A Great Duty
A Great Duty

Author: Leonard B. Kuffert

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780773526013

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In A Great Duty>/I>L.B. Kuffert shows that the history of Canadian culture from the war to Canada's centenary is much richer and more complex than has previously been recognized. He looks at the responses of cultural critics to such topics as war, reconstruction, science, conformity, personality, and commemoration, catching outspoken observers in the act of synthesizing new interpretations of the contemporary world and protesting the dominance of mass-produced entertainment.English-Canadian cultural critics from across the political spectrum championed self-improvement, self-awareness, and lively engagement with one's surroundings, struggling to find a balance between the social benefits of democracy and modernization and what they considered the debilitating influence of the accompanying mass culture. They used print and broadcast media in an attempt to convince Canadians that choosing wisely between varieties of culture was an expression of personal and national identity, making cultural nationalism in Canada a "middlebrow" project. As Kuffert argues, "if English Canadians are today more familiar with the ways in which modern life and mass culture envelop and define them, if they live in a nation where private citizens and cultural institutions view the media as avenues of entertainment, as businesses, or as the means to construct identity, they should be aware of the role of wartime and post-war cultural critics" in creating those orientations toward culture.

The Enchantments of Mammon
The Enchantments of Mammon

Author: Eugene McCarraher

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2019-11-12

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0674984617

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“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century

The Crosswinds of Freedom, 1932–1988
The Crosswinds of Freedom, 1932–1988

Author: James MacGregor Burns

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-04-10

Total Pages: 956

ISBN-13: 1453245200

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A Pulitzer Prize winner’s “immensely readable” history of the United States from FDR’s election to the final days of the Cold War (Publishers Weekly). The Crosswinds of Freedom is an articulate and incisive examination of the United States during its rise to become the world’s sole superpower. Here is a young democracy transformed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, the rapid pace of technological change, and the distinct visions of nine presidents. Spanning fifty-six years and touching on many corners of the nation’s complex cultural tapestry, Burns’s work is a remarkable look at the forces that gave rise to the “American Century.”

The Box
The Box

Author: Marc Levinson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 1400880750

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In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential. Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe. Published in hardcover on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. Now with a new chapter, The Box tells the dramatic story of how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur turned containerization from an impractical idea into a phenomenon that transformed economic geography, slashed transportation costs, and made the boom in global trade possible.

The City That Ate Itself
The City That Ate Itself

Author: Brian James Leech

Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Published: 2018-02-28

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0874175984

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Winner of the Mining History Association Clark Spence Award for the Best Book in Mining History, 2017-2018 Brian James Leech provides a social and environmental history of Butte, Montana’s Berkeley Pit, an open-pit mine which operated from 1955 to 1982. Using oral history interviews and archival finds, The City That Ate Itself explores the lived experience of open-pit copper mining at Butte’s infamous Berkeley Pit. Because an open-pit mine has to expand outward in order for workers to extract ore, its effects dramatically changed the lives of workers and residents. Although the Berkeley Pit gave consumers easier access to copper, its impact on workers and community members was more mixed, if not detrimental. The pit’s creeping boundaries became even more of a problem. As open-pit mining nibbled away at ethnic communities, neighbors faced new industrial hazards, widespread relocation, and disrupted social ties. Residents variously responded to the pit with celebration, protest, negotiation, and resignation. Even after its closure, the pit still looms over Butte. Now a large toxic lake at the center of a federal environmental cleanup, the Berkeley Pit continues to affect Butte’s search for a postindustrial future.

Rebel Youth
Rebel Youth

Author: Ian Milligan

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0774826908

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During the “long sixties,” baby boomers raised on democratic postwar ideals demanded a more egalitarian society for all. While a few became vocal leaders at universities across Canada, nearly 90% of Canada’s young people went straight to work after high school. There, they brought the anti-authoritarian spirit of the youth revolt to the labour movement. While university-based activists combined youth culture with a new brand of radicalism to form the New Left, young workers were pressing for wildcat strikes and defying their aging union leaders in a wave of renewed militancy. In Rebel Youth, Ian Milligan looks at these converging currents, demonstrating convincingly how they were part of a single youth phenomenon. With just short of seventy interviews complementing the extensive use of archival records from ten different cities, this book claims a central place for labour and class in the legacy of the Canadian sixties.