The Uncredited

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Laine Nooney

In the fall of 1980, the remote, rural Gold Rush town of Oakhurst, California, became home to Sierra On-Line, a computer game manufacturer that emerged as one of the most successful and iconic game companies of the 1980s and 1990s. Forty years later, Sierra On-Line is long gone from Oakhurst, but its operational and labor infrastructure remain strangely present—a civic palimpsest composed of repurposed buildings, regional archives, local memorials, and the fraying memories of its citizens. This article explores the undocumented dimensions of the computer game industry's supply chain during the final decades of the twentieth century, focusing on the emotional labor and maintenance work involved in sales, customer service, and technical support. Unfolding in three scenes—each pinned to a financial crash, each oriented to the experience of a different female employee—the article traces the material and affective networks that made gaming possible and computers thinkable as machines of everyday life in the late twentieth-century United States.

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Cumming ◽  
Grant Fleming

We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro

The introduction sketches the contours of the book. It details the construction of a moral panic concerning the abduction of children by strangers in the late twentieth century and lays out the political and cultural ramifications of this panic. As the introduction indicates and the rest of the book demonstrates, this panic—precipitated by the bereaved parents of missing and slain children, the news media, and politicians—led to the consolidation of a “child safety regime” and the expansion of the American carceral state. The introduction situates this argument within the existing historiography of late twentieth-century United States politics and culture, as well as the growing literature on carceral studies.


Author(s):  
Paul Kaplan ◽  
Daniel LaChance

Crimesploitation is a kind of reality television programming that depicts nonactors committing, detecting, prosecuting, and punishing criminal behavior. In programs like Cops, To Catch a Predator, and Intervention, a real-life-documentary frame creates a sense of verisimilitude that intensifies the show’s emotionally stimulating qualities and sets it apart from fictional crime stories. Crimesploitation programs create folk knowledge about the causes and consequences of criminal behavior and the purposes and effects of criminal punishment. That folk knowledge, in turn, reflects and reinforces two ideologies that legitimized the ratcheting up of harsh punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States: law-and-order punitivism and neoliberalism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-296
Author(s):  
Shelley Sang-Hee Lee

This article considers the immigrant store owner as spectacle, signifier, and actor in Korean-Black relations in Los Angeles during the late twentieth century, arguing that the “Black-Korean conflict” was an historical and cultural phenomenon in which events and their representations built upon each other. Members of these groups sometimes resisted and interrogated the framework of interethnic conflict which was projected onto them, but also incorporated it into their outlooks and organizing strategies. The article also reflects upon efforts to address intergroup tensions and conflict against a backdrop of widespread racial injustice and economic inequality in Los Angeles and the United States.


Author(s):  
Mona Lynch ◽  
Anjuli Verma

This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony drug filings, convictions and sentences in fueling both the scale and racial disparities of imprisonment; and regional and jurisdictional variations in trends across three planes: federal-state, interstate, and intrastate. Finally, the recent “stabilization” of incarceration rates in the United States is described and possible implications considered.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Reddy-Best ◽  
Dana Goodin ◽  
Eulanda Sanders

Queer Fashion & Style: Stories from the Heartland—An Exhibition Catalog analyzes the recent history of fashion through a queer lens by examining how queer identities are negotiated in everyday styles by women in the Midwest part of the United States from the late twentieth century to the present.


2020 ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Adam Sutcliffe

This chapter reviews the question on what Jews are for. It talks about the anxiety over the long-term viability of Judaism that threatened to overwhelm the question across much of the Jewish world in the late twentieth century. It describes the European Jewish life in the aftermath of the Holocaust that was shadowed by a sense of dutiful traditionalism and anxiety over the continued presence of antisemitism. The chapter also analyzes the temptation and increasing ease of assimilation that was perceived as a threat to Jewish continuity in Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere in the New World. It points out how it was clear to some Jewish leaders, while faced with the prospect of a “vanishing diaspora,” that the postwar focus on communal survival lacked the inspirational power to renew Jewish life.


Author(s):  
William Douglas Woody ◽  
Krista D. Forrest

The introduction presents readers with the framework of the project, opening with the definition and the relevance of the totality of the circumstances in understanding police interrogation and confession in the United States. The authors illustrate their totality-of-the-circumstances approach by evaluating similarities and differences between the false confessions of Stephen and Jesse Boorn in the early 1800s and Jeffrey Deskovic in the late twentieth century. Despite substantial differences in evidence, legal requirements, trial procedures, and other details, the errors and larger totality of the circumstances in both cases reveal important similarities that the authors explore throughout the book.


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