Steeped in a Culture of Violence

Steeped in a Culture of Violence

Author: Brandon T. Jett

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1648431348

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The Texas shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, which killed ten and injured thirteen, prompted public debate over the causes and potential solutions to this type of violent episode. On May 21, 2018, National Rifle Association president Oliver North declared that a culture of violence is largely responsible for these killings. “The problem that we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease. . . . The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.” This debate has captivated the American media and general public for decades. Texas history is steeped in brutality and bloodshed, creating a narrative that these conditions are still a vital part of the state’s culture in the twenty-first century. But perceptions of violence are often at odds with realities on the ground. Over several centuries, violence has decreased with the development of modern society, but popular perception seems to be that a culture of violence has emerged, and perhaps persisted despite demographic, economic, cultural, and political shifts in Texas. Starting from the notion that a culture of violence existed historically in the state and asking if such a culture still persists in modern Texas, this collection of essays examines trends associated with various types of violence within the state as well as social and political responses from 1965 to 2020. This important and timely work provides valuable context for discussions on violence in the past and for the future.


Savage Pastimes

Savage Pastimes

Author: Harold Schechter

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2005-03

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9780312282769

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In this cogent and well-researched book, Harold Schechter argues that, unlike the popular conception of the media inciting violence through displaying it, without these outlets of violence in the media a basic human need would not be met and would have to be acted out in much more destructive ways. Schechter demonstrates how violent images saturated the earliest newspaper, how art and disturbing images are not incompatible and how the demoaisation of comic books in the 1950s det up a pattern of equating testosterone fuelled entertainment with aggression.


Vampire Nation

Vampire Nation

Author: Toma Longinović

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-08-12

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0822350394

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Analyzes how the rhetoric of Yugoslav intellectuals and politicians and the U.S.-led Western media and political leadership framed the serbs as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century.


Steeped in the Blood of Racism

Steeped in the Blood of Racism

Author: Nancy K. Bristow

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190215372

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On May 15, 1970, white police opened fire on students in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black institution in Mississippi, killing two young people and injuring twelve. Frequently linked to the shootings at Kent State University ten days earlier, the violence at Jackson State was routinely misunderstood and largely forgotten by all but the local African American community. This book provides a full account of these shootings and their aftermath, as well as historical amnesia about the incident.


Steeped in a Culture of Violence

Steeped in a Culture of Violence

Author: Brandon T. Jett

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781648431333

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"This collection of essays examines whether or not a culture of violence exists in modern Texas by examining trends associated with various types of violence within the state as well as the social and political responses to violent behaviors and events from 1965 to the present. Texas history is steeped in brutality and bloodshed, including conflicts between Native American tribes (such as the Comanche and Apache), confrontations between European settlers and indigenous peoples, warfare, violence against slaves, personal feuds, extralegal activities commonly practiced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, labor strikes and riots, battles between segregationists and civil rights activists, and myriad other incidents. While scholars have argued that industrialization and economic changes coupled with the expansion of state institutions in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have worked to reduce the frequency and acceptance of violence, recent evidence indicates that the general public does not agree, suggesting instead that a culture of violence has emerged, or perhaps persisted. Beginning with a broad introductory essay, the work proceeds in twelve chapters, each dealing with a specific form of violence. This important and timely collection provides valuable context to discussions on violence in general while providing a close examination of whether or not a culture of violence exists in Texas in the modern era"--


If I Had a Hammer

If I Had a Hammer

Author: Margaret Little

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0774841265

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This book is about poor women, many of them single mothers, Aboriginal, or both, who have defied the odds to become apprenticing carpenters. To do so they have juggled child-care schedules, left abusive partners, and kicked drug habits to participate in a unique intensive retraining program. Through the voices of the women participants and their instructors, Margaret Little analyzes the program to reveal the struggles and triumphs of low-income women. She demonstrates that there is a desperate need for retraining programs that provide real opportunities for economic independence. She also argues that, in an era of workfare and time-limited welfare, such programs are an effective strategy for welfare reform.


Honor and Violence in the Old South

Honor and Violence in the Old South

Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780195042429

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Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a Jefferson Davis Memorial Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J, Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites—both slaveholders and non-slaveholders—applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown ranges widely—covering topics such as childbearing, marital patterns, duelling, slave discipline, and lynch-law—to discover the role of honor in the psyche of white Southerners.


Murder and Intrigue on the Mexican Border

Murder and Intrigue on the Mexican Border

Author: John A. Adams

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2018-06-13

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1623495857

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In early 1914, Clemente Vergara discovered several of his horses missing and reported the theft to local authorities. The Webb County sheriff arranged for the South Texas rancher to meet with Mexican soldiers near Hidalgo to discuss compensation for his loss. Vergara crossed the Rio Grande, soon succumbed to a vicious physical assault, and was jailed. Days after incarceration in Hidalgo, his body was found hanging from a tree. The murder of Clemente Vergara contributed to events that put the United States and Mexico on the brink of war and opened the door for expanded American involvement in Mexico. Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt seized upon the incident to challenge President Woodrow Wilson—a fellow Democrat—to intervene and even threatened retaliation by the Texas Rangers. Meanwhile, the White House played a larger strategic game with competing factions in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. Wilson’s apparent inaction heightened Colquitt’s demands to guarantee the safety of Americans and their property in the Texas borderlands, and the Vergara affair’s extensive media coverage convinced many Americans that intervention in Mexico was necessary. Author John A. Adams Jr. shows how an otherwise commonplace horse theft and murder revealed a tangled web of international relations, powerful business interests, and intrigue on both sides of the border. Readers will be captivated by Murder and Intrigue on the Mexican Border and the continuing legacy that border events leave on Texas history.


Carnage and Culture

Carnage and Culture

Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0307425185

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Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times--from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes’s conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive--Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world. Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values–the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship–which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage.


A Short History of Progress

A Short History of Progress

Author: Ronald Wright

Publisher: House of Anansi

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0887847064

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Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life. The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?In his #1 bestseller A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.