Located in the lower Hudson Valley, Middletown was first settled in 1760 and quickly grew into a thriving dairy farming center. With the arrival of the pioneering New York and Erie Rail Road in 1843, Middletown continued to flourish, and by 1888, it became a city. Hundreds of residents found employment in the growing railroad industry as well as at the sprawling Middletown State Hospital, with its advanced facilities at one time boasting over 100 buildings. Middletown Revisited documents the rich history of a city that has continued to grow over generations.
Located in the lower Hudson Valley, Middletown was first settled in 1760 and quickly grew into a thriving dairy farming center. With the arrival of the pioneering New York and Erie Rail Road in 1843, Middletown continued to flourish, and by 1888, it became a city. Hundreds of residents found employment in the growing railroad industry as well as at the sprawling Middletown State Hospital, with its advanced facilities at one time boasting over 100 buildings. Middletown Revisited documents the rich history of a city that has continued to grow over generations.
Prompted by the overt omission of Muncie's black community from the famous study by Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, the authors uncover the neglected part of the story of Middletown, a well-known pseudonym for the Midwestern city of Muncie, Indiana. It is a uniquely collaborative field study involving local experts, ethnographers, and teams of college students. The book, The Other Side of Middletown, and DVD, Middletown Redux, are valuable resources for community research. Sponsored by the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, Muncie, Indiana.
Inspired by the immensely influential 1937 sociological study Middletown: A Case Study in Cultural Conflicts by Robert and Helen Lynd, Peter Davis's six documentary films about Muncie, Indiana, set out to examine the lives of Munsonians in the early 1980s. The disputes and conflicts accompanying the filming revealed more about American values and customs than the films themselves. While attempting to transform the data from the Middletown studies into a meaningful and interesting visual form, the filmmakers were constantly distracted by the pressures, decisions and perils of government- and corporate-funded documentary filmmaking. Dwight W. Hoover, a Muncie historian and collaborator in the Middletown film project, describes why the films were made and how they changed the lives of everyone involved.
Rooting for the Home Team examines how various American communities create and maintain a sense of collective identity through sports. Looking at large cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles as well as small rural towns, suburbs, and college towns, the contributors consider the idea that rooting for local athletes and home teams often symbolizes a community's preferred understanding of itself, and that doing so is an expression of connectedness, public pride and pleasure, and personal identity. Some of the wide-ranging essays point out that financial interests also play a significant role in encouraging fan bases, and modern media have made every seasonal sport into yearlong obsessions. Celebrities show up for big games, politicians throw out first pitches, and taxpayers pay plenty for new stadiums and arenas. The essays in Rooting for the Home Team cover a range of professional and amateur athletics, including teams in basketball, football, baseball, and even the phenomenon of no-glove softball. Contributors are Amy Bass, Susan Cahn, Mark Dyreson, Michael Ezra, Elliott J. Gorn, Christopher Lamberti, Allison Lauterbach, Catherine M. Lewis, Shelley Lucas, Daniel A. Nathan, Michael Oriard, Carlo Rotella, Jaime Schultz, Mike Tanier, David K. Wiggins, and David W. Zang.
This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.
Though the word “sociology” was coined in Europe, the field of sociology grew most dramatically in America. Despite that disproportionate influence, American sociology has never been the subject of an extended historical examination. To remedy that situation—and to celebrate the centennial of the American Sociological Association—Craig Calhoun assembled a team of leading sociologists to produce Sociology in America. Rather than a story of great sociologists or departments, Sociology in America is a true history of an often disparate field—and a deeply considered look at the ways sociology developed intellectually and institutionally. It explores the growth of American sociology as it addressed changes and challenges throughout the twentieth century, covering topics ranging from the discipline’s intellectual roots to understandings (and misunderstandings) of race and gender to the impact of the Depression and the 1960s. Sociology in America will stand as the definitive treatment of the contribution of twentieth-century American sociology and will be required reading for all sociologists. Contributors: Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Craig Calhoun, Charles Camic, Miguel A. Centeno, Patricia Hill Collins, Marjorie L. DeVault, Myra Marx Ferree, Neil Gross, Lorine A. Hughes, Michael D. Kennedy, Shamus Khan, Barbara Laslett, Patricia Lengermann, Doug McAdam, Shauna A. Morimoto, Aldon Morris, Gillian Niebrugge, Alton Phillips, James F. Short Jr., Alan Sica, James T. Sparrow, George Steinmetz, Stephen Turner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Howard Winant
