Academic literature on the topic '1970s United States'

The communal revival that began in the mid-1960s developed into a new mode of activism, ‘communal activism’ or the ‘commune movement’, forming its own politics, lifestyle and ideology. Communal activism spread and flourished until the mid-1970s in many parts of the world. To analyse this global phenomenon, this thesis explores the similarities and differences between the commune movements of Denmark, UK and the US. By examining the motivations for the communal revival, links with 1960s radicalism, communes’ praxis and outward-facing activities, and the crisis within the commune movement and responses to it, this thesis places communal activism within the context of wider social movements for social change. Challenging existing interpretations which have understood the communal revival as an alternative living experiment to the nuclear family, or as a smaller part of the counter-culture, this thesis argues that the commune participants created varied and new experiments for a total revolution against the prevailing social order and its dominant values and institutions, including the patriarchal family and capitalism. Communards embraced autonomy and solidarity based on individual communes’ situations and tended to reject charismatic leadership. Functioning as an independent entity, each commune engaged with their local communities designing various political and cultural projects. They interacted with other social movements groups through collective work for the women’s liberation and environmentalist movement. As a genuine grass root social movement communal activism became an essential part of Left politics bridging the 1960s and 1970s.

The project is an inter-disciplinary intervention into a field that may be largely called New York Studies or, more explicitly, the uses of urban, human and cultural geography for a cultural-materialist history of New York between the fiscal crisis years of the mid-1970s through to the Market Crash of October 1987. My concern is to offer a critique of urban regime transformation in New York, the kind of private-public coalitions taking shape in response to the advent and consolidation of the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) industries and their socio-spatial implications, through the lenses of cultural production. I am interested in the ways in which representation - the literary, the cinematic (more sparsely and tangentially), the documented and the archival in an analytically productive conjunction - encodes and arbitrates the changes in the production of urban space in New York City. Thus, the project underlines the heightened significance of literary economies for understanding the experiential structures of urban transformation in 1970s and 1980s New York. Driven by the belief that written culture, just like visual art, may prefigure and telescope urban change, a handful of New York writers dared to tread (both literally and symbolically) where the sociologist, the urban geographer or the documenter does so by professional default, and thus engaged head-on with the hard city of socio-economic networks. This kind of ‘urbanisation of [literary] consciousness’ calls for refreshed modes of enquiry, proposed in Chapter 1, at which point fetishist and aestheticist constructions of the city in the postmodernist key become inadequate, insufficient and politically ineffectual interpretative strategies. The following three-fold case study analysis of counterculture and the underground economy, of homesteading and ‘low rent’ fiction, of the finance industry, publishing and ‘financial writing’ may offer radical opportunities for revisiting both the space of representation and the represented space of urban decline and growth through a geocultural reading for the unevenness of urban space.

The primary concerns of this study were to describe the most common practices of current college student leadership training programs in the United States and to compare the 1979 and 1997 findings by replicating the 1979 Simonds study. This study provides an overview of related literature on the history of leadership theory and the research on leadership training in higher education, a detailed description of the methodology, results of the survey, a comparative analysis of the 1979 and 1997 findings, and discussion of the current status of leadership training at institutions of higher education. Conclusions are drawn, and implications and recommendations for student affairs professionals are made that may improve the quality of student leadership in higher education.

This thesis investigates the reasons for Greenberg???s aesthetic intransigence ??? that is, his adherence to a formalist/purist stance, and his refusal to countenance non-purist twentiethcentury avant-garde trends evident in the art he ignored or denigrated, and in the art he promoted. The most substantial body of work challenged is Cold War revisionism (exemplified by the scholarship of Francis Frascina, Serge Guilbaut, and John O???Brian) which casts Greenberg as a politically expedient party to the imperialist agendas of various CIA-funded organisations. The major conclusions reached are that: Greenberg???s aesthetic intransigence was driven by a similarly intransigent ethico-political position, and that his critical method reflected patterns of argumentation set up in ???Avant-Garde and Kitsch??? (1939). This essay, and Greenberg???s ethico-political position, derived, not least, from his direct encounter with American Nazism and anti-Semitism which led him to realise that America (with what he saw as its decadence, cultural apathy, and low-level mass taste) was as vulnerable to the threat of totalitarianism as Europe and Russia. Reflecting this fear, ???Avant-Garde and Kitsch??? had juxtaposed a stagnant, impure culture with a vigorous avantgarde culture of impeccable vintage ??? in the process infusing politics into a formalist, historical conception of modernism Greenberg first devised in the early 1930s and then augmented, during 1938-9, with Hans Hofmann???s theories and others. Thus established, this rudimentary paradigm for Greenberg???s art writing was elaborated upon and made canonical in ???Towards a Newer Laocoon??? (1940), and entrenched after the war concurrent with the entrenchment of his ethico-political position. In the face of a Stalinist/capitalist war of wills, continuing anti-Semitism, and what Greenberg perceived as increasing decadence, he continued to argue for a serious, professionally-skilled (predominantly abstract) art, which would be resistant to the ersatz, yet not dehumanized by excluding the natural. By promoting this as the only genuine avant-garde art (while ignoring or denigrating playful, humorous and anarchic avant-garde tendencies), and by reiterating in the 1950s his pre-war Marxist sympathies, Greenberg was effectively demonstrating his continued hope for a utopian culture (luxuriant, formal, informed and socialist) first visualised in the late 1930s.