Behind the Screens

2016 ◽  
pp. 460-480
Author(s):  
Sima Belmar
Keyword(s):  
Dance History ◽  
Interracial Contact ◽  
American Character ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Modern Jazz ◽  
History Of

This chapter seeks to recuperate the dance legacies in Saturday Night Fever (1977) through a choreographic and cinematographic analysis of the film’s dance sequences. The ways the camera centralizes racialized, dancing bodies offers a perhaps accidental acknowledgement of the debt owed to black dancers. Centered around John Travolta’s Italian-American character Tony Manero living in a homogeneous Brooklyn neighborhood—where blacks were (and continue to be) unwelcome—Saturday Night Fever paradoxically exposes and pays tribute to the black roots of the screendancing. Travolta’s training for the film uncovers a complex dance history that reflects significant interracial contact behind the scenes as well as between and within singular bodies. There was interracial mixing in the backgrounds of the film’s top-billed choreographer, Lester Wilson, and Travolta’s uncredited dance instructor, Deney Terrio, and the modern, jazz, and street dance roots of the choreography shifts the film into a history of American concert and commercial dance practice.

The Predicament of National Character

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Character ◽  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Military ◽  
American Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Henry Luce ◽  
Second World

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.

A View of Ancient Greek Dance from 1895

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 333-336
Author(s):  
Nancy Lee Ruyter
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Source

In 1895, the book Dancing, a broad survey of world dance history, was published in London. Mainly written by Mrs. Lilly Grove (later Dame Lily Grove Frazer) after five years of travel and intensive research, it also includes four short chapters by other authors. It was issued in later editions after 1895 and is still an important early source for information about dance history. Of the 454 pages in Dancing, twenty-six are devoted to ancient Greece. I discuss some of Grove's sources, statements, and conclusions in relation to those of more recent writings about dance in ancient Greece.

Utica Greens: Central New York's Italian-American Specialty

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-67
Author(s):  
naomi guttman ◽  
roberta l. krueger
Keyword(s):  
Olive Oil ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Cold Climate ◽  
American Family ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of

In a cuisine known best for its ample portions of pasta and in a cold climate favoring hearty food, Utica Greens, a méélange of sautééed escarole, cherry peppers, garlic, cheese, prosciutto, breadcrumbs and olive oil, has become a regional specialty. ““Greens”” now appear on the menu of virtually every Italian-American restaurant in Utica and can be found on buffet tables at receptions and potlucks in the surrounding area. Incorporating interviews with chefs and household cooks, this article charts the history of Utica Greens from its origins as a humble dish prepared in Italian-American family kitchens to its appearance in local restaurants where it has become a nostalgic marker of a time when people grew their own food in backyard gardens and home-grown vegetables were at the center of family life.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Goodall
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Character ◽  
Mccarthy Era ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
History Of

This introductory chapter analyzes how conflicting impulses for loyalty and liberty shaped the politics of countersubversion between World War I and the McCarthy era. By examining the ways this intellectual problem manifested in various historical contexts, the chapter uncovers a history of fits and starts rather than simple, linear progression: waves of growth in political policing followed by undercurrents of reform. The contradictory effort to retain historic freedoms while simultaneously limiting them is what gave American countersubversion its distinctively American character: populist, legalistic, voluble, and partisan. The chapter also seeks to explain how a country with a long-standing hostility to the centralization of power, and a strong disposition to associate activist government with tyranny, gradually reconciled itself to a domestic security state.

The American Business of Italian Food

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Business ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Generation

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.

POLISH RADIO ON THE BACKGROUND OF SYSTEMIC CHANGES IN POLAND IN THE YEARS 1945-1956

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 417-425
Author(s):  
Zygmunt Kazimierski ◽  
Marcin Mielnik
Keyword(s):  
Technical Society ◽  
First Year ◽  
Polish People ◽  
Modern Jazz ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Broadcast Stations

The Polish Radio began its activity on the first of February 1925. On this day the first program of the Polish Radio technical Society was broadcasted. From then on, the radio accompanied Polish people in good and bad times. The years 1946 – 1956 were not so glorious. At that time, Polish radio became the propaganda tool for the PPR and from December 1949 the PZPR. These parties, mainly under the slogans of the reconstruction of the country from war damage and the struggle for peace, sought to Stalinize Poland on the model of the USSR. While studying those times, it should be stated that information and publication hardly existed because it was replaced by a hypocritical, brutal and intrusive propaganda. However, history of Polish Radio in those years should not only been described in critical way. At that time, many very important and socially necessary initiatives took place. Since the first year after regaining independence, more and more new broadcast stations have been launched in various regions of Poland. New programs were broad-casting more and more often, such as "Muzyka i Aktualności", in which various mes-sages were given with ease, interwoven with modern jazz music.

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