Dos Passos, John (1896–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Blaise Cendrars ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
John Howard ◽  
American Society ◽  
Mike Gold

John Dos Passos was an American writer best known for his ‘contemporary chronicles’ of American life. His early novels, including Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy — The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936) — are considered classics of American Modernism, offering a complex and multifaceted portrayal of American society from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. The depiction of urban experience in these novels reflects the cinematic montage of Dziga Vertov, the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce, and the dynamism and simultaneity of Italian Futurism, among other influences. In addition to writing fiction, Dos Passos was a dramatist, poet, historian, journalist, travel writer, painter, and translator. His first two novels, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), are harrowing and highly critical accounts based on his experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He published a collection of free verse, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), as well as translations of the modernist poetry of Blaise Cendrars. In the late 1920s he worked briefly as a director, playwright, and set designer at the Vsevolod Meyerhold-inspired New Playwrights’ Theater in Greenwich Village, where his associates included communist writers like Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson.

Neighborhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Talen
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Neighborhood Structure ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Local Participation ◽  
Personal Influence ◽  
Social Mix ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
American Society

This book is written in support of those who believe that neighborhoods should be genuinely relevant in our lives, not as casual descriptors of geographic location but as places that provide an essential context for daily life. “Neighborhood” in its traditional sense—as a localized, place-based, delimited urban area that has some level of personal influence—seems a vanished part of the urban experience. This book explores whether 21st-century neighborhoods can once again provide a sense of caring and local participation and not devolve into enclaves seeking social insularity and separation. That the localized, diverse neighborhood has often failed to materialize requires thorough exploration. While many factors leading to the decline of the traditional neighborhood—e-commerce, suburban exclusivity, internet-based social contact—seem to be beyond anyone’s control, other factors seem more a product of neglect and confusion about neighborhood definition and its place in American society. Debates about the neighborhood have involved questions about social mix, serviceability, self-containment, centeredness, and connectivity within and without. This book works through these debates and proposes their resolution. The historical and global record shows that there are durable, time-tested regularities about neighborhoods. Many places outside of the West were built with neighborhood structure in evidence—long before professionalized, Western urban planning came on the scene. This book explores the compelling case that the American neighborhood can be connected to these traditions, anchored in human nature and regularities of form, and reinstated as something relevant and empowering in 21st-century urban experience.

The End of “The Protestant Era”?

2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Collis Greene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society

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.

Victims of the Great Depression: Self-Blame/Non-Self-Blame, Radicalism, and Pre-1929 Experiences

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Sternsher
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Self Blame ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

Youth, Christianity, and the Crisis of Civilization, 1930–1945

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Bergler
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
World Crisis ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Christian Leaders

AbstractDuring the 1930s and 1940s, the Great Depression and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe convinced a broad spectrum of Americans that they were living through a prolonged “crisis of civilization” with real potential to destroy all they held dear. Meanwhile, they saw evidence that these global problems put young people especially at risk for immorality, loss of hope, and political subversion. Because the “youth problem” and the “world crisis” seemed to be inextricably linked, even the everyday behaviors of young people took on a heightened political significance in the eyes of many adults. Christian leaders from across the spectrum of churches—Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and African American—did not just capitalize on this obsession with youth and the fate of civilization; they did all they could to fan those flames. They did so not cynically, but sincerely, believing that they could and should save the world by saving American youth. Yet these leaders were also making a bid for influence in American society and for control of the future of their churches. The resulting politicized views of youth and youth work would not only influence the outcomes of internal church battles, but they would also shape how various Christian groups responded to the Cold War.

scholarly journals The Ultimate Fox in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes

2018 ◽  
Vol 214 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Instructor Marwa Ghazi Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Human Value ◽  
American Society ◽  
Moral Themes

         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.

scholarly journals American cinema of the Great Depression. The «Social Restlessness Phase»

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Dmitriy Vladislavovich Zakharov
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Private Interest ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gangster Film ◽  
American Society

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.

Roadside Americans

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Reid
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
White House ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
On The Road ◽  
American Society ◽  
Reagan Era

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet, by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White House, the youthful faces on the road chasing the ghost of Jack Kerouac were largely gone—along with sympathetic portrayals of the practice in state legislatures and the media. In Roadside Americans, Jack Reid traces the rise and fall of hitchhiking, offering vivid accounts of life on the road and how the act of soliciting rides from strangers, and the attitude toward hitchhikers in American society, evolved over time in synch with broader economic, political, and cultural shifts. In doing so, Reid offers insight into significant changes in the United States amid the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Reagan Era.

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