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2, Art Recess, ed. A Poet in Center City Pt. 3. Plymouth Meeting, Pa: perma.cc, 2023.
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A Poet in Center City: (Poet in Center City entire, 2024 ed.). 2nd ed. Plymouth Meeting, Pa: Funtime Press, 2019.
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Dignas, Beate, Beate Dignas, Gerald Schwedler, Marek Tamm, Patrick Hutton, Susan A. Crane, Stefan Berger, Alessandro Ancangeli, and William Niven, eds. A Cultural History of Memory in Antiquity. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474206747.
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The ancient world is a paradigm for the memory scholar. Without an awareness that collective memories are not only different from individual memories (or even the sum thereof) but also highly constructed, ancient research will be fundamentally flawed. Many networks of memories are beautifully represented in the written and material remains of antiquity, and it is precisely the ways in which they are fashioned, distorted, preserved or erased through which we can learn about the historical process as such. Our evidence is deeply characterized by the fact that ancient ‘identity’ and ‘memory’ appear exceptionally strong. Responsible for this is a continuing desire to link the present to the remote past, which creates many contexts in which memories were constructed. The ancient historian therefore has the right tools with which to work: places and objects from the past, monuments and iconography, and textual narratives with a primary purpose to memorize and commemorate. This is paired with our desire to understand the ancient world through its own self-perception. With the opportunity of tapping into this world by way of oral history, personal testimonies are a desideratum in all respects. Memory of the past, however, is profoundly about ‘self-understanding’. This volume surveys and builds on the many insights we have gained from vibrant research in the field since Maurice Halbwachs’ and Jan Assmann’s seminal studies on the idea and definition of ‘cultural memory’. While focusing on specific themes all chapters address the concepts and expressions of memory, and their historical impact and utilization by groups and individuals at specific times and for specific reasons.
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Laceulle, Hanne. Aging and Self-Realization: Cultural Narratives about Later Life. Transcript Verlag, 2019.
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Emerich, Monica M. The Collective Conscience. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036422.003.0008.
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This chapter deals with LOHAS in the context of “community-building” and the formation of a collective conscience. LOHAS is ultimately a narrative about how to change the world using consumer culture. The lens of globalization is used to examine how LOHAS attempts, on the one hand, to overcome a legacy of anthropocentrism, Eurocentrism, cultural and economic imperialism, and Westernization in capitalism, while, on the other hand, self-consciously reinforcing the capitalist imperative to sell more and different things to more people. As a market-based movement and as a claim to a reformatory effort, LOHAS is only as successful as the quantity of consumers and producers that support its premises. With its sweeping global agenda, LOHAS texts try to position the concept as a nonpartisan movement, one based on commonalities rather than differences. This chapter is a study of the rise of community and collectivity in LOHAS culture, which is chiefly occurring through mediated means, particularly through social media. It historicizes LOHAS within social movements, examining the importance of media and the central role of communication in democratic efforts. This sets the stage for a closer look at the ways in which media and market enable and disable participation in the communication process. An important part of this is the working of ideology in the construction of truth claims.
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Kröller, Eva-Marie. Literary Histories. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199679775.003.0038.
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This chapter discusses national literary histories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific and summarises the book's main findings regarding the construction and revision of narratives of national identity since 1950. In colonial and postcolonial cultures, literary history is often based on a paradox that says much about their evolving sense of collective identity, but perhaps even more about the strains within it. The chapter considers the complications typical of postcolonial literary history by focusing on the conflict between collective celebration and its refutation. It examines three issues relating to the histories of English-language fiction in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific: problems of chronology and beginnings, with a special emphasis on Indigenous peoples; the role of the cultural elite and the history wars in the Australian context; and the influence of postcolonial networks on historical methodology.
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Wagoner, Brady, ed. Handbook of Culture and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190230814.001.0001.
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This book is about the ways in which culture matters to memory. It explores how memory is deeply entwined with social relationships, stories in film and literature, group history, monuments, ritual practices, material artifacts, and a host of other cultural devices. Culture in this account is not a bounded group of people or variable to be manipulated but, rather, the medium through which people live and make meaning of their lives. The focus of analysis becomes one of understanding the mutual constitution of people’s memories and the social–cultural worlds to which they belong. An interdisciplinary team of leading scholars has been brought together in this volume to offer new theoretical models of memory as both a psychological and a social–cultural process. The following themes are explored: the concept of memory and its relation to evolution, neurology, culture, and history; the particular dynamics of different cultural contexts of remembering, such as families, commemorations, giving testimony, and struggling with difficult memories such as in therapy; life course changes in memory from its development in childhood, through its anticipatory function in emerging adulthood, to managing its decline in old age; and the national and transnational organization of collective memory and identity through narratives propagated in political discourse, the classroom, and media. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the complex and interconnected relationship between culture, mind, and memory.
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Sharma, Mukul. Dalit Memories and Water Rights. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199477562.003.0004.
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Water is a deeply contentious issue, intersecting with caste, class, and gender in India in multifaceted ways, and producing complex cultural meanings and social hierarchies. Culturally, politically and economically, it has been a source of power. It has been controlled by the powerful, and used as a means to exert control over others. It has been a traditional medium for exclusion of Dalits in overt and covert ways: denying Dalits the right over, and access to, water; asserting monopoly of upper-castes over water bodies, including rivers, wells, tanks and taps; constructing casteist water texts in cultural and religious domains; obscuring Dalit narratives and knowledge of water; and rendering thinking and speaking about caste, water and Dalits together as peripheral to discourses on water. The chapter takes up two case studies from two different regions of Bihar, where Dalits have used water to represent their own ecological vision in a collective manner, drawing from a rich repertoire of their religious, cultural, and social resources. Cultural symbols and myths of Deena-Bhadri and Ekalavya are assembled by Dalits as a community tool-box, to demand river and fishing rights, and to attach themselves to pasts, places, and resources.
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Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence. Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812579.001.0001.
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This book examines class identities and politics in late twentieth-century England. Class remained important to ‘ordinary’ people’s identities and their narratives about social change in this period, but in changing ways. Using self-narratives drawn from a wide range of sources, the book shows that many people felt that once-clear class boundaries had blurred since 1945. By the end of the period, ‘working-class’ was often seen as a historical identity, related to background and heritage. The middle classes became more heterogeneous, and class snobberies ‘went underground’, as people from all backgrounds began to assert the importance of authenticity, individuality, and ordinariness. The book argues that it is more useful to understand the cultural changes of these years through the lens of the decline of deference, which transformed people’s attitudes towards class, and towards politics. The final two chapters examine the claim that Thatcher and New Labour wrote class out of politics. This simple—and highly political—narrative misses important points of distinction. Thatcher was driven by political ideology and necessity to dismiss the importance of class, while the New Labour project was good at listening to voters—particularly swing voters in marginal seats—and echoing back what they were increasingly saying about the blurring of class lines and the importance of ordinariness. But this did not add up to an abandonment of a majoritarian project, as New Labour reoriented socialism to emphasize using collective action to empower the individual.
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Jonsson, Herbert, Lovisa Berg, Chatarina Edfeldt, and Bo G. Jansson, eds. Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction. Stockholm University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/bbj.
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Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world? These and related questions are, if not given a definite answer, explored in the chapters of this anthology. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders include studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the anthology as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demand a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks. The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West-african novels, border-crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.
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Leigh, Harless Nancy, ed. Caring beyond borders: Nurses' stories about working abroad. New York: Kaplan Pub., 2010.
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Stone, Dan. Genocide and Memory. Edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232116.013.0006.
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This article explores the history of genocide by looking at collective memories, from the point of view of Western culture. Western culture is suffused with autobiographies, especially with traumatic life narratives about the legacies of abusive childhoods. For the individual victims of genocide, traumatic memories cannot be escaped; for societies, genocide has profound effects that are immediately felt and that people are exhorted never to forget. The discussion shows how genocide is bound up with memory, on an individual level of trauma and on a collective level in terms of the creation of stereotypes, prejudice, and post-genocide politics. Despite the risks of perpetuating old divisions or reopening unhealed wounds, grappling with memory remains essential in order to remind the victims that they are not the worthless or less than human beings that their tormentors have portrayed them as such.
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Butler, Melvin L. Island Gospel. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042904.001.0001.
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For Jamaican Pentecostal Christians, music is a form of worship that opens pathways to the Spirit and brings about deliverance from sin. It is also a way of drawing and transcending boundaries, as practitioners sing about what they believe and identify where they stand in relation to cultural and religious outsiders. This book explores these ritual functions as they are fulfilled within Jamaican church services and concerts. It highlights the ways in which Pentecostals cultivate feelings of collective distinctiveness by rendering gospel music with an island flavor and by patrolling stylistic boundaries between a holy “home” and a profane “world.” This dichotomy is destabilized through the transnational flow and appropriation of popular culture and “American” media. What emerges are the strategies of musical worship through which Pentecostals embody their religion and seek spiritual transcendence while navigating the crossroads of local and global practice. Pentecostals describe themselves as “in the world, but not of the world,” meaning that while they live and work in the broader society, they strive to be “sanctified” from it by upholding a distinct moral code. This narrative of worldly renunciation prompts believers to abandon prior habits of conduct while embracing newer, localized identities as children of God. This book uncovers how gospel music, as a dynamic cultural practice, complicates these theological affirmations and reveals the shifting foundations of Pentecostal identity in Jamaica and its diaspora.
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Passy, Florence, and Gian-Andrea Monsch. Contentious Minds. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190078010.001.0001.
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Why does the mind matter for joint action? Contentious Minds is a comparative study of how cognitive and relational processes allow activists to sustain their commitment. With survey data and narratives of activists engaged in three commitment communities, the minds of activists involved in contentious politics are compared with those devoted to institutional and volunteering action. The book’s main argument is that activists of one commitment community have synchronized minds concerning the aim and means of their activism as they perceive common good (aim) and politics (means) through similar cognitive lenses. The book shows the importance of direct conversational contact with individuals in bringing about this synchronization. Assessing the synchronization within communities as well as the variation between them constitutes a major purpose of this book. It shows that activists construct and enact community-specific democratic cultures, thereby entering the public sphere through collective action. The book makes three major contributions. First, it emphasizes the necessity to return the study of the mind to research on activism, Second, it calls for an integrated relational perspective that rests on the structural, instrumental, and interpretative dimensions of social networks. Finally, it advocates a substantial integration of culture in the study of social movements by effectively valuing the role of culture in shaping a person’s mind.
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Wills, Mary. Envoys of abolition. Liverpool University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620788.001.0001.
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After Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, a squadron of Royal Navy vessels was sent to the West Coast of Africa tasked with suppressing the thriving transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on previously unpublished papers found in private collections and various archives in the UK and abroad, this book examines the personal and cultural experiences of the naval officers at the frontline of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign in West Africa. It explores their unique roles in this 60-year operation: at sea, boarding slave ships bound for the Americas and ‘liberating’ captive Africans; on shore, as Britain resolved to ‘improve’ West African societies; and in the metropolitan debates around slavery and abolitionism in Britain. Their personal narratives are revealing of everyday concerns of health, rewards and strategy, to more profound questions of national honour, cultural encounters, responsibility for the lives of others in the most distressing of circumstances, and the true meaning of ‘freedom’ for formerly enslaved African peoples. British anti-slavery efforts and imperial agendas were tightly bound in the nineteenth century, inseparable from ideas of national identity. This is a book about individuals tasked with extraordinary service, military men who also worked as guardians, negotiators, and envoys of abolition.
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Oates, Thomas P. “This Game Has Got to be About More than Winning”. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040948.003.0003.
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This chapter explores the anxious, deeply conflicted sense of besiegement characterizing dominant accounts of gender and race relations, as expressed in melodramas set around the NFL produced for television and cinema. The depictions of football’s male-defined spaces highlighted here are often fraught with anxiety and a sense of vulnerability. Real and imagined influences issue challenges to male power, and internal forces continually threaten to break it apart. In these narratives, male collectives are set in opposition to feminine forces, which threaten them (and their individual members) with emasculation. Though football is often celebrated as a symbol of the supposed transcendence of the racial past, narratives of the game are infused with profound ambivalence about black masculinity. The black athlete, celebrated for his impressive and admirable physical gifts, frequently challenges the cohesion of the group. Displays of “excessive” individualism and the homoerotic appeal of black bodies further complicate this racial ambivalence.
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Wheeldon, Marianne. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190631222.001.0001.
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This book examines the vicissitudes of Debussy’s posthumous reception in the 1920s and early 1930s and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his musical aesthetic. In tracing this overarching narrative, this study enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. Key in this regard is identifying the networks of influence that had to come together and act in several spheres—textual, performative, material—to safeguard the composer’s legacy. Today, Debussy’s position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure: this book examines how and why this seemingly inevitable state of affairs came about. Although this study focuses on one particular instance of reputation building, its scope is also broader in that it addresses the more general processes by which reputations are constructed, contested, and consolidated. And by analyzing the forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, this book contributes to a greater understanding of the interwar period—the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 1930s Paris.
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Wales Freedman, Eden. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496827333.001.0001.
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Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women. Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature, articulating a theory of reading (or “dual-witnessing”) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. The book then places its original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in American literature. This book also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.
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Kahn, Andrew, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler. National narratives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199663941.003.0017.
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Within the context of the Enlightenment’s broader commitment to progress, the chapter considers the treatment of absolutism and the debate about the legacy of Peter the Great, an important theme in Russian writing in the Catherine period. Eighteenth-century writers also used literature (including works about travel) to explore the question of cultural progress and civilization. In the eighteenth century, progress and Enlightenment framed the idea of nation, and questions of national identity were evaluated with reference to Europe. New forms of writing developed to keep pace with these enquiries, and the chapter contains a case study on Nikolai Karamzin’s The Letters of a Russian Traveler, while another case study explores the relationship between literature, biography, and the idea of a philosophical life as examined by Aleksandr Radishchev.
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Kahn, Andrew, Mark Lipovetsky, Irina Reyfman, and Stephanie Sandler. Intelligentsia narratives. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199663941.003.0038.
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The chapter explores how narratives about the intelligentsia and its cultural identity unfold the experience and ideology of this significant group in parallel with catastrophic narratives about revolution, terror and war. Central texts include major Russian novels of the twentieth century, such as Gorky’s Life of Klim Samgin, Olesha’s Envy, Bulgakov’s The White Guard and The Master and Margarita, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Also important are the genres of autobiography, memoir, and oral history, and a case study of a single lyric poem, by Osip Mandelstam, further demonstrate the capacity of poetry to engage with the theme of the responsibility of the intelligentsia in a time of terror. The chapter shows how literary texts captured the conflicted and far from passive role of the intelligentsia as a beleaguered moral authority in a state organized around a central political idea.
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Flesher Fominaya, Cristina. Democracy Reloaded. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190099961.001.0001.
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Framed in debates about the crisis of democracy, the book analyzes one of the most influential social movements of recent times: Spain’s “Indignados” or “15-M” movement. In the wake of the global financial crisis and harsh austerity policies, 15-M movement activists occupied public squares across the country, mobilized millions of Spanish citizens, gave rise to new hybrid parties such as Podemos, and inspired pro-democracy movements around the world. Based on access to key participants in the 15-M movement and Podemos, and extensive participant observation, the book tells the story of this remarkable movement, its emergence, evolution, and impact. In so doing, it challenges some of the core arguments in social movement scholarship about the factors likely to lead to movement success. Instead, the book argues that movements organized around autonomous network logics can build and sustain strong movements in the absence of formal organizations, strong professionalized leadership, and the ability to attract external resources. The key to understanding its power lies in the shared political culture and collective identity that emerged following the occupation of Spain’s central squares. These protest camps sustained the movement by forging reciprocal ties of solidarity between diverse actors, and generating a shared set of critical master frames across a diverse set of actors and issues (e.g., housing, education, pensions, privatization of public services, corruption) that enabled the movement to effectively contest hegemonic narratives about the crisis, austerity, and democracy, influencing public debate and the political agenda.
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Ray, Keith, and Julian Thomas. Neolithic Britain. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823896.001.0001.
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The Neolithic in Britain was a period of fundamental change: human communities were transformed, collectively owning domesticated plants and animals, and inhabiting a richer world of material things: timber houses and halls, pottery vessels, polished flint and stone axes, and massive monuments of earth and stone. Equally important was the development of a suite of new social practices, and an emphasis on descent, continuity and inheritance. These innovations set in train social processes that culminated with the construction of Stonehenge, the most remarkable surviving structure from prehistoric Europe. Neolithic Britain provides an up to date, concise introduction to the period of British prehistory from c. 4000-2200 BCE. Written on the basis of a new appreciation of the chronology of the period, the result reflects both on the way that archaeologists write narratives of the Neolithic, and how Neolithic people constructed histories of their own. Incorporating new insights from the extraordinary pace of archaeological discoveries in recent years, a world emerges which is unfamiliar, complex and challenging, and yet played a decisive role in forging the landscape of contemporary Britain. Important recent developments have resulted in a dual realisation: firstly, highly focused research into individual site chronologies can indicate precise and particular time narratives; and secondly, this new awareness of time implies original insights about the fabric of Neolithic society, embracing matters of inheritance, kinship and social ties, and the 'descent' of cultural practices. Moreover, our understanding of Neolithic society has been radically affected by individual discoveries and investigative projects, whether in the Stonehenge area, on mainland Orkney, or in less well-known localities across the British Isles. The new perspective provided in this volume stems from a greater awareness of the ways in which unfolding events and transformations in societies depend upon the changing relations between individuals and groups, mediated by objects and architecture. This concise panorama into Neolithic Britain offers new conclusions and an academically-stimulating but accessible overview. It covers key material and social developments, and reflects on the nature of cultural practices, tradition, genealogy, and society across nearly two millennia.
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Roach, Levi. Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691181660.001.0001.
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This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.
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Biebuyck, William, and Judith Meltzer. Cultural Political Economy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.140.
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Cultural political economy (CPE) is an approach to political economy that focuses on how economic systems, and their component parts, are products of specific human, technical, and natural relations. Notwithstanding longer historical roots, CPE emerged as part of the “cultural turn” within the social sciences. Although it is often seen as countering material determinism and the neglect of culture in conventional approaches in political economy, the cultural turn was less about “adding culture” than about challenging positivist epistemologies in social research. For some, cultural political economy continues to be defined by an orientation toward cultural or “lifeworld” variables such as identity, gender, discourse, and so on, in contrast to conventional political economy’s focus on the material or “systems” dimensions. However, this revalorization of the nonmaterial dimensions of political economic life reinforces a sharp distinction between the cultural and the material, an issue which can be traced to the concept of “(dis)embedding” the economy and subordinating society. A more noticeable development, however, is the increasing orientation of critical (CPE) analyses of global development toward the “economization” of the cultural in the context of mutating forms of neoliberalism. Concomitant to the economization of the cultural in narratives of global development is the “culturalization” of the economic. Here attention is paid not just to the growth of cultural industries but to the multiple ways in which culture has been normalized in discourses of global and corporate development.
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Pilcher, Jeffrey M. Cultural Histories of Food. Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199729937.013.0003.
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Because of its essential role in human life, food has been a part of historical narratives since antiquity. As the proper subject of professional inquiry, however, food gained recognition only in the 1990s with the advent of the so-called new cultural history. Whereas the disciplinary hegemony of culture has begun to fragment and decline, the field of food history continues to grow significantly. Therefore, it is only fitting to reflect on the historical study of food as a cultural expression, to differentiate it from cultural approaches to the history of food politics, nutrition, and the like. Changing scholarly assumptions about culture have had an impact in terms of understanding what cuisine is all about. Drawing on the theories of Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz, and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson about cuisine, this article examines historical change at three interrelated levels: the circulation of texts, the tastes of dining, and the practices of cooking.
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Schneider, William. Interviewing in Cross-Cultural Settings. Edited by Donald A. Ritchie. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195339550.013.0004.
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The essence of this article is interviewing in cross-cultural settings. Cross-cultural interviews involve an interviewer and an interviewee who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences. They may not share common assumptions about meaning and both must work to establish understanding of what they mean by what they say. Usually, the person interviewing comes from a literate tradition and is conducting the interview to create a record that they or others will analyze and reference in their work. The person interviewed often is from a group whose primary reference is their oral tradition and narratives based on personal experience. In cross-cultural settings the interviewee or narrator is creating narrative from his or her oral tradition and personal experiences, while the interviewer is working to make a record for reference after the recording session. This article also discusses the ways of communicating in cross-cultural context. An analysis of cross-cultural interviews concludes this article.
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Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. Invisible Weapons. Cornell University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501705151.001.0001.
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In 1098, three years into the First Crusade and after a brutal eight-month siege, the Franks captured the city of Antioch. Two days later, Muslim forces arrived with a relief army, and the victors became the besieged. Exhausted and ravaged by illness and hunger, the Franks were exhorted by their religious leaders to supplicate God, and for three days they performed a series of liturgical exercises, beseeching God through ritual prayer to forgive their sins and grant them victory. The following day, the Christian army, accompanied by bishops and priests reciting psalms and hymns, marched out of the city to face the Muslim forces and won a resounding and improbable victory. From the very beginning and throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against the Muslim armies. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Honorius III likened liturgy to “invisible weapons.” This book is about those invisible weapons; about the prayers and liturgical rituals that were part of the battle for the faith. The book tells the story of the greatest collective religious undertaking of the Middle Ages, putting front and center the ways in which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how liturgy was deployed in crusading, and how liturgy absorbed ideals or priorities of crusading. Liturgy helped construct the devotional ideology of the crusading project, endowing war with religious meaning, placing crusading ideals at the heart of Christian identity, and embedding crusading warfare squarely into the eschatological economy. By connecting medieval liturgical books with the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin allows us to understand a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
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Mitsuyo, Toyoda. Recollecting Local Narratives on the Land Ethic. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456320.003.0011.
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Indigenous Japanese narratives about the land and its relation with human societies have been handed down from generation to generation as guides to appropriate human conduct. Though Japan has a rich heritage of such narratives about nature, their value has not been properly appreciated because of the adoption of a modern epistemology, which is primarily based on scientific reasoning. Japanese mythological accounts of the world provide a treasure trove of ideas for constructing a land ethic rooted in local traditions. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic offers the notion of biotic community based on his actual observation of nature from an ecological perspective, treating humans as plain members and citizens of the biotic community. Japanese nature narratives provide guidance for living safely and sustainably in harmony with the natural world. The collection of these narratives, therefore, is an important source for a Japanese land ethic built upon the unique cultural heritage of Japan.
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Marran, Christine L. Ecology without Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9781517901585.003.0001.
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This chapter introduces my concept of the “biotrope” to navigate the broader question of why and how the material world has proven to be such an effective medium for representing culture. It then argues that ecocriticism needs to be more skeptical about cultural claims. The chapter then shows how literature, poetry, and film are at their most critical and effective when they are not made to replicate our desire for a world that appears to be made by and for specific human collectives or the anthropos.
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Tilley, Heather, and Jan Eric Olsén. Touching Blind Bodies: A Critical Inquiry into Pedagogical and Cultural Constructions of Visual Disability in the Nineteenth Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0014.
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Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.
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Stead, Lisa. Reframing Vivien Leigh. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190906504.001.0001.
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Reframing Vivien Leigh takes a fresh new look at one of the twentieth century’s most iconic stars. Focusing on Vivien Leigh as a distinctly archival subject, the book draws upon original oral history work with curators, archivists, and fan collectives and extensive research within a network of official and unofficial archives around the world to produce alternative stories about her place within film history. The study examines an intriguing variety of historical correspondence, costume, scripts, photography, props, and memorabilia in order to reframe the dominant narratives that have surrounded her life and career. While Leigh’s glamour, collaborations with Laurence Olivier, and mental health form important coordinates for any study of the star, the book foregrounds a range of alternative contexts that emphasize her creative agency, examining her off-screen labor in areas such as theatrical training, adaptation, war work, producing, protesting, and interactions with her fan base. Part I examines a variety of case studies of Leigh’s screen and stage craft as they emerge from the archive, looking at Leigh’s varied collaborations, her investment in faithful adaptations, and her vocal training. It interconnects star studies, feminist film studies, and performance studies to produce a new take on stardom as creative process rather than stardom as image. Part II turns toward unofficial archives and local museum collections, centering the work of the archivist and the amateur collector and their impact on women’s star histories. It explores Leigh’s archival afterlives as they are constructed by a range of agents and institutions beyond the “official” star archive.
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Tahmahkera, Dustin. American Indians in Popular Culture. Edited by Frederick E. Hoxie. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858897.013.16.
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Contemporary scholars are shaping the field of indigenous popular cultural studies through multiple critical approaches and explorations of new areas of analysis. This scholarship seeks to emphasize narratives of Native agency, negotiation, contestation, and reconfiguration in interdisciplinary sites of cultural production, representation, and reception. These efforts have opened a space for critical dialogue about the formations of topics in American Indian popular culture studies that transcend mere description and surface analysis. The goal of this new approach is to place American Indians at the center of the complex politics of pop culture. This chapter provides an overview of scholarly approaches to pop cultural representations of American Indians. It examines critical issues in the field while surveying recent scholarship on the production, representation, and reception of American Indians in television, film, music, and other expressive mass media. The chapter concludes with a look at future scholarship on American Indian representations.
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Jolowicz, Daniel. Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192894823.001.0001.
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This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.
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Mitchell, Tony. Music and Landscape in Iceland. Edited by Fabian Holt and Antti-Ville Kärjä. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190603908.013.8.
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This chapter brings much nuance to the constant representation of Icelandic music through landscape, seascape, and icescape, drawing from longitudinal field research and interdisciplinary cultural research on landscape. The narratives of landscape in Iceland have multiple dimensions, including national identity, ecology, and cultural imagination, and they are culturally and politically complex. The main examples are two Icelandic films: The 2009 documentary Draumlandið (Dreamland) about the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and its environmental impact, the 2003 feature film Nói Albínói (Nói the Albino), and the films of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. These are discussed in reference to the edited volume of essays on Icelandic landscape Conversations with Landscape (2010) and Kristin Shranmm’s concept of Borealism (2011) as it applies to Icelandic music and cinema.
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Ferrari, Simon. Congratulations! You Have Killed Osama bin Laden!! University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038860.003.0010.
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This chapter examines the political and cultural narratives surrounding bin Laden and the Global War on Terrorism through the field of video games. It begins with an exploration of games about the news and one method of critiquing them. It then deals with the first wave of Flash games made after September 11, 2001 (the term Flash game denotes any videogame created in Adobe's Flash software development platform). It compares and contrasts those early offerings with the more refined documentary videogames made after bin Laden's death. Finally, it reflects on how the mainstream industry has capitalized on the War on Terror and what a look back at this tumultuous decade of experimentation tells us about the state of game design and its relation to the broader context of cultural production.
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Armstrong-Hough, Mari. Biomedicalization and the Practice of Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646688.001.0001.
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Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise in and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence of these distinctive strategies, Armstrong-Hough argues that physicians act not only on increasingly globalized professional standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.
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Bhatia, Sunil. Studying Globalization at Home. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199964727.003.0009.
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This chapter documents the ethnographic context in which the interviews and participant observation were conducted for the study presented in this book. It also situates the study within the context of narrative inquiry and develops arguments about the role of self-reflexivity in doing ethnography at “home” and producing qualitative forms of knowledge that are based on personal, experiential, and cultural narratives. It is argued that there is significant interest in the adoption of interpretive methods or qualitative research in psychology. The qualitative approaches in psychology present a provocative and complex vision of how the key concepts related to describing and interpreting cultural codes, social practices, and lived experience of others are suffused with both poetical and political elements of culture. The epistemological and ontological assumptions undergirding qualitative research reflect multiple “practices of inquiry” and methodologies that have different orientations, assumptions, values, ideologies, and criterion of excellence.
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Jolly, Rosemary J. Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0030.
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The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be
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Matthews, Victor H. The History of Bronze and Iron Age Israel. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190231149.001.0001.
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This volume provides a basic introduction to the historical, archaeological, and contextual aspects of ancient Israel during its formative period in the Bronze and Iron Age. It integrates extrabiblical sources from regions throughout the ancient Near East with the data found in the biblical narratives in order to explore the development of ancient Israelite identity, cultural traditions, and their interaction with the other major cultures of the ancient Near East. Given the nature of available information on this early culture, it is necessary to take into account the methods designed to examine the transmission of cultural memories and foundation stories in shaping a people’s concept of themselves. Because we do have more data available from neighboring regions, attention is expanded beyond the biblical narratives to include what we know about the physical realities of geopolitics and super-power politics, the international and interregional movement of peoples, and the evolutionary process from inchoate to complex states. In addition, attention is also given to what archaeological excavations can contribute to the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel and its cultures. In particular, aspects of everyday life both in the village culture and in urban settings are examined as a key to the development of social, legal, and religious traditions and practices.
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Katz, Stephen, ed. Ageing in Everyday Life. Policy Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447335917.001.0001.
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This book is a timely collection of interdisciplinary and critical chapters about the fields of ageing studies and the sociology of everyday life as broadly conceived to explore the meaningful connections between subjective lives and social worlds in later life. The scope of the writing expands beyond traditional approaches in these fields to engage with cross-cultural, feminist, spatial, ethnographic, technological, cinematic, new media and arts research. Readers will find the detailed attention to everyday experiences, places, biographies, images, routines, intimacies and temporalities illuminating, while appreciating the wider critiques of ageism and exclusion that inform each chapter. The book also contributes to the growing international area of ‘critical gerontology’ by comprising two parts on ‘materialities’ and ‘embodiments’, foci that emphasize the material and embodied contexts that shape the experiences of ageing. The chapters on ‘materialities’ investigate things, possessions, homes, technologies, environments, and their representations, while the complementary chapters on ‘embodiments’ examine living spaces, clothing, care practices, mobility, touch, gender and sexuality, and health and lifestyle regimes. Overall, in both its parts the book contests the dominant cultural narratives of vulnerability, frailty and disability that dominate ageing societies today and offers in their place the resourceful potential of local and lived spheres of agency, citizenship, humanity and capability.
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Cordeiro, Jaime. O ensino de História: Algumas experiências. Brazil Publishing, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.31012/978-65-5861-232-2.
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This book reports some of the author's experiences as a History teacher and as a scholar of his teaching. The chapters present some didactic proposals, but also reports of courses given on the subject of history teaching, as well as the examination of some cultural products that can be mobilized to teaching this discipline. In this case, didactic experiences and suggestions are presented with some with some cultural objects, such as books by José J. Veiga, the film Forrest Gump and some songs of Brazilian popular music. Representations about the periodization of the history of Brazil and Brazilian national identity and about how the teaching of our discipline has contributed to the reaffirmation of the unified and dominant national memory are also studied. One of the chapters examines specifically how the annual celebration of some civic dates participates in the process of reaffirming that memory. The penultimate chapter offers suggestions on how to examine some controversial topics in basic education classes, in the context of the so-called “war of narratives”. Finally, the last text offers a synthesis of a study on the state of the discussions about History teaching in the 1980s and 1990s in São Paulo through an analysis that draws on the contributions of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of field.
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Watt, Paul, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190616922.001.0001.
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This Handbook provides a forum for consolidated interdisciplinary discussion on intellectual culture in the “long” nineteenth century highlights and focuses its innovative methodological potential for the areas of musicology, literary and historical studies. In particular, the collection challenges the work-centred focus of Western music history by treating writings about music as cultural artefacts of substantive importance—rather than mere supplements to musical understanding—and will thereby historicize and problematize current conceptions of periodization and national narratives of music history.
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Bhatia, Sunil. Decolonizing Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199964727.001.0001.
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Decolonizing Psychology sheds light on the universalizing power and the colonizing dimensions of Euro-American psychology. The book integrates insights from postcolonial, narrative, and cultural psychology to ask how Euro-American scientific psychology becomes the standard-bearer of psychology throughout the world, whose stories get told, what knowledge is considered as legitimate, and whose lives are considered central to the future of psychology. Urban Indian youth represent one of the largest segments of the youth population across the world and yet remain so utterly invisible in the discipline of psychology. By using ethnographic and interview methods, this book draws a nuanced narrative portrait of how urban youth in Pune, India, who belong to the transnational elite, middle and working classes, reimagine their identities within the new structural and neoliberal cultural contexts of globalization and neoliberalization. The book examines how particular class identities shape youth narratives about globalization and “Indianness” generally, as well as specific stories about self and identity, social inequality, dignity, poverty, family, relationships, work, marriage, and practices of consumption. The book articulates an alternative vision of psychology in which questions of social justice and equality are seen as central to its mission, and it is argued that a psychology is needed that urgently and meaningfully speaks to the lives of the majority of the world’s population.
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Young, Serinity. Women Who Fly. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195307887.001.0001.
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The desire to transcend the mundane and the terrestrial, and to reach new heights of spiritual experience, has been expressed through myths, folk tales, and the arts throughout the world and across centuries. Flight from both the captivity of earth’s gravity and the mental constraints of time-bound desire are the backbone of myth-making. Women and goddesses have figured prominently in such myths, both as independent actors and as guides for men. Women Who Fly is a history of religious and social ideas about such aerial females as expressed in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. It is also about the varied symbolic uses of women in mythology, religion, and society that have shaped, and continue to shape, our social and psychological reality. The motif of the flying female is an intriguing and unstudied area of the history of both religion and iconography. It is a broad topic. Rather than place restrictions on this theme (or its imagery), or force it into the confines of any one discipline or cultural perspective, the goal here instead is to celebrate its thematic and cultural diversity, while highlighting commonalities and delineating the religious and social contexts in which it developed. Aerial women are surprisingly central to any full and accurate understanding of the similarities between various religious imaginations, through which these flying females have carved trajectories over time.
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Busse, Beatrix. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190212360.001.0001.
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The present study investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including, for instance, the novels Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. All narratives typically contain a reference to or a quotation of someone’s speech, thoughts, or writing. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and, from a historical point of view, also reflect cultural understandings of the modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way a reader perceives a story depends upon the ways discourse is presented, and among these, speech, writing, and thought, which reflect a character’s disposition and state of mind. Being at the intersection of linguistic and literary stylistics, this study develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of historical discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction, thus identifying diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It shows that the presentation of characters’ minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated and that discourse presentation fulfills the narratological functions of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers’ expectations as to suspense or surprise.
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Silverstein, Adam J. Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198797227.001.0001.
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This book examines the ways in which the biblical book of Esther was read, understood, and used in Muslim lands, from ancient to modern times. It zeroes-in on a selection of case studies, covering works from various periods and regions of the Muslim world, including the Qur’an, premodern historical chronicles and literary works, the writings of a nineteenth-century Shia feminist, a twentieth-century Iranian dictionary, and others. These case studies demonstrate that Muslim sources contain valuable materials on Esther, which shed light both on the Esther story itself and on the Muslim peoples and cultures that received it. The book argues that Muslim sources preserve important, pre-Islamic materials on Esther that have not survived elsewhere, some of which offer answers to ancient questions about Esther, such as the meaning of Haman’s epithet in the Greek versions of the story, the reason why Mordecai refused to prostrate himself before Haman, and the literary context of the “plot of the eunuchs” to kill the Persian king. Furthermore, throughout the book we will see how each author’s cultural and religious background influenced his or her understanding and retelling of the Esther story: In particular, it will be shown that Persian Muslims (and Jews) were often forced to reconcile or choose between the conflicting historical narratives provided by their religious and cultural heritages respectively.
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Smith, Victoria Ford. Between Generations. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496813374.001.0001.
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Between Generations recuperates a tradition of adult-child collaboration in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British children’s literature and culture, charting the emergence of new models of authorship and a growing cultural imperative to recognize the young as active, creative agents. The book examines the intergenerational partnerships that generated pivotal texts from the Golden Age of children’s literature, from “The Pied Piper” to Peter Pan, and in doing so challenges popular critical narratives that read actual young people solely as social constructs or passive recipients of texts. The spectrum of adult-child partnerships included within this book’s chapters make clear that the boundary between fictive collaborations and lived partnerships was not firm but that, instead, imaginative and material practices were mutually constitutive. Adults’ partnerships with young auditors, writers, illustrators, reviewers, and co-conspirators reveal that the agentic, creative child was not only a figure but also an actor, vital to authorial practice. These collaborations were part of a larger investigation of the limits and possibilities of child agency taking place in a range of discourses and cultural venues, from education reform to psychology to librarianship. Throughout, the book considers the many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Friedrich Froebel, who question the assumed authority of adults, who write about children as both passive and subversive subjects, and who self-consciously negotiate, alongside real children, the ideological and ethical difficulties of listening to and representing children’s perspectives.
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Grieve, Victoria M. Little Cold Warriors. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190675684.001.0001.
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American children’s experiences during the Cold War were complex. Both conservative and liberal Baby Boomers have romanticized the 1950s as an age of innocence, but these nostalgic narratives obscure many other histories of postwar childhood, one of which has more in common with the war years and the Sixties, when children were mobilized and politicized by the US government, private corporations, and individual adults to fight the Cold War both at home and abroad. Children battled communism in its various guises on television, in the movies, and in comic books; they practiced safety drills, joined civil preparedness groups, and helped to build and stock bomb shelters in the backyard. Children collected coins for UNICEF, exchanged art with other children around the world, prepared for nuclear war through the Boy and Girl Scouts, raised funds for Radio Free Europe, sent clothing to refugee children, and donated books to restock the diminished library shelves of war-torn Europe. Rather than rationing and saving, American children were encouraged to spend and consume in order to maintain the engine of American prosperity. In these capacities, American children functioned as ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of the United States. This book is about politicized childhood at the peak of the Cold War and the many ways that children and ideas about childhood were pressed into political service. It combines approaches from childhood studies and diplomatic history to understand the cultural Cold War through the activities and experiences of young Americans.