Your search for: subjects:"United States Social Life And Customs 20th Century"

Best shows us that, while the prom is often trivialized, most kids take the prom seriously. The prom is a space where kids work through their understanding of authority, social class, gender norms, and multicultural schooling. Proms are more than just pictures and puffed sleeves--they are a mythic ...

Best shows us that, while the prom is often trivialized, most kids take the prom seriously. The prom is a space where kids work through their understanding of authority, social class, gender norms, and multicultural schooling. Proms are more than just pictures and puffed sleeves--they are a mythic part of youth culture and, for better or worse, will always be a night to remember.

From Walt Whitman's catalog of America to Thomas Hart Benton's American epics painted on walls across the country to Studs Terkel's documentaries, much artistic and literary labor has stemmed from the urge to figure out what makes this country tick. Any attempt at so large a canvas as this disparate ...

From Walt Whitman's catalog of America to Thomas Hart Benton's American epics painted on walls across the country to Studs Terkel's documentaries, much artistic and literary labor has stemmed from the urge to figure out what makes this country tick. Any attempt at so large a canvas as this disparate country will be fragmented and incomplete, but like Benton's 1932 mural "American Today", American Mosaic is composed of pieces that taken together provide a vivid look at vanishing scenes of American life. Here, Robert Wolf offers a collective autobiography of the American heartland written for the most part by everyday men and women without literary ambition. Focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, this collection of essays, short stories, poems, and memoirs--woven together with Wolf's introductory notes--is the culmination of nine years of Free River Press writing workshops conducted by Wolf for the purpose of documenting contemporary American life. The volume includes work from homeless men and women from Tennessee, small farmers in rural Iowa, residents of Midwestern small towns, the Mississippi Delta, and river communities on the Mississippi. These first-person, eyewitness accounts offer glimpses of daily life: the farmers' struggles against large corporations; poetic meditations on life in the streets, on the road, and in prison; tall tales of river town saloons; and the social rituals of cooking, town hall and party phone lines across America's small towns. Among many narratives, American Mosaic gives us the ruminations of a homeless woman over a martini in El Gilbert's poem "Drunk," descriptions of hearty, communal meals during the July harvest in Clara Leppert's piece "Meals for Threshers," a picture of the goings-on in a West Helena, Arkansas juke joint with Chris Crawford's essay "Lucky Lacey," and the reminiscences of a former Mississippi River towboat captain in Jack Libby's "The Midnight Watch Change." Together, these diverse stories comprise panels of a literary mural of America. American Mosaic is a compelling testament to regional and local American voices and folkways which are fast disappearing through the relentless push towards a global economy and culture.

We cannot understand the United States in the twentieth century, the "century of the child", without understanding the prominent part that children and adolescents have played in the American story. Much has changed for young people during this century, and this is the first work to examine those ...

We cannot understand the United States in the twentieth century, the "century of the child", without understanding the prominent part that children and adolescents have played in the American story. Much has changed for young people during this century, and this is the first work to examine those developments from the turn of the century to today. Designed to be a ready-reference tool, the work is divided into four chronological chapters - 1900 to 1920, 1921 to 1940, 1941 to 1960, and 1961 to the present - and each chapter contains six sections: at home, at play, at work, at school, health, and children and the law. Each chapter offers copious detail and fascinating narrative about children's lives. The reader can learn about all of the topics in a particular era or focus on one topic and follow it through the decades. Topics discussed range from events of historical significance to cultural fads: from the teddy bear to the Barbie doll, from child labor in sweatshops to teenage workers at McDonald's, from the one-room schoolhouse to the SATs, and from childhood scourges to the eradication of many childhood diseases. Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America will be invaluable to social studies and American history teachers, librarians, and students. The many tables and statistics included in the book will aid the reader and researcher. Each chapter concludes with a narrative bibliography of recommended works of interest on the topics discussed, and a selection of photos complement the text.