scholarly journals Lexical-Semantic and Syntactic Peculiarities of the American Photographic Discourse of the Great Depression (as exemplified by the titles of the American photographs during the period of 1929-1942)

Author(s):  
Viacheslav D. Shevchenko ◽  
Andrei V. Komarov

The present article describes the analysis of the peculiarities of such a cognitive-communicative phenomenon as American photographic discourse. It contains sociolinguistic and cultural-semiotic particular features. The present complex discourse is analyzed in the context of linguistic synchrony during the period of the Great Depression, the economic crisis that influenced not only the American discursive space but also all the spheres of the American society from 1929 till 1942. The authors typify the photographic discourse as a synthesis of linguistic forms comparing it with the utterance (act of speech) by virtue of its peculiar structural components – persuasion, cognition and purposefulness. The authors conclude that the American photographic discourse combines the inner qualities of the visual, author and critical art (the arts) discourses because of its complex essence. Besides, the lexical representatives of the American photographic discourse of the times of the Depression are defined by a certain semantic peculiarity – absence of the words with the abstract meaning. According to the authors, such a consistency may be explained not only due to the presence of the semantic links with the main “Depression” macro-concept and also due to the certain socio-historical events. The majority of the representatives materializing the micro-concepts possess the negative evaluative connotation as evidenced by the commemoration of the “crisis” integral seme peculiar both for the macro Depression concept and all the micro-concepts (“Poverty”, “Manual Labor”, “Racism”, “Migration”, “Death”, “Disease” and “Protest”). However, the important characteristic of the “Manual Labor” micro-concept is a high frequency rate of the words denoting professions in the sphere of farming and mining. Such a tendency proclaims the US individualistic culture that is focused on the personal initiative and the active combating the difficulties. The analysis of the syntactic means objectified within the framework of the American photographic discourse has demonstrated that the titles of the photographs presented in the form of phrases (word clusters) have a sentence-like essence. Such a characteristic presupposes the presence of the predication and modality features specifically attributed to a sentence. As the result, there has been acknowledged the special complex syntactic status of the titles of the American photographs.

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Collis Greene

More than fifty years after delivering the talk “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935” to the American Society of Church History, Robert Handy is still the default authority on religion and the Great Depression. This is a tribute to his remarkable insights, but it is also an indication that the Depression merits more attention from historians of religion. A number of scholars have taken the religious history of the 1930s seriously. Yet we tend to think of the work of Joel Carpenter, Leo Ribuffo, Alan Brinkley, Beth Wenger, Kenneth Heineman, and others as primarily about fundamentalist institution-building, New Deal demagogues, or Jews and Catholics in New York and Pittsburgh, and only incidentally about the Great Depression.


2018 ◽  
Vol 214 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Instructor Marwa Ghazi Mohammed

         Lillian Hellman was an American playwright whose name was associated with the moral values of the early twentieth century. Her plays were remarkable for the moral themes that dealt with the evil. They were distinguished, as well, for the depiction of characters who are still alive in the American drama for their vivid personalities, effective roles and realistic portrayal. This paper studies Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes as a criticism of the American society in the early twentieth-century. Though America was a country built on hopes and dreams of freedom and happiness. During the Great Depression, happiness was certainly not present in many people's lives. The presence of alternate political ideas, decay of love and values increased life's problems, and considered a stress inducing factor were popular themes to be explored during the Great Depression. America, the land of promises, became an empty world revolving around money and material well-being and which turned the people bereft of love, and human values. Hellman’s play presents the real fox, represented by the political and material world, as the one responsible for the raise of new kind of people, the little foxes, and the decline of human value.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Vladislavovich Zakharov

The article overviews the American cinema of the 1930 in terms of the “cyclic conception” stating that the life of American society is subject to a distinctive algorhithm of public mood: “social restlessness” alternating with “private interest”. The author surveys gangster film, one of the dominating genres of the Depression cinema as exemplified by “The Pubic Enemy (1931, dir. William A. Wellman). The article also traces the links of the “social restlessness” films of the 1930s with the previous and subsequent phases stressing the problem of dividing each phase into stages: formation, prime and decline.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Mordecai Lee

Public administration history often notes the seminal role of Harold D. Smith, FDR’s budget director (1939–1945), in the professionalization of the field and his principles for public budgeting. He was a cofounder of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) and its second president (1940–1941). Smith came to Washington after a longer career in nonprofit management. This exploratory historical case study fills in a gap in the literature. Specifically, it examines his nonprofit management record at the Michigan Municipal League (1928–1937). He successfully grew the nonprofit in the teeth of the Great Depression. This success, among others, can be seen as providing two possible applications. First, his record suggests some commonalities between nonprofit management and public administration. Second, leading a nonprofit during the Great Depression may suggest applicable lessons for longer-term problems caused by COVID-19 regarding organizational management strategies during another severe economic contraction.


Author(s):  
Bruce Sinclair

To the men of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, proof of the value of the organization lay in America’s remarkable technological triumphs. They could see the connection in several different ways. Most obviously, there were members famous for their accomplishments. George Westinghouse, for instance, ASME’s twenty-ninth president, reached the status of folk hero for his inventiveness and the giant industrial firm he created. There were others like him, such as George Babcock, Ambrose Swasey, and Charles Schwab, who, although not as well known, were held in great esteem in the mechanical community for their technical achievements and business enterprise.


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