Little Theater Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy Chansky
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Amateur Theater ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
American Society ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Susan Glaspell ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Provincetown Players ◽  
Washington Square

The Little Theater Movement comprised a web of amateur theater activities undertaken across much of the United States between 1912 and 1925. Little Theater opposed commercialism; its proponents believed that theater could be used for the betterment of American society and for self-expression. Little Theater founders and participants included playwrights, professors, liberal political activists, social workers, lawyers, heiresses, poets, actors, aesthetes, journalists, housewives, and students. They drew inspiration from the best-known work of the European Independent Theater Movement and from the design aesthetics of Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, and Max Reinhardt. Eventually their values affected commercial theatre. The Little Theater Movement is best known for four of its earliest companies: the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Chicago Little Theater, and the Neighborhood Playhouse. No two of these were alike, suggesting the breadth and variety of the movement’s undertakings. The Provincetown Players started in 1915, when a group of New York-based writers and activists assembled at their summer beach haunt in Massachusetts to present short, original plays. The founders were idealist George Cram Cook and his writer wife, Susan Glaspell; the group is perhaps best known for giving Eugene O’Neill his start as a produced playwright. The Washington Square Players was also started by a group of iconoclastic New Yorkers. The WSP’s mission was not, however, the production of member-written, American plays, but rather the production of a variety of plays from many sources.

Sonny Bravo, Típica 73, and the New York Sound

2020 ◽  
pp. 82-150
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican Descent ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
And Performance ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter focuses on an in-depth study of Elio Osácar a.k.a. Sonny Bravo, whose career as an arranger and performer began in the 1950s. It examines the rise, fall, and return of Típica 73, a pan-ethnic salsa group representative of the period 1973–80 that featured musicians from Panama, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New Yorkers of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican descent. The chapter recounts the story of a group who covered contemporary Cuban songs and pushed the boundaries of tradition through their instrumentation and performance. It introduces some key band members such as Sonny Bravo and Johnny Rodríguez who represented important New York–based familial and musical lineages. Their success was a direct result of musical innovation and negotiation. The band came to an abrupt end after a career-defining trip to Cuba, where they recorded with Cuban counterparts. Upon their return to the United States, they were branded as communist sympathizers. Ultimately, the chapter presents musical transcriptions of Bravo's arrangements and solos and places his music and his family, via his own father's musical career, within the historical context of early-twentieth-century Cuban migration to Tampa, Miami, and New York.

Since 1945: New Amenities, New Hazards

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Society ◽  
Service Employment

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."

Ethnocultural Political Analysis: A New Approach to American Ethnic Studies

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Swierenga
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
American Society ◽  
Nathan Glazer

At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their bookBeyond the Melting Pottraced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and,mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for dieNew York Timesand author ofThe American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.

Introduction: Immigration and Incorporation

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén G. Rumbaut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
American Society

In at least one sense the “American century” is ending much as it had begun: the United States has again become a nation of immigrants, and it is again being transformed in the process. But the diversity of the “new immigration” to the United States over the past three decades differs in many respects from that of the last period of mass immigration in the first three decades of the century. The immigrants themselves differ greatly in their social class and national origins, and so does the American society, polity, and economy that receives them—raising questions about their modes of incorporation, and challenging conventional accounts of assimilation processes that were framed during that previous epoch. The dynamics and future course of their adaptation are open empirical questions—as well as major questions for public policy, since the outcome will shape the future contours of American society. Indeed, as the United States undergoes its most profound demographic transformation in a century; as inexorable processes of globalization, especially international migrations from Asia, Africa, and the Americas, diversify still further the polyethnic composition of its population; and as issues of immigration, race and ethnicity become the subject of heated public debate, the question of incorporation, and its serious study, becomes all the more exigent. The essays in this special issue of Sociological Perspectives tackle that subject from a variety of analytical vantages and innovative approaches, covering a wide range of groups in major areas of immigrant settlement. Several of the papers focus specifically on Los Angeles and New York City, where, remarkably, fully a quarter of the total U.S. immigrant population resides.

Stephen Foster

Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deane L. Root ◽  
Codee Spinner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
George Gershwin ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
American Society

Stephen Collins Foster (b. Lawrence, near Pittsburgh, PA, 4 July 1826–d. New York, 13 January 1864) was the first professional songwriter in the United States, and the earliest to write songs whose images pervaded American culture and whose melodies endure into the 21st century. For his most familiar songs, he wrote both lyrics and music, though he also set poems that had appeared in household magazines, and toward the end of his life he partnered with poet George Cooper. His oeuvre includes principally songs for solo voice (or solo voice plus four-voice chorus) with piano accompaniment, four-voice hymns, and instrumental works (mostly dances, for piano). His songs for blackface minstrels (which provided him with the majority of his income, though they amount to less than one-tenth of his 287 authenticated compositions) were controversial from the start; they made Foster’s reputation, even as he attempted to create “refined” songs in a genre he considered to be rife with “trashy and really offensive words” (Foster letter to E. P. Christy, 25 May 1852). He was of Scots-Irish descent, and as a resident of a northern industrializing urban center that drew workers from throughout Western Europe, he was attuned to different national styles of song and common sentiments of lyric poetry not confined by ethnicity, race, or social class. His song structures and lyrics became models for other songwriters well into the Tin Pan Alley era; his inability to control copyrights (which were owned by his publishers) and his death in poverty (with 38 cents in his pocket) were factors in the establishment of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) fifty years later. It is perhaps not coincidental that songs quoting Foster’s “Swanee River” (“The Old Folks at Home”) helped launch the careers of two of the most significant American songwriters of the 20th century, Irving Berlin (“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”) and George Gershwin (“Swanee”). This bibliography summarizes the major sources of archival, published, and online information about Foster’s life, career, music, and their interpretation and influence in the social and cultural history of the United States, Europe, and East Asia. It omits the sound recordings, plays, films, novels, and other creative works that reflect and contribute to that influence.

Whiteness Interrupted

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Bell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
White Teachers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Racial Privilege ◽  
American Society ◽  
Depth Interviews

In Whiteness Interrupted Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority-black schools in which he examines the limitations of understandings of how white racial identity is formed. Through in-depth interviews with dozens of white teachers from a racially segregated, urban school district in Upstate New York, Bell outlines how whiteness is constructed based on localized interactions and takes a different form in predominantly black spaces. He finds that in response to racial stress in a difficult teaching environment, white teachers conceptualized whiteness as a stigmatized category predicated on white victimization. When discussing race outside majority-black spaces, Bell's subjects characterized American society as postracial, in which race seldom affects outcomes. Conversely, in discussing their experiences within predominantly black spaces, they rejected the idea of white privilege, often angrily, and instead focused on what they saw as the racial privilege of blackness. Throughout, Bell underscores the significance of white victimization narratives in black spaces and their repercussions as the United States becomes a majority-minority society.

scholarly journals The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Lepecki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Washington Square

Laurence Louppe once advanced the intriguing notion that the dancer is “the veritable avatar of Orpheus: he has no right to turn back on his course, lest he be denied the object of his quest” (Louppe 1994, 32). However, looking across the contemporary dance scene in Europe and the United States, one cannot escape the fact that dancers—contrary to Orpheus, contrary to Louppe's assertion—are increasingly turning back on their and dance history's tracks in order to find the “object of their quest.” Indeed, contemporary dancers and choreographers in the United States and Europe have in recent years been actively engaged in creating re-enactments of sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure, dance works of the twentieth century. Examples abound: we can think of Fabian Barba's Schwingende Landschaft (2008), an evening-length piece where the Ecuadorian choreographer returns to Mary Wigman's seven solo pieces created in 1929 and performed during Wigman's first U.S. tour in 1930; of Elliot Mercer returning in 2009 and 2010 to several of Simone Forti's Construction Pieces (1961/62), performing them at Washington Square Park in New York City; or Anne Collod's 2008 return to Anna Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965), among many other examples.

Black and Multiracial Politics in America Edited by Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh and Lawrence J. Hanks. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 404p. $55.00 cloth, $21.00 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-630
Author(s):  
Michael K. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Waves

The waves of immigrants arriving in the United States over the last 20 years, largely from Latin America and Asia, have settled in a few states—mainly California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—and in big cities in those states. Like the migration of African Americans to northern cities in the twentieth century and the suburbanization of whites, this demographic transformation is remaking urban politics. Black and Multiracial Politics in America, a collection of original essays, addresses the implications of this change for “the practice and process of black and multiracial politics in American society” (p. xiii). The authors seek to forge a new link between the study of black and the study of multiracial politics.

scholarly journals Becoming American/Becoming New Yorkers: Immigrant Incorporation in a Majority Minority City

2002 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 1020-1036 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Kasinitz ◽  
John Mollenkopf ◽  
Mary C. Waters
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
The United States ◽  
Press Release ◽  
Immigrant Incorporation ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
New Yorkers

Many observers have noted that immigrants to the United States are highly concentrated in the largest metropolitan areas of a relatively few states. Though immigrants diffused into many places that had previously seen relatively few immigrants during the 1990s, as of the 2000 census, 77 percent of the nation's 31.1 million foreign born residents still lived in six states – California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. According to the 2000 census, the two largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and New York, accounted for one third of all immigrants ( http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2002/demoprofiles.html ). While immigrants moved into many new areas during the 1990s, making the challenge of incorporating their children a national issue, their concentration in our largest cities remained pronounced.

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