Reuniting white America after Vietnam. “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks,” Frederick Douglass asked in 1875, peering into the nation’s future, “what will peace among the whites bring?” The answer then and now, after civil war and civil rights: a white reunion disguised as a veterans’ reunion. How White Men Won the Culture Wars shows how a broad contingent of white men––conservative and liberal, hawk and dove, vet and nonvet––transformed the Vietnam War into a staging ground for a post–civil rights white racial reconciliation. Conservatives could celebrate white vets as deracinated embodiments of the nation. Liberals could treat them as minoritized heroes whose voices must be heard. Erasing Americans of color, Southeast Asians, and women from the war, white men could agree, after civil rights and feminism, that they had suffered and deserved more. From the POW/MIA and veterans’ mental health movements to Rambo and “Born in the U.S.A.,” they remade their racial identities for an age of color blindness and multiculturalism in the image of the Vietnam vet. No one wins in a culture war—except, Joseph Darda argues, white men dressed in army green.
Introduction -- The Midwest and white virtue -- Heartland histories -- Inside out : the global production of insular whiteness -- No place like home : the "ordinary" Midwest through popular fiction and fantasy -- Theater of whitness : mass media discourses on the Midwest region -- Conclusion -- Appendix A : bibliography of films referenced in chapter 4 -- Appendix B : bibliography of media articles referenced in chapter 5.
How Americans learned to wait on time for racial change What if, Joseph Darda asks, our desire to solve racism--with science, civil rights, antiracist literature, integration, and color blindness--has entrenched it further? In The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism, he traces the rise of liberal antiracism, showing how reformers' faith in time, in the moral arc of the universe, has undercut future movements with the insistence that racism constitutes a time-limited crisis to be solved with time-limited remedies. Most historians attribute the shortcomings of the civil rights era to a conservative backlash or to the fracturing of the liberal establishment in the late 1960s, but the civil rights movement also faced resistance from a liberal "frontlash," from antiredistributive allies who, before it ever took off, constrained what the movement could demand and how it could demand it. Telling the stories of Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Clark, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Howard Griffin, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, Richard Wright, and others, Darda reveals how Americans learned to wait on time for racial change and the enduring harm of that trust in the clock.
Contains eleven essays that examine instances in which local politicians have been called to act upon disputes grounded in moral concerns, such as abortion rights, conflicts over sexual orientation issues, hate crime, and others.
White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving, and Pat Conroy and such films as Deliverance, Misery, and Dead Poets Society—as well as other writings, including The Closing of the American Mind—Sally Robinson argues that white men are tempted by the possibilities of pain and the surprisingly pleasurable tensions that come from living in crisis.
"Beyond the Global Culture War" presents a cross-cultural critique of global liberalism and argues for a broad-based challenge that can meet it on its own scale. Adam Webb is one of our most exciting and original young scholars, and this book is certain to generate many new debates. This timely volume probes many of the key challenges we face in the new millennium. This is essential reading for all students of politics and globalization.
Raising the war on political correctness to a new and higher intellectual level, Philip Devine sheds fresh light on the whole question of cultural standards and the fashionable notion of multiculturalism. While acknowledging the diversity of ways of life and the differing belief systems that arise from and justify those ways of life, the author attacks the current exploitation of diversity to justify a militantly intolerant relativism. His wide-ranging and erudite work connects cultural issues to our real-world existence as biological and historical beings, pulling together ideas of bioethics, education, and the structure and purpose of families. This work will be of interest to those fighting the culture wars across the humanities and social and behavioral sciences.
"Reviews the general problem of fraud and plagiarism today and highlights as a case study how the academy and the media covered up and whitewashed the scandal of Martin Luther King's, Jr.'s plagiarisms."--Page 1.
Frances Densmore's Teton Sioux Music and Culture is one of the many volumes that resulted from her prolific life-long project to record and transcribe the traditional music of American Indian peoples. The book explores the role of music in all aspects of Sioux life, and is a classic of the descriptive genre produced by members of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology. Music serves as the vehicle for organizing this detailed account of traditional religion, warfare, and social life, enriched by first-person narrations by the Lakota men and women who worked with Densmore from 1911 to 1914 to preserve their songs by means of a wax cylinder recorder, the modern technology of that period. The evident quality of the narratives, translations from Lakota, as well as the complete transcription and translation of all the Lakota lyrics to the songs, resulted from Densmore's close collaboration with Robert P. Higheagle, who shared her dedication to the project and was an exceptionally capable translator and cultural mediator.
