) is the assumption that presidential voting “looks and works the same” across the United States. However, our results indicate marked variation in the influence of both partisanship and ideology on presidential vote choice across state electorates. Political characteristics of state electorates (e.g., mass polarization and mass liberalism) provide some insight into these differences. Furthermore, we discover some continuity from 1984 to 1988 within states in the nature of influences on their electorates' presidential voting.

Stephen Foster

Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deane L. Root ◽  
Codee Spinner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
George Gershwin ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
American Society

Stephen Collins Foster (b. Lawrence, near Pittsburgh, PA, 4 July 1826–d. New York, 13 January 1864) was the first professional songwriter in the United States, and the earliest to write songs whose images pervaded American culture and whose melodies endure into the 21st century. For his most familiar songs, he wrote both lyrics and music, though he also set poems that had appeared in household magazines, and toward the end of his life he partnered with poet George Cooper. His oeuvre includes principally songs for solo voice (or solo voice plus four-voice chorus) with piano accompaniment, four-voice hymns, and instrumental works (mostly dances, for piano). His songs for blackface minstrels (which provided him with the majority of his income, though they amount to less than one-tenth of his 287 authenticated compositions) were controversial from the start; they made Foster’s reputation, even as he attempted to create “refined” songs in a genre he considered to be rife with “trashy and really offensive words” (Foster letter to E. P. Christy, 25 May 1852). He was of Scots-Irish descent, and as a resident of a northern industrializing urban center that drew workers from throughout Western Europe, he was attuned to different national styles of song and common sentiments of lyric poetry not confined by ethnicity, race, or social class. His song structures and lyrics became models for other songwriters well into the Tin Pan Alley era; his inability to control copyrights (which were owned by his publishers) and his death in poverty (with 38 cents in his pocket) were factors in the establishment of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) fifty years later. It is perhaps not coincidental that songs quoting Foster’s “Swanee River” (“The Old Folks at Home”) helped launch the careers of two of the most significant American songwriters of the 20th century, Irving Berlin (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) and George Gershwin (“Swanee”). This bibliography summarizes the major sources of archival, published, and online information about Foster’s life, career, music, and their interpretation and influence in the social and cultural history of the United States, Europe, and East Asia. It omits the sound recordings, plays, films, novels, and other creative works that reflect and contribute to that influence.

Black and Multiracial Politics in America Edited by Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence J. Hanks. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 404p. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-630
Author(s):  
Michael K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Waves

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

scholarly journals The Requests of Syrians in America to End the Enduring Indifference of the Ottoman Authorities

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Paola Viviani
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
North And South America ◽  
North And South ◽  
Insight Into

The migration of Syrians to America in the 19th and 20th centuries is a major issue which has been widely covered in both fictional and non-fictional literature. Over the same period, many Arab magazines were founded both in North and South America, or “migrated” to those countries. An example is al-Jāmiʿa, which was relocated from Alexandria, Egypt, to New York in 1906, where its founder, the renowned intellectual Faraḥ Anṭūn, was able to undertake a profound study of Western society. Not only did this give him a better insight into that society, but also helped him to better understand the critical issues in his native milieu and the tensions between Turks and Arabs, which often came to the fore, especially when the latter expected the former to help them through important phases of their social, civil, and economic life even in the land they migrated to. This paper analyses an article in al-Jāmiʿa by Nāṣīf Shiblī Damūs, previously published in the epony-mous newspaper, in which Syrian migrants in the United States, with Anṭūn supporting them, lament the indifference of the Ottoman authorities toward them and put forward a number of specific requests, using the magazine as a means of making themselves heard by the entire Arab and Ottoman community throughout the world.

scholarly journals The Reflection of the Era of the “Roaring Twenties“ in the F.S.Fitzgerald’s Novel «The Great Gatsby»

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
A. Diadechko
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Great Gatsby ◽  
The Great Gatsby ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society

The article deals with the portraying “Roaring Twenties” which marked a legendary and unprecedented period in the history of American society. Though this era goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, it has never stopped arousing deep common interest because of its uniqueness. Having been abundantly reflected in numerous pieces of art and literature, “Roaring Twenties”, synonymously named “The Jazz Age”, go on provoking public discussion and reevaluation. If viewed in literary terms, this epoch is certainly linked with the name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and with his best known novel “The Great Gatsby” filmed five times. The writer is considered to be one of the best chronicler of the American 1920s. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece had embodied many symbols and icons of America which travelled though one hundred years and still feature contemporary society. The articles attempts to outline extra-lingual information and data that shape the temporal and cultural background of the novel. It aims at providing the readers with sufficient additional information that may significantly enlarge on the novel context grasping. It proposes a detailed description and interpretation of symbols and markers of the American 1920s which typically feature “Roaring Twenties” and the ways they are projected onto Fitzgerald’s story. In particular, the focus is made on American Dream doctrine, New York of the 1920s, the conflict between “the old money” and “the new money”, feminism and fashion, alcohol and crime, music, cars. Some parallels between the author’s life story and his characters are also specified.

scholarly journals The Alert Collector: Hip Hop in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 215
Author(s):  
Holly Boyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
American Society

Hip hop is a ubiquitous part of American society in 2015—from Kanye West announcing his future presidential bid to discussions of feminism surrounding Nikki Minaj’s anatomy, to Kendrick Lamar’s concert with the National Symphony Orchestra, to Questlove leading the Tonight Show Band, hip hop has exerted its influence on American culture in every way and form.Hip hop’s origin in the early 1970s in the South Bronx of New York City is most often attributed to DJ Kool Herc and his desire to entertain at a party. In the 1980s, hip hop continued to gain popularity and speak about social issues faced by young African Americans. This started to change in the 1990s with the mainstream success of gangsta rap, where drugs, violence, and misogyny became more prominent, although artists who focused on social issues continued to create. The 2000s saw rap and hip hop cross genre boundaries, and innovative and alternative hip hop grew in popularity.

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