Benjamin Looker – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
Nation of Neighborhoods
Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America
Häftad, Engelska, 2015
252 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. By studying the way these contests unfolded across a startling variety of genres-Broadway shows, radio plays, urban ethnographies, real estate documents, and even children's programming-Looker shows that the neighborhood ideal has functioned as a central symbolic site for advancing and debating theories about American national identity and democratic practice.
292 kr
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Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy Midwestern metropolis, the city and the surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of St. Louis activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, women’s rights and in support of the peace movement and environmental activism. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions—both original works and previously published—that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist initiatives that took shape in a single Midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this thoughtful collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. In so doing, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and available opportunities for the disparate groups who dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities for current activist movements that strive to effect change in St. Louis and beyond.