Dying City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Tochterman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Urban Fear ◽  
American Cities

In this eye-opening cultural history, Brian Tochterman examines competing narratives that shaped post–World War II New York City. As a sense of crisis rose in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s, a period defined by suburban growth and deindustrialization, no city was viewed as in its death throes more than New York. Feeding this narrative of the dying city was a wide range of representations in film, literature, and the popular press--representations that ironically would not have been produced if not for a city full of productive possibilities as well as challenges. Tochterman reveals how elite culture producers, planners and theorists, and elected officials drew on and perpetuated the fear of death to press for a new urban vision. It was this narrative of New York as the dying city, Tochterman argues, that contributed to a burgeoning and broad anti-urban political culture hostile to state intervention on behalf of cities and citizens. Ultimately, the author shows that New York’s decline--and the decline of American cities in general--was in part a self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by urban fear and the new political culture nourished by it.

A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
FREDERICK BUELL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Motor Fuel ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Peak Oil ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Energy History ◽  
1960S And 1970S

In opposition to energy historian Vaclav Smil, who argues that “timeless literature … show[s] no correlation with advances in energy consumption,” this essay makes the general claim that energy history is significantly entwined with cultural history. Energy history is in fact entwined with changing cultural conceptualizations and representations of psyche, body, society, and environment; it is correlated not just with changing material cultures, but with symbolic cultures as well. To see this, the essay argues, one must conceptualize energy history in terms of a succession of energy systems – systems that are constituted by sociocultural, economic, environmental, and technological relationships. The essay's specific argument then traces the effects on symbolic culture, especially literature, of the nineteenth – and twentieth-century shift from coal capitalism to oil–electric capitalism. It starts by looking at the features of early oil extraction culture, from Drake's 1859 oil strike in Titusville, Pennsylvania to Upton Sinclair's novelOil!, and examines how oil–electric capitalism develops and defines itself culturally against the previous era of coal capitalism. Then the essay considers how the consolidation of the oil–electric capitalist system is significantly related to the emergence of modernist culture, affecting the production of both popular culture and high art. By the end of the twentieth century, a new phase in oil–electric capitalism emerges with the expansion of the postwar petrochemical industry, the dramatic expansion of environmental crisis discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and the return of peak-oil discourse to the mainstream in the last decade. The essay examines how the material features of oil, as well as its dominant uses as luminant, motor fuel, lubricant, and eventually petrochemical feedstock, take on cultural importance. Exemplifying both the cultural innovations and reinventions of oil capitalism from the extraction era to the consolidation era and the post-World War II period, the essay focusses throughout on the two recurring motifs, exuberance and catastrophe, as they play out in a wide range of literary texts and popular enthusiasms.

Film Noir: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text

1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Maltby
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
Intended Meaning ◽  
The Public ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Front Office ◽  
Mining Projects ◽  
Office Personnel

How are we to situate a movie in history? By now there must be few practitioners of American Studies who would not acknowledge that the products of Hollywood provide a rich seam waiting to be mined by social and cultural historians. As in most mining projects, the difficulty lies in developing the equipment needed to extract the ore. To treat film as a source of cultural history is by no means as simple as that old-fashioned literary approach by which an author's biography could be interwoven with a summary political or social history. The cinema has no author whose individuality can be used to gloss over the absence of method in such a procedure. Or rather, any movie has such a plethora of authors that the attempt to establish evidence of authorial intent is bound to fail, as auteurist criticism has repeatedly demonstrated. The “authors” of an entertainment commodity are not simply its director, writer, producer and studio head of production. They include front office personnel, New York executives and the advertising staff, distributors and theatre managers who “author” the product at the point of its sale to the public. In any case, the historian concerned with popular rather than elite culture is at least as interested in reception as in production, and his or her sphere of interest must extend beyond the limits of the text and its intended meaning to a concern with context and with how the movie was received and understood by its primary audience.

Brought to You by the Ford Foundation

Ballet Class ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Melissa R. Klapper
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Extracurricular Activities ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Ford Foundation ◽  
The United States ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The post–World War II era saw an explosion in ballet class as more young people than ever engaged in extracurricular activities. George Balanchine, founder of the School of American Ballet (1934) and the New York City Ballet (1948), exerted an outsize impact on the expansion of ballet in the United States, training teachers and investigating ballet class across the country. The Ford Foundation grants of 1963 cemented Balanchine’s centrality to American ballet by providing extraordinary funding to a number of ballet schools and companies within his orbit. These grants, while opposed by some cultural critics and members of the modern dance community, raised the standard of ballet class in America and also set the tone for the dance boom of the 1960s and 1970s. During the dance boom the number of ballet studios and companies grew sharply, capitalizing on great public interest in dance classes and performances.

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