Guides to Subcultures and Countercultures – serie

This book provides a fascinating examination of one of the most notorious countercultures in the United States.Skinheads: A Guide to An American Subculture is an insider's look at the history of skinheads in the United States, from their emergence from the U.S. hardcore underground in the 1980s in New York City, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, to the current scene that thrives in many major metropolitan areas today.What makes this revelatory book so compelling is its one-of-a-kind view of skinhead culture from the inside out. Coauthor Perry Hardy is a skinhead, bass player for the band, The Templars, and veteran member of the American skinhead scene since the onset of the movement. Based on his experiences, plus interviews with dozens of skinheads of all kinds, Skinheads draws back the curtain to reveal a world that more often is simply a haven for those disaffected from society, rather than a subculture of hatred or violence.

This history of the punk movement in the United States shows how punk music, fashion, art, and attitude clashed with and ultimately influenced mainstream culture.Unlike other volumes on the punk era that focus on just the music—and primarily on British punk bands—Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture spans the full expanse of punk as it happened in the United States, from the late-1960s blast from Iggy Pop and the Stooges to the full explosion of punk in the mid 1970s to its next-generation resurgences and continuing aftershocks.Punks covers it all—not just music, but the punk influence on film, fashion, media, and language. Readers will see how punk spread virally, through fan-created magazines, record labels, clubs, and radio stations, as well as how mainstream America reacted, then absorbed aspects of punk culture. The book includes interviews with key members of the punk subculture, including new conversations with people who participated in the punk scene in the 1970s and 1980s.Includes new interviews with Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, founders of Dischord Records and the punk band Minor Threat, plus reprints of interviews with singers Jello Biafra and Kathleen Hanna, two well-known punks who spoke out frequently about politics and gender issuesOffers an annotated bibliography, including a variety of entries that are both scholarly and popular, grouped by format

An insightful introduction to hippie culture and how its revolutionary principles in the 1960s helped shape modern culture.This title explores how hippies, and 1960s counterculture in general, developed and influenced popular culture in America. Covering the years between 1961 and 1972, this is the first volume focused exclusively on the emergence, growth, and lasting legacy of hippie culture, on everything from clothing, hair styles, and music to attitudes toward sex and drugs, and anti-war, anti-establishment activism.Hippies includes a chronology, topical chapters on hippie culture, biographies, primary documents, and a glossary. Coverage ranges from an examination of hippie involvement in drug use, politics, sexual behavior, and music, and a contemporary perspective on lasting impact of hippies on modern American life. Readers will encounter famous icons of the era, from Abbie Hoffman to Timothy Leary, while getting a real sense of what life inside the hippie counterculture was like.

This is a revealing look at the events and personalities that defined the Beat Generation, drawing on over three decades of research.Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture gets readers past the caricature of the "beatnik" as a goateed, beret-wearing, bongo-playing poseur, drawing on extensive research to show just how profound an impact the beats had on American culture, politics, and literature. Beatniks conveys the complexity, influences, events, and places that shaped the Beat Generation from the late 1940s to the cusp of the 1960s. The book also features a series of essays on specific aspects of the subculture, as well as interviews with Beat Generation luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Ann Charters, Roy Harper and Michael McClure. Throughout, readers will meet an extraordinary gallery of people both famous—Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady—and lesser known but no less fascinating, including Kenneth Patchen, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Jack Micheline, Lew Welch, Joan Vollmer Adams, and Lenore Kandel. Also included is a detailed glossary with the origins and meanings of the beat lingo.

This history of the Ku Klux Klan traces the evolution of the organization from its 1865 founding to the present, drawing extensively on contemporaneous media reports.The Ku Klux Klan tells the story of America's oldest and largest homegrown terrorist organization. It is a revealing look at the philosophies and methods of a secret society that used religious symbols, secret codes, and the cloak of anonymity to bind its members together in the cause of violent racial warfare.The Ku Klux Klan encompasses the organization's entire history, from its post-Civil War founding by Nathan Bedford Forrest, to its high watermark in the early 20th century, with membership swelling to four million and its founders portrayed as heroes in the film, Birth of a Nation to its resurgence in the Civil Rights era, to more recent attempts by David Duke and others to put a benign face on the Klan in order to gain elective office.

This book offers an examination of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, focusing on the vibrant icon of the newly liberated woman—the flapper—that came to embody the Jazz Age.Flappers takes readers back to the time of speakeasies, gangsters, dance bands, and silent film stars, offering a fresh look at the Jazz Age by focusing on the women who came to symbolize it.Flappers captures the full scope of the hedonistic subculture that made the Roaring Twenties roar, a group that reacted to Prohibition and other attempts to impose a stricter morality on the nation. Topics include the transition from silent films to talkies, the arrival of American Jazz as the country's first truly indigenous musical form, the evolution of the United States from a rural to an urban nation, the fashion and slang of the times, and more. It is an exhilarating portrait of a brief outburst of liberation that would last until the Great Depression came crashing down.

This compact volume offers a compelling introduction to a group once deemed the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States, the Black Panther Party.In a time when African Americans' widespread tactic of direct, nonviolent protest was seen as the most effective way to fight for racial justice, the Black Panthers' confrontational style and critiques of local law enforcement throughout the nation defied both civil rights orthodoxy and white authority. The Black Panther Party: A Guide to an American Subculture situates the Black Panther Party within the shifting political terrain of the African American freedom struggle of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an era when African Americans were assumed to have secured their basic constitutional rights, the Black Panther Party stood firm to remind black people and the nation that despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, social, economic, and political equality had not been achieved for large segments of African Americans, and that more needed to be done locally and nationally. Organized geographically, the book examines Black Panther Party chapters and affiliates throughout the United States. It covers the Panthers' most important developments and challenges, paying particular attention to local realities as they varied throughout the nation—from Oakland, California to New Haven, Connecticut.

This book provides a concise and engaging examination of the subculture of the Crips and Bloods—the notorious street gangs that started in Los Angeles, but have now spread throughout the United States.Despite the dangers and harsh realities intrinsic to street life and criminal activity, the no-holds-barred lifestyle of gangs continues to interest mainstream America. This provocative book provides an insider's look into the subculture of two of the most notorious street gangs—the Crips and the Bloods. Crips and Bloods: A Guide to an American Subculture traces the evolution of the two gangs, covering their origins in South Central Los Angeles to the organizations' current presence throughout the United States. The author analyzes the ways in which the gang subculture is created, promoted, and perpetuated; shows how the groups currently recruit their members; and explores the ways Crip and Blood culture has expanded beyond the gangs into the larger mainstream society.

Based on original sources and research, not legends and myth, this book presents a lively, in-depth analysis of how the American Mafia epitomizes organized crime.Whether it's supplying illicit drugs, alcohol during Prohibition, gambling, prostitution, or even loans to those with bad credit, the Mafia has established itself as a part of the fabric of American society, politics, and economics for over a century. The Mafia continues to exist not only because of their immense power that allows their criminal organization to defy law enforcement, but because demand remains strong for what they offer. This book utilizes verifiable information about the Mafia based on newspaper and magazine accounts, police and FBI documents, court records, and the author's own original research to offer a deeper analysis of "the Mob" that provides historical, social, economic and cultural context. Fascinating biographical sketches that profile well-known Mafiosi such as Charles "Lucky" Luciano and John Gotti are also presented.