From the 1905 opening of the wildly popular, eponymous Nickelodeon in the city's downtown to the outgrowth of nickel theaters in nearly all of its neighborhoods, Pittsburgh proved to be perfect for the movies. Nickelodeon City profiles the major promoters in Pittsburgh, as well as ordinary theater owners, suppliers, and patrons. Aronson examines early film promotion, distribution, and exhibition, and reveals the beginnings of state censorship and the lobbying and manipulation attempted by members of the movie trade.
This is a history of a major American university from its birth on the western frontier in the eighteenth century through its two-hundredth anniversary. Told primarily through the stories of its energetic and sometimes eccentric chancellors, it's a colorful and highly readable chronicle of the University of Pittsburgh. The story begins in the early spring of 1781, when an ambitious young Philadelphia lawyer named Hugh Henry Brackenridge crossed the Alleghenies to seek his opportunity in Pittsburgh. "My object,"?he wrote, "was to advance the country [Western Pennsylvania] and thereby myself." He founded Pittsburgh Academy, later to be the Western University of Pennsylvania and then the University of Pittsburgh, and lived to see the school grow along with the city. Author Robert C. Alberts, mines the University archives and describes many issues for the first time. Among them is the role played by the Board of Trustees in the conflicts of the administration of Chancellor John Gabbert Bowman, including the firing of a controversial history professor, Ralph Turner; the resignation of the legendary football coach, Jock Sutherland; and a Board investigation into Bowman's handling of faculty and staff. We see Pitt's decade of progress under Edward Litchfield (1956-165), who gambled that the millions of dollars he spent . . . would be forthcoming form somewhere or someone; but who, as it turned out was mistaken." Pitt became a state-related university in August 1966, but financial stability was achieved gradually during the administration of Chancellor Wesley W. Posvar. The ensuing crisis of the 1960s and early 1970, caused by the Vietnam War, and the student protests that accompanied it, are described in rich detail. The history then follows Pitt's emergence as a force in international higher education; the institution's role in fostering a cooperative relationship with business; and its entry into the postindustrial age of high technology. The story of Pitt reflects all the struggles and the hopes of the region. As Alberts writes in his preface, "There was drama; there was tragedy; there was indeed controversy and politics. There were, unexpectedly, rich veins of humor, occasionally of comedy."
Houses, in the Argentine and Chilean films of the early twenty-first century, provide much more than a backdrop to on-screen drama. Nor are they simply refuges from political turmoil or spaces of oppression. Remaking Home argues that domestic spaces are instead the medium through which new, fragile common identities are constructed. The varied documentary and fiction films analyzed here, which include an early work by Oscar winner Sebastián Lelio, use the domestic sphere as a laboratory in which to experiment with narrative, audiovisual techniques, and social configurations. Where previous scholarship has focused on the social fragmentation and political disillusionment visible in contemporary film, Remaking Home argues that in order to understand the political agency of contemporary cinema, it is necessary to move beyond deconstructive critical approaches to Latin American culture. In doing so, it expands the theoretical scope of studies in Latin American cinema by finding new points of contact between the cultural critique of Nelly Richard, the work of Bruno Latour, and theories of new materialism.
In The Andes Imagined, Jorge Coronado not only examines but also recasts the indigenismo movement of the early 1900s. Coronado departs from the common critical conception of indigenismo as rooted in novels and short stories, and instead analyzes an expansive range of work in poetry, essays, letters, newspaper writing, and photography. He uses this evidence to show how the movement's artists and intellectuals mobilize the figure of the Indian to address larger questions about becoming modern, and he focuses on the contradictions at the heart of indigenismo as a cultural, social, and political movement. By breaking down these different perspectives, Coronado reveals an underlying current in which intellectuals and artists frequently deployed their indigenous subject in order to imagine new forms of political inclusion. He suggests that these deployments rendered particular variants of modernity and make indigenismo's representational practices a privileged site for the examination of the region's cultural negotiation of modernization. His analysis reveals a paradox whereby the un-modern indio becomes the symbol for the modern itself.The Andes Imagined offers an original and broadly based engagement with indigenismo and its intellectual contributions, both in relation to early twentieth-century Andean thought and to larger questions of theorizing modernity.
