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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Canned, processed pork luncheon meat created by Hormel in 1937. It holds an ambivalent place in American cuisine—rejected by some because of associations with institutional food, others have championed it as comfortable nostalgia. The official website offers a history of the US from a spamish perspective, as well as a fan club and gift items. The word has also come to be used for unwanted e-mail.
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Capital of Utah and headquarters for the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Mormons founded the city as a well-ordered grid between the mountains and the Great Salt Lake in 1847. While its population and cultural institutions have grown more diverse over time, the geography of Mormonism still dominates the city, from the institutions of Temple Square to the commercial enterprises centered around the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution (founded 1868). The relatively small city (under 200,000) also acts as a center for regional agriculture, wholesale and services, as well as a center for education (University of Utah), culture and recreation (Utah Jazz basketball team and mountain sports nearby). The setting and regional opportunities have contributed to rapid servicesector employment growth and population expansion. The metropolitan area grew 18 percent between 1990 and 1998 to reach 1,267,745 inhabitants with development of 1,000 acres per month, increasing highways, sprawl and congestion.
The Winter Olympics of 2002, a rare hosting by an urban center, appeared to be the capstone for this development. The city’s reputation for conservative integrity, however, was marred by influencepeddling scandals surrounding its bid and questions about financial support for its development.
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Capital punishment, or the death penalty is the execution of an individual by the government, either federal or state, as punishment for a crime. Presently thirty-eight states, the federal govern ment and the US military have death penalty statutes on their books. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1977 (Coker v. Georgia) that the death penalty was a disproportionate punishment for rape, almost all capital crimes involve murder or the death of a victim that occurred in the course of another crime. The method of execution varies according to state, although lethal injection and electrocution are by far the most common.
All of the colonies had death-penalty statutes on their books and these policies remained largely unchanged after the American revolution. Although there were two periods of intense abolitionist activity in the nineteenth century this largely ended by 1917. The entry of the US into the First World War, along with high-profile murders, such as the Leopold and Loeb case in the 1920s, led to a widespread resurgence of the death penalty Throughout the 1930s and 1940s an average of 140 people were being executed each year. However, in the 1950s there began a rapid decline in this rate as popular support waned. This opposition was fueled in part by the controversial cases of Caryl Chessman and Barbara Graham, whose stories had been turned into highly successful books and films.
By the mid-1960s executions were down to less than twenty annually and publicopinion polls showed opposition to the death penalty at an all-time high. In 1967 there began an unofficial moratorium that lasted ten years. Yet, in 1972, the US Supreme Court invalidated all existing capital punishment statutes. In a five to four decision (Furman v.
Georgia) the court ruled that capital punishment violated the 8th and 14th Amendments because it was being imposed in an arbitrary and capricious fashion. There was an angry and swift reaction by many of the states, and several immediately implemented changes in their sentencing procedures in order to meet the Court’s constitutional concerns. As a result of these modifications, the Court ruled in 1976 that states could re-institute the death penalty. A year later Utah executed Gary Gilmore by firing squad.
Since then, over 550 people have been put to death, with four states—Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Florida—accounting for 60 percent. The US has the largest death-row population in the world with close to 3,600 individuals currently awaiting execution: 46 percent are white, 43 percent African American and 8 percent Hispanic. Less than 1 percent are women or citizens of another country. Since 1970, eighty-two individuals have been released from death row after new scientific (genetic/DNA) evidence had established their innocence. Several polls conducted throughout the 1980s and 1990s saw a substantial growth in widespread public support for capital punishment, although it also saw the rise of numerous abolitionist organizations and a number of highly critical books and films (Dead Man Walking, 1997). Various local and state moratoria have emerged, although public support remains high.
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Caribbean nations long have endured the influence of the “colossus to the North.” Yet, as ideas, styles and people have traveled north, they have established distinctive communities, complicating American minority politics and culture. Two million Caribbean immigrants have arrived since the 1960s (alongside Puerto Rican US citizens); large urban communities include Haitians in New York and Miami, FL, Cubans in Miami, Dominicans on the Eastern Seaboard, Jamaicans, Belizians and others.
Some West Indian immigrant families come to embody the American dream Colin Powell, former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and possible presidential contender, is the son of Jamaican immigrants, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm has roots in Barbados, singer Harry Belafonte in Jamaica and Martinique, actor Sidney Poitier in the Bahamas and writers Paule Marshall in Barbados and Edwige Danticat in Haiti. Others have been identified with problems of race, class and crime.
While the US has intervened in the Caribbean for centuries, it has not always been a one-way street. Cubans participated in the radicalization of the Florida cigar industry and Jamaican Marcus Garvey tested his models for pan-African unity in the US before being deported in 1927. Yet, except for elite or seasonal migrations, few West Indians went north: less than 500,000 had immigrated before the Second World War.
Political and economic movements, as much as new immigration rules, fostered subsequent migration. Cuban Americans fleeing Castro and Haitian boat people escaping Duvalier and crushing poverty gained particular mass media attention, while other West Indians tended to be conflated with existing black or emergent Hispanic populations. Some men gained citizenship by joining the military in the Vietnam War.
West Indian migrants often have proved more successful in business and education than existing African American populations: by the 1990s, their average income approached general norms and far surpassed that of other African Americans, while immigrants and their children gained responsibilities in politics, civil service, the military and business. Nonetheless, seasonal migrants like cane-cutters in South Florida and women leaving their families for domestic service underscore continuing exploitation. A Caribbean cultural presence may be more muted: fads for calypso, reggae and soca do not necessarily identify an American population so much as characterizing transnational styles. Caribbean food (especially Jamaican and Cuban) moved out of its ethnic communities in the 1990s.
West Indian success has exacerbated tensions between insiders and outsiders, especially as West Indians bring different cultures of color and class to the US—Afro-Cubans, for example, fall within multiple census categories, as do Caribbean Asians.
Fair-skinned Creoles challenge the phenotypic classification of race in everyday life for both blacks and whites. Nor is theirs a simple story—Colin Powell, on the path to the White House, is balanced by Louis Farrakhan (with family origins in St. Kitts and Jamaica as well as Boston’s West Indian community), leading the Nation of Islam.
Marshall, Danticat and others have explored ambiguous positions inside and outside of both American and Caribbean culture.
Moreover, political and economic issues in their nearby homelands influence both Caribbean communities and the image of West Indians in the US. This underpinned the problematic association of Haitian refugees with AIDS in the 1980s or the US invasion in the 1990s. Other difficulties face Voudou and Santería, which may include animal sacrifice, within American civic religion. West Indian immigrants also have been associated in the media with drugs, and brutalized by police and immigration authorities.
Industry:Culture
Categorized less by their food (generally bland mainstream American) than by their use.
Family restaurants tolerate and promote the presence and activities of children with special treats, spaces, games and rewards, as well as budget prices. This normative image of family allows for some variation among chains (McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants with sit-down space) and restaurants with servers—Friendly’s, Howard Johnsons (with motels for travelers), Chili’s, diners, etc. Neighborhood and ethnic restaurants, however, also do strong family business—pizza, tacos, barbeque and dim sum have crossed over from their ethnic enclaves to allow for large and creative familiar groupings.
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CB radio is a set of forty audio channels set aside by the Federal Communications Commission so that individuals may broadcast short messages to listeners over a range of a few miles. No license is required to use CB radio. Though widely remembered as a fad, CB radio is still used to communicate information between drivers on US highways.
CB channel 9 is designated for emergency services and is especially important in areas where regular telephone service is unavailable. CB radio enthusiasts contributed the phrase “10–4” (the term signifies agreement with a speaker) to the American vocabulary.
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Census category first used in 1980 when census takers began to inquire about the ancestry of the US population. In previous years, questionnaires had asked merely for the respondent’s birthplace. When ethnicity was asked for, however, the multicultural nature of the country and the intermarriage that had occurred between different ethnic groups over the years made it difficult for some to report their ancestry. Someone who was equally Scottish, German, Italian and Irish was inclined just to answer “American,” explaining why this became the fastest growing “ethnic” group in the United States. The category “American” also fitted in with the prevailing white backlash against non-white Americans, since it clearly “whitened” the person designating him/herself in this way.
Someone who had one-quarter of the same heritage noted above replaced by African or Chinese descent could be designated African American or Asian American respectively, although they might contest this classification.
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Center for commercial, communal, civic and ceremonial space in nineteenth and early twentieth-century small-town America. Although Sinclair Lewis’ unflattering depiction of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota in his 1930 novel Main Street exposed negativity and restlessness there, Main Street’s decline resulted from the popularity of the automobile and suburban expansion. Disney none theless championed it in the 1950s. Recent movements to re-establish Main Street as a commercial and communal center include New Urbanism and historic preservation. New Urbanist projects focus on the pedestrian in designing new Main Streets, while historically preserved Main Streets attempt to restructure the economy along shuttered, dilapidated corridors.
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Central to many colleges and universities’ sports programs since the nineteenth century, especially the Ivy League universities, crew is an expensive sport (racing shells cost as much as $20,000) and is generally available only to wealthier Americans at university or Olympic levels. Rowers along rivers like Boston’s Charles and Philadelphia’s Schuylkill (immortalized in Thomas Eakin’s paintings) thus have drawn ire from residents of surrounding communities. Hence, Philadelphia administrators have occasionally suggested that the city’s boathouses (used for equipment and social activities) should provide camps or other low-cost facilities to disadvantaged kids.
Visibility of women in the sport grew dramatically after the passage of Title IX. Since colleges already had the necessary equipment, rowing easily served to move towards funding parity. By 1997, 96 NCAA schools had women’s varsity rowing teams.
Reaching parity was made easier still in 1997 when the NCAA made women’s rowing a sanctioned sport, while men’s rowing remained a varsity or club sport. Consequently in many schools women rowers outnumber men.
This has had increasing impact on gender conventions beyond the crews. Bodybuilding sports, before Title IX at least, generally had been considered unfeminine. Now these constitute the backbone of many women’s sporting programs.
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Changes in family life and structure, along with fluctuations in wealth, shaped the context of children’s experience after the Second World War. From 1945 to the early 1970s, American families grew steadily wealthier. The birth-control pill, introduced in the early 1960s, slowed the birth rate, so children grew up in smaller, richer families than ever before. Larger houses gave children more privacy, more wealth meant more toys, including television, more travel and, by the 1980s, more computers and other electronic devices. Meanwhile, a steadily rising divorce rate, followed towards the end of the century by more frequent remarriage, created a complex family structure with multiple residences, incomes and cultures. All these combined to increase the cultural and commercial significance of children and childhood.
Schooling reflected these changes. Attentiveness to children’s individual personalities produced innovations in teaching techniques in the 1960s and 1970s, including open classrooms and highschool electives, though the 1980s and 1990s brought a resurgence of adult authority and a “return to basics.” Parental involvement in schools eroded after the 1970s as demand for income encouraged adults to work longer hours and/or multiple jobs. Beginning in the 1980s, communications technologies lengthened the work day itself. Children’s activities became more structured with playgroups, after-school care, organized sports and summer camp replacing the less-structured street play of earlier generations of children. New therapeutic approaches to troubled children emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and therapists offered Ritalin and other prescription drugs to help these children “adjust” more readily.
Though the Civil Rights movement and new constitutional doctrines on equality improved social and economic opportunities for non-white citizens, non-white and recent immigrant groups stayed poorer than whites. African American, Asian and Latino children continued to play with their peers on public streets and in public playgrounds instead of in private rooms at home or in the supervised parks available to the more affluent. While prosperous minority families followed other middle-class families into the suburbs, the integration of professional sports provided African American and Hispanic children with new nonwhite role models of immense wealth and prestige to emulate. Beginning in the 1970s, growing racial disparities in wealth clashed with these children’s heightened desires for both basic and glamorous goods, introducing new tensions into poor families and communities.
Gender expectations of children also changed as adults won increased educational, professional and recreational opportunities. Despite controversy evidence of underachievement by girls led to new girl-centered initiatives, including girls-only math and science camps, magazines devoted to empowering girls and an increased sensitivity about schoolyard teasing.
Post-Second World War America has paradoxically both shortened and lengthened childhood. Children mature early as independent consumers, but remain dependent longer on more affluent parents. School days and years are longer, though pedagogy has become more respectful of children’s individuality Children receive more organized assistance with leisure, learning and emotional development, though working parents, underfunded public programs and the labor market often require even young children to shift largely for themselves.
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