Rice, Elmer (1892–1967)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Chambers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Law School ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Crime Drama ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Adding Machine ◽  
Street Scene

Born Elmer Reizenstein in New York City on September 28, 1892, Elmer Rice’s career spanned nearly fifty years. He wrote over fifty plays, including collaborations with Dorothy Parker (Close Harmony, 1924), Philip Barry (Cock Robin, 1928), and Langston Hughes and Kurt Weill (the musical adaptation of Street Scene, 1947), and explored a variety of dramatic forms. His professional theater debut came two years after graduation from New York Law School, with the enormously successfully On Trial (1914), a crime drama noted for its use of flashback. An antiwar play, The Iron Cross (1915), followed. Both works exemplify a career-long interest in inflecting the melodramatic form with new methods and in exploring the complexities of modern life. These inclinations are seen in The Adding Machine (1923) and Street Scene (1929). The former, a critique of the machine age, is a model of American expressionism; the latter advanced stage realism in the United States with a disorienting depiction of urban life. While these plays demonstrate an interest in new techniques, they are also rooted in melodrama and sought to promote liberal democratic social reform. Street Scene was awarded the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Katy Hull
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leader ◽  
Benito Mussolini ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Italian Fascism ◽  
Italian American ◽  
Effective System ◽  
Depth Study

This introductory chapter discusses how the representation of fascism as a machine with a soul explains why Italian fascism appealed to some Americans in the interwar years. Although Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, and other fascist sympathizers echoed their contemporaries in their critiques of American modernity, they parted ways with most other Americans in their interpretation of Benito Mussolini and his government. In their telling, fascism was an effective system for managing contemporary challenges because it delivered the material benefits of the machine age while protecting Italians from its emotionally draining effects. These observers claimed that the fascists had intentionally reformed democratic institutions to create a government that was more receptive to the needs of ordinary people. In each case, they asserted that fascism produced a different kind of modernity from that which prevailed in the United States — one that upheld traditions, restored connections between government and the governed, and rebalanced the relationship between men and machines. The chapter then provides a background of the four individuals selected for the in-depth study of fascist sympathies: Richard Washburn Child, the diplomat and writer; Anne O'Hare McCormick, the New York Times journalist; Generoso Pope, the Italian-American community leader; and Herbert Wallace Schneider, the professor of moral philosophy.

The Psychosis of Permanent War

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-51
Author(s):  
Chris Hedges
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
The Rule Of Law

In this no-holds-barred essay, former New York Times Middle East correspondent and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges examines how the United States’ staunch support provides Israel with impunity to visit mayhem on a population which it subjugates and holds captive. Notwithstanding occasional and momentary criticism, the official U.S. cheerleading stance is not only an embarrassing spectacle, Hedges argues, it is also a violation of international law, and an illustration of the disfiguring and poisonous effect of the psychosis of permanent war characteristic of both countries. The author goes on to conclude that the reality of its actions against the Palestinians, both current and historical, exposes the fiction that Israel stands for the rule of law and human rights, and gives the lie to the myth of the Jewish state and that of its sponsor, the United States.

Parks in Urban America

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schuyler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Parks ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
Public Park ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Political Patronage ◽  
Calvert Vaux ◽  
Active Recreation

The creation and evolution of urban parks is in some ways a familiar story, especially given the attention that Frederick Law Olmsted’s work has commanded since the early 1970s. Following the success of Central Park, cities across the United States began building parks to meet the recreational needs of residents, and during the second half of the 19th century, Olmsted and his partners designed major parks or park systems in thirty cities. Yet, even that story is incomplete. To be sure, Olmsted believed that every city should have a large rural park as an alternative to the density of building and crowding of the modern metropolis, a place to provide for an “unbending of the faculties,” a process of recuperation from the stresses and strains of urban life. But, even in the mid-1860s he sought to create alternative spaces for other types of recreation. Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux successfully persuaded the Prospect Park commission, in Brooklyn, New York, to acquire land for a parade ground south of the park as a place for military musters and athletics; moreover, in 1868 they prepared a plan for a park system in Buffalo, New York, that consisted of three parks, linked by parkways, that served different functions and provided for different forms of recreation. As the decades progressed, Olmsted became a champion of parks designed for active recreation; gymnasiums for women as well as men, especially in working-class areas of cities; and playgrounds for small children. He did so in part to relieve pressure on the large landscape parks to accommodate uses he believed would be inappropriate, but also because he recognized the legitimate demands for new forms of recreation. In later years, other park designers and administrators would similarly add facilities for active recreation, though sometimes in ways that compromised what Olmsted considered the primary purpose of a public park. Urban parks are, in important ways, a microcosm of the nation’s cities. Battles over location, financing, political patronage, and use have been a constant. Through it all, parks have evolved to meet the changing recreational needs of residents. And, as dominant a figure as Olmsted has been, this is a story that antedates his professional career and that includes the many voices that have shaped public parks in U.S. cities in the 20th century.

“Over There and Over Here”: Some Observations on Recent Reader Services Developments at four Academic Legal Researh Libraries

2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gee
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Yale University ◽  
New York University ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Perpetual Motion ◽  
Creative Space ◽  
To Come

Every night for ten nights last May, I returned to room 128 in the Westside YMCA (West 63rd Street, New York City – just off Central Park) armed with more behind the scenes insights, professional secrets and first hand accounts of US law library operation and management than one slim A5 notebook could hope to hold. I was fortunate to be in the United States on a two-week placement at Columbia University, visiting some of America's great law libraries – the law school libraries of Columbia itself, New York University and Yale University. Each morning, after orange juice, coffee and a toasted cream cheese bagel, I would head out with the commuters to join the subway at Columbus Circle – uptown for Columbia or downtown for NYU. Every evening I would admire the energy of the mostly silver-haired athletes in brightly coloured lycra returning to the Westside “Y” after numerous circuits of the Jackie “O” reservoir on the upper east side of Central Park. The park is 843 acres of creative space bounded by impressive hotels, apartment blocks and the streets of Harlem. In May it is in perpetual motion from dawn to dusk with joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists weaving their way around the trees, fountains and numerous statues. Indeed it appears to be a huge magic garden, complete with beautiful street lamps that seem to come from C.S. Lewis's Narnia – another world, like the City itself, at once familiar and fascinatingly different.

A Comparison of Four Premier Academic Law Libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom: The Findings of a Valuable International Placement

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 520-534
Author(s):  
David Gee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
New York University ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Perpetual Motion ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
To Come

Every night for ten nights last May, I returned to room 128 in the Westside YMCA (West 63rd Street, New York City — just off Central Park) armed with more behind the scenes insights, professional secrets and first hand accounts of US law library operation and management than one slim A5 notebook could hope to hold. I was fortunate to be in the United States on a two-week placement at Columbia University, visiting some of America's great law libraries — the law school libraries of Columbia itself, New York University and Yale University. Each morning after an orange juice, toasted cream cheese bagel and cappuccino, I would head out with the commuters to join the subway at Columbus Circle — uptown for Columbia or downtown for NYU. Every evening I would admire the energy of the mostly silver-haired athletes in brightly colored lycra returning to the Westside “Y” after numerous circuits of the Jackie “O” reservoir on the upper east side of Central Park. The park is 843 acres of creative space bound by impressive hotels, apartment blocks and the streets of Harlem. In May it is in perpetual motion from dawn to dusk with joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists weaving their way around the trees, fountains and numerous statues. Indeed it appears to be a huge magic garden, complete with beautiful street lamps that seem to come from C.S. Lewis's Narnia — another world, like the City itself, at once familiar and fascinatingly different.

scholarly journals The Rural Ideal and Agrarian Realities: Arthur E. Holt and the Vision of a Decentralized America in the Interwar Years

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Family Farms ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Great Community ◽  
Corporate Farms ◽  
Work Family ◽  
American Society

A revolution in rural life since the 1940s has produced agribusiness, corporate farms, and situation in which less than five percent of Americans are engaged in farming activities and fewer still work family farms. Richard Hofstadter once observed, “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.” Today, when few vestiges remain of “the localistic and personalistic frame of reference, which describes farming and country life effectively all the way through the depression years,” it is important to remember the influence that an idealized picture of rural life had on earlier generations of American intellectuals. Amidst the profound changes in American society produced by industrialization, urbanization, and corporate capitalism, many thinkers adhered to a vision of simpler times—one of grass-— Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), p. 23. John L.—Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), p. xvi; Shover's book is a poignant analysis of the revolution in rural life since the 1940s. Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J., 1970), examines the nostalgia for simpler times in the thought of nine people, including John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Jane Addams, Josiah Royce, and Robert E. Park, who identified personally and professionally with urban life.

scholarly journals Introduction to Symposium on the Third Restatement of Conflict of Laws

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 137-138
Author(s):  
Carlos M. Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Choice Of Law ◽  
Conflict Of Laws ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
The Third ◽  
American Law

The American Law Institute (ALI) has recently embarked on the project of elaborating a new Restatement of Conflict of Laws. Its first two Restatements on this subject have been enormously influential. The Ali began its work on the First Restatement in 1923, naming Joseph Beale of the Harvard Law School as its Reporter. Adopted in 1934, the First Restatement reflected the highly territorialist approach to the conflict of laws that had long prevailed in this country. Even before the First Restatement’s adoption, the First Restatement’s territorialist approach, and the “vested rights” theory on which it was based, was subjected to intense scholarly criticism. Nevertheless, the First Restatement’s approach continued to prevail in the United States until the New York Court of Appeals initiated a “choice-of-law revolution” in the early 1960’s with its decision inBabcock v. Jackson. Although most states have departed from the First Restatement’s approach, the First Restatement retains its adherents. Ten states continue to follow the First Restatement for tort cases and twelve states for contract cases.

scholarly journals Why not an International Journal of Clinical Legal Education?

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Gold
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
The Past ◽  
School Based ◽  
Important Milestone

Jerome Frank may have suggested the term Clinical Legal Education (CLE) first when he asked “Why Not a Clinical Lawyer School?”2; but, it was not until the New York City based Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR), funded by the Ford Foundation, took the pre-eminently active role in promoting and supporting law school-based experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s that CLE truly had an opportunity to develop. Over the past thirty plus years CLE has become more and more central to legal education, especially in the United States; innovations elsewhere have been fewer, more modest, and slower to develop, but of significance to the shifting culture of law learning, wherever they have taken place. The inception of the Journal3 marks an important milestone in the continuing development of CLE; for with this volume, we formally recognise that CLE is a vitally important and diverse phenomenon with a global reach.

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