Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television

Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television

Author: David Thelen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-10-15

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780226794716

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Acknowledgments Introduction 1: The Participatory Moment 2: "Reagan's Magic" and "Olliemania": How Journalists Invented the American People 3: The Living Traditions of Citizenship: From Monitoring to Mobilizing in the Summer of 1987 4: Turning the Intimate into the Public: The Participatory Act of Writing a Congressman 5: Choosing a Voice and Making It Count 6: Interpreting Politics in Everyday Life 7: Bringing Critical Issues into the Public Forum: Policing the World and Defining Heroism 8: Making Citizens Visible: Toward a Social History of Twentieth-Century American Politics Conclusion: Drawing Politics Closer to Everyday Life Note on Sources and Method Notes Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.


Finding Mecca in America

Finding Mecca in America

Author: Mucahit Bilici

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-12-18

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0226922871

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The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.


Chicago on the Make

Chicago on the Make

Author: Andrew J. Diamond

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0520286499

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"Effectively details the long history of racial conflict and abuse that has led to Chicago becoming one of America's most segregated cities. . . . A wealth of material."—New York Times Winner of the 2017 Jon Gjerde Prize, Midwestern History Association Winner of the 2017 Award of Superior Achievement, Illinois State Historical Society Heralded as America’s quintessentially modern city, Chicago has attracted the gaze of journalists, novelists, essayists, and scholars as much as any city in the nation. And, yet, few historians have attempted big-picture narratives of the city’s transformation over the twentieth century. Chicago on the Make traces the evolution of the city’s politics, culture, and economy as it grew from an unruly tangle of rail yards, slaughterhouses, factories, tenement houses, and fiercely defended ethnic neighborhoods into a truly global urban center. Reinterpreting the familiar narrative that Chicago’s autocratic machine politics shaped its institutions and public life, Andrew J. Diamond demonstrates how the grassroots politics of race crippled progressive forces and enabled an alliance of downtown business interests to promote a neoliberal agenda that created stark inequalities. Chicago on the Make takes the story into the twenty-first century, chronicling Chicago’s deeply entrenched social and urban problems as the city ascended to the national stage during the Obama years.


The Increasingly United States

The Increasingly United States

Author: Daniel J. Hopkins

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-05-30

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 022653040X

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In a campaign for state or local office these days, you’re as likely today to hear accusations that an opponent advanced Obamacare or supported Donald Trump as you are to hear about issues affecting the state or local community. This is because American political behavior has become substantially more nationalized. American voters are far more engaged with and knowledgeable about what’s happening in Washington, DC, than in similar messages whether they are in the South, the Northeast, or the Midwest. Gone are the days when all politics was local. With The Increasingly United States, Daniel J. Hopkins explores this trend and its implications for the American political system. The change is significant in part because it works against a key rationale of America’s federalist system, which was built on the assumption that citizens would be more strongly attached to their states and localities. It also has profound implications for how voters are represented. If voters are well informed about state politics, for example, the governor has an incentive to deliver what voters—or at least a pivotal segment of them—want. But if voters are likely to back the same party in gubernatorial as in presidential elections irrespective of the governor’s actions in office, governors may instead come to see their ambitions as tethered more closely to their status in the national party.


American Warsaw

American Warsaw

Author: Dominic A. Pacyga

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-11-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 022681534X

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Pacyga chronicles more than a century of immigration, and later emigration back to Poland, showing how the community has continually redefined what it means to be Polish in Chicago.


Making Hispanics

Making Hispanics

Author: G. Cristina Mora

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-07

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022603397X

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How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation. Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.


Becoming Judy Chicago

Becoming Judy Chicago

Author: Gail Levin

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 0520300068

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Born to Jewish radical parents in Chicago in 1939, Judy Cohen grew up to be Judy Chicago—one of the most daring and controversial artists of her generation. Her works, once disparaged and misunderstood by the critics, have become icons of the feminist movement, earning her a place among the most influential artists of her time. In Becoming Judy Chicago, Gail Levin gives us a biography of uncommon intimacy and depth, revealing the artist as a person and a woman of extraordinary energy and purpose. Drawing upon Chicago’s personal letters and diaries, her published and unpublished writings, and more than 250 interviews with her friends, family, admirers, and critics, Levin presents a richly detailed and moving chronicle of the artist’s unique journey from obscurity to fame, including the story of how she found her audience outside of the art establishment. Chicago revolutionized the way we view art made by and for women and fundamentally changed our understanding of women’s contributions to art and to society. Influential and bold, The Dinner Party has become a cultural monument. Becoming Judy Chicago tells the story of a great artist, a leader of the women’s movement, a tireless crusader for equal rights, and a complicated, vital woman who dared to express her own sexuality in her art and demand recognition from a male-dominated culture.


Refugee High

Refugee High

Author: Elly Fishman

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1620978415

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A year in the life of a Chicago high school with one of the nation’s highest proportions of refugees, told with “strong novel-like pacing” (Milwaukee Magazine) "A stunning and heart-wrenching work of nonfiction."—Chicago Reader Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, its immigrant population numbered close to three hundred—or nearly half the school—and many were refugees new to the country. These young people came from thirty-five different countries, speaking more than thirty-eight different languages. Called “a feat of immersive reporting” (National Book Review), and “a powerful portrait of resilience in the face of long odds” (Publishers Weekly), Refugee High, by award-winning journalist Elly Fishman, offers a riveting chronicle of the 2017–8 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique needs of refugee and immigrant children: Alejandro may be deported just days before he is scheduled to graduate; Shahina narrowly escapes an arranged marriage; and Belenge encounters gang turf wars he doesn’t understand. Heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure, Refugee High raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems.


Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Neither Liberal nor Conservative

Author: Donald R. Kinder

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05-24

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 022645259X

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Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage. Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all. If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life.