Bristow as Businessman and Musical Authority

Author(s):  
Katherine K. Preston

Bristow organized two piano and melodeon businesses--the first a disaster, the second more successful. He provided testimonials to many instrument manufacturers (Steinway, Chickering, Bradbury, and Weber pianos) and other music-related endeavors. He was also associated with the United States Mutual Pianoforte Association (1867), a nonprofit that made pianos available to the general public at low prices. Bristow also served as a musical-instrument judge at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and became swept up in a controversy about the judging process. He was defended by some New York critics but was deemed guilty by association by many and must have rued the day he agreed to take on the task.

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-73
Author(s):  
Richard A. Willis

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the average life of a theatre in Europe was about twenty years; the life expectancy of a theatre in the United States was much less. Chances were that the theatre would burn. Nothing seemed sufficient to prevent accidental fires from getting started, and, once the fires had begun, they could rarely be brought under control. In practically every case, however, the general public remained indifferent to its safety. Theatres destroyed by fire were rebuilt, reopened, and refilled almost immediately. Three major theatre catastrophes spanned the nineteenth century in America: the burning of the Theatre in Richmond in 1811, where seventy died; the fire at Mrs. Conway's Theatre in Brooklyn in 1876, which killed two hundred and eighty-five; and the worst of the theatre disasters, the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago in 1903, where six hundred and two perished. These were the most devastating fires in a century during which hundreds of theatres burned, many thousands of dollars worth of property was destroyed, and well over a thousand spectators lost their lives. Such tragedies were in the general pattern of conflagrations in America throughout the nineteenth century. Imagine a closely built-up street running from New York to Chicago. If all the buildings on both sides of that street were burned, the loss would equal the estimated costs from fires in this country in 1907.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


Author(s):  
Federico Varese

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


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