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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Characteristically American genre synthesizing the road (the automobile or motorcycle) and a person’s individual quest for meaning and improvement. The road movie has a long heritage in American literary quests (Huckleberry Finn, Travels With Charley, On the Road). It also has been adapted into other national cinemas in France, Australia, Germany and Finland, while remaining deeply American.
While the postwar road movie shows special affinities with the western, we must recognize other important filmic roots. These include the moving albeit comic quests of Chaplin, Keaton and Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941). Frank Capra also used road elements effectively in the comic It Happened One Nïght (1934) and in a more somber vein in Meet John Doe (1941). The presence of comic and tragic elements continues to challenge the boundaries of any genre classification.
In the postwar period, certain key movies demarcate complex changes in spectatorship and meaning generation by generation. In the 1950s, for example, the road movie allows the rebellion of Brando in the Wild One (1954). The 1960s extended this rebellion in the nihilistic crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Easy Rider (1969), whose motorcycle pilgrimage and violent denouement underscored the tensions of the decade.
After a spate of comedies (e.g. Smokey and the Bandit, 1977) and interesting foreign perspectives like Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas (1984), more reflexive road movies returned with David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1989). In the 1990s, this new take allowed the genre to rethink masculinity, whether through the female liberty underpinning Thelma and Louise (1991) or the gay/hustler explorations of My Own Private Idaho (1991).
Industry:Culture
Charles Manson was convicted in 1971 of masterminding 1969 murders at the home of actor Sharon Tate (with coffee heiress Abigail Folger among those murdered), and the butchery of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. These murders were ritualistic acts, inviting numerous theories about their purpose and Manson’s cult family. The most popular theory is that the murders were inspired by Manson’s interpretation of the Beatles, including his belief that the song “Helter Skelter” referred to a coming race war which the murders were intended to provoke. The Internet still features a plethora of sites protesting Manson’s innocence and those adamantly proclaiming that justice was served.
Still in prison, with no likelihood of parole, Manson now preaches and sings over the Web about ecology and the environment. One of his followers was also convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford.
Industry:Culture
Chartered in 1868, the University of California (UC) System eventually grew to nine campuses. For much of the twentieth century the UC System, along with the twentythree-campus California State University provided affordable, quality undergraduate and graduate education for California residents. However, in the early 1990s, the UC System faced budget cuts, temporarily leading to overcrowding and significantly higher costs for students.
The UC System, which includes five medical schools and teaching hospitals as well as three law schools, has also been a cornerstone for top-notch research. Since 1939, the UC faculty has won thirty-two Nobel Prizes.
The UC System has often been at the forefront of political and social change. In the mid- to late-1960s, the Free Speech movement, a demonstration against the Vietnam War and racism, occurred on the Berkeley campus. In the 1970s, Allan Bakke, an engineer denied admission to the medical school at the Davis campus, sued the university claiming he had been rejected only because he was white. In a decision that established parameters for affirmative-action programs, the Supreme Court ordered Bakke admitted, ruling that schools cannot use quotas to achieve racial diversity but may consider race in the admissions process in order to reach this end. In July 1995, the UC system’s governing board voted to end the admissions policy of preferences based on race and gender, while allowing campuses to give preference to applicants with disadvantaged backgrounds. The action effectively dismantled existing affirmative-action policies for campus admissions, but faced deep protests.
Industry:Culture
Chemistry is vital for improving and sustaining the quality of human life, and the chemical process industries continue expanding to meet society’s demands, producing over a million new chemicals a year worldwide. The US chemical industry alone employs over a million workers and is the largest segment of US manufacturing. The four main areas within chemistry are organic, inorganic, analytical and physical.
Organic chemistry studies carbon compounds and how to modify and combine them to synthesize new substances. Synthetics include dyes, perfumes, refrigerants used in airconditioners and plastics such as Nylon, Plexiglass and Teflon—a polymer extensively used since the 1960s as a non-stick coating for pans. Compounds are also synthesized and screened for use as drugs or agricultural chemicals.
Inorganic chemistry treats all compounds, except for hydrocarbons and their derivatives. Advances in inorganic chemistry have yielded composite materials for constructing anything from better tennis rackets to more durable airplane wings.
Semiconductors and high-temperature superconductors have also been produced, making possible faster computers and high-speed trains.
Analytical chemistry is concerned with determining the composition of substances.
Advances since the 1950s involve increasingly sophisticated instrumentation and techniques, including ultra-centrifuges, mass spectrometers and high-resolution chromatography. X-ray crystallography has also made it possible to analyze the structures of vitamin B12, DNA and hemoglobin. Many techniques are employed to detect environmental pollutants and food contaminants.
Physical chemistry employs the instruments and methods of analytical chemistry to develop theories of chemical phenomena. Chemical thermodynamics measures variables like melting and boiling points, chemical kinetics studies reaction rates and electrochemistry examines chemical effects due to electric currents. Such information has facilitated research in and development of electronic components, alternatives for harmful chemicals and more.
Chemistry has increasingly fractured into various specializations. To mention a few: agricultural and food chemistry produce preservatives and flavorings, as well as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides like 2,4-D, which led to rapid rises in crop yields after the Second World War. Pharmaceutical chemistry creates medicines and other drugs to treat diseases and extend and improve the quality of life. These include the antibiotics penicillin, tetracycline and aureomycin, as well as synthesis of steroids like progesterone, used for contraception, and hormones like insulin used in treating diabetes. Petrochemistry generates petroleum-based products such as gasoline, oil, waxes and plastics, as well as the raw material for most synthetic fibers.
The need to assess the benefits of chemicals versus their adverse consequences has always existed but been largely ignored by chemical manufacturers until the 1960s, creating the impression of an industry unconcerned with environmental pollution, health risks or product safety Public concerns led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and passage of various laws thereafter to protect the environment and improve workplace safety The US chemical industry has responded with programs, which include voluntary clean-ups, effluent reduction and safer disposal methods, and prioritizing employee health and safety issues, to regain public trust.
Industry:Culture
Chicago, Illinois, located in the center of the Midwestern prairie on the banks of Lake Michigan, has always played a special role in the national imagination. Known as “The City of Neighborhoods,” “The City of Broad Shoulders” (from a poem by Carl Sandburg) and “The City that Works,” Chicago has been associated with an array of images, ranging from its reputation for political corruption to its fiercely “tribal” ethnic rivalries to its history of gangsters (particularly during the Prohibition era), to the violence that erupted during the Democratic National Convention of 1968, when the police and National Guard were unleashed by then-Mayor Richard J. Daley to quell antiwar demonstrations.
Chicago’s cityscape bears the marks of its once unrivaled prominence as a center of industry though, like many of its companion rustbelt cities, manufacturing now employs only about one-fifth of workers (mostly in food processing). Chicago’s once famous steelyards closed down in the early 1980s due to competition from cheaper steel produced abroad. Its location at the hub of the transcontinental train lines and its proximity to the cattleraising farms of the Midwest had made it the center of the meatpacking industry at the turn of the nineteenth century when the development of refrigerated train cars allowed freshly slaughtered meat to be safely shipped to markets in the East and elsewhere. The rise of trucking and the growth of the interstate highway system eventually obviated the need for a centralized location for meatpacking. Almost all the Chicago stockyards, whose appalling conditions had been immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle, closed down between the 1930s and the 1960s.
Unlike many of the other rustbelt cities, however, Chicago has had the ability to reinvent itself, and, in the 1990s, it enjoyed an economic renaissance that seems to parallel its rebirth more than a century earlier after the famous fire of 1871. It remains the financial center of the Midwest and its main airport, O’Hare, is one of the busiest in the world. Old industrial areas which ring the central city (known as “the Loop” because of the pattern of elevated train tracks that surround the core) are now being redeveloped into loft apartments and condominiums, restaurants and artists’ galleries; its natural setting on the banks of Lake Michigan is also being newly exploited. Lake Shore Drive, which runs along the lakefront from the city’s northern tip to its southern tip, has been rerouted as it runs past the Loop so that institutions located on the Lake, including the Museum of Natural History the Aquarium and the Planetarium, are now easily accessible on foot, as is the lakefront itself. Chicago sports teams include the Bears (football), the Bulls (basketball), whose most famous former player is Michael Jordan and two baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox. Wrigley Stadium, home of the Cubs, is one of the few baseball parks still located in the middle of a city neighborhood, now known as “Wrigleyville.” Chicago is also famous for its “Magnificent Mile” shopping district, on North Michigan Avenue, and the Art Institute.
Chicago hosts many immigrant communities, including East and West Europeans, Mexicans and Asians. Citizens of Japanese descent ended up in Chicago after being released from Midwestern internment camps following the Second World War. Its African American population increased rapidly in the Great Migration from the South between the World Wars and following the Second World War, so that they now make up about two-fifths of the city’s residents. Overall, Chicago was demoted from second to third city in the US following the 1990 census, which the population of Los Angeles, CA surpassed.
In the 1980s, Chicago was roiled with political turmoil as its old Democratic Party “machine,” which controlled the ward organizations and doled out patronage jobs and which had long been dominated by the city’s “white ethnics,” the Irish in particular, was overthrown with the election of the city’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington. Despite the turmoil and racist invective that attended his first election in 1983, Washington proved a charismatic leader and was re-elected to office in 1987, although he died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. After an interim mayor, Richard M. Daley son of the famous Richard J. Daley was elected to office.
For social scientists, Chicago has always been associated with the Chicago School of Sociology, which flourished particularly during the 1920s and 1930s. These social scientists, based at the renowned University of Chicago, used the city as their laboratory They conducted empirical research on particular neighborhoods and occupational groups, with a special interest in social problems caused by poverty In the 1920s, a sociologist, Ernest W. Burgess, developed his theory that American cities were made up of “concentric zones,” with an “administrative—business sector” at the center of the city surrounded by a ring of slums and ethnic enclaves, which, in turn, was surrounded by a zone of slightly better-off immigrant neighborhoods, which was encircled by Zone 4, where the American-born middle classes resided. Zone 5 housed the suburban commuters. This model fostered the development of a human ecology perspective on the city in which the urban environment was envisioned like a natural habitat made up of interconnected systems. Despite the fact that critics pointed out rather early on that the particular formation of Chicago and other cities was hardly “natural,” but was the outcome of particular policies shaped by governmental and market interests, the “zonal development” model continued to be influential in urban studies.
Industry:Culture
Chief of the Public Health Service of the US (under the Department of Health and Human Services). Statements on tobacco (now printed as a warning on all cigarette boxes), physical fitness, diet, AIDS and other issues have made this a moral and political position, turning Surgeon Generals like C. Everett Koop into public figures. The consequences of politicization were also apparent in the forced resignation of Clinton appointee Jocelyn Elders (1933–), the first woman and African American to hold the post. Her views on guns, legalizing drugs, sexuality and sex education proved too controversial for the staid vision of a healthy America.
Industry:Culture
Children’s literature generally refers to books and stories for readers from infancy through the ages of fourteen or fifteen. The American children’s literature industry includes publishing houses, book weeks, specialty associations, conferences, storytelling associations and libraries; one Internet vendor in this prolific field lists 1 million titles, while the New York Times Parents Guide (1991) reviews over 1,700. American children’s literature reflects concern for family society and environment and increasingly seeks to deal with multiculturalism and social problems. The industry also has responded to new media ties as well as marketing associated with well-known characters.
Broad categories of children’s literature respond to age, interests and skills, including picture books, read-aloud books, biography folklore and legends, history, religion, series, ethnic narratives and poetry Nursery rhymes, song books, coloringin and alphabet books abound for young children; schools and media encourage parents to read to their children, while public libraries, schools and bookstores make books readily available for growing readers.
Picture books and read-aloud books are recognized annually in the Caldecott Awards for illustrated stories: Maurice Sendak, Eric Carle and Tomie de Paola are well-known authorillustrators. Pat the Bunny and Good Nïght Moon are babyhood classics, while other popular read-aloud books include Millions of Cats, Madeline, The Little House and Make Way for Ducklings. Madeline and Curious George, like the more recent Arthur series, also have media, toy and game tie-ins. The many works of Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) and Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends provide comic verse, word play and catchy illustrations.
Series books introduce recurrent characters for older readers. Popular series of the baby boom include Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys, which also demarcated gendered readers. By the 1990s, these had given way to the contemporary issues and social mixtures of Sweet Valley Twins, The Baby-sitters Club (aimed at girls) or the Goosebump horror tales. The British Harry Potter books have become publishing blockbusters.
Nonetheless, fairy tales and legends remain popular, reaching across time and space through lavishly illustrated editions, popular movie adaptations and accompanying books, CD-ROM games and board games. Some classic early American novels, such as Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and The Little House (series), also retain their appeal for established readers. In the 1990s, for example, Frances Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, both written before 1930, were revitalized by movies, stage plays, CD-ROM and newly illustrated editions.
Other books move children onward into new worlds. Here, the Newberry Awards recognize excellence in children’s literature, including since the 1960s works that deal with issues of race, death and sexuality Science fiction for children proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Heinlein’s works and Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Stories of aliens and anti-utopian societies, such as The Giver, maintain this tradition. The Harry Potter fantasy books captured the imagination of millions of young readers at the turn of the twentyfirst century Semi-documentary novels also inform and educate young readers: My Brother Sam is Dead treats the tragic disruption of a family during the Civil War, while Number the Stars depicts a child during the Holocaust. Nonfiction books dealing with environmental issues also reflect broader American concerns in the 1980s and 1990s.
Late twentieth century trends included works for the disadvantaged child, works written with limited vocabulary and a new realism. Children’s literature written by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, disabled citizens and children with illnesses all appear in books designed to spur reflection and conversation with parents and teachers.
Industry:Culture
Children’s magazines abound, with an especially large number featuring health and science-related content. Children between the ages of two and fourteen and parents can choose from magazines of general interest, those featuring crafts, coloring pages and cutout pages and others offering history, literature, sports, consumer news, religion, geography and entertainment. Generally these contain sixty pages or fewer, and circulations range from 5,000 to 2.5 million. In the 1990s, these magazines increasingly used clever graphics, color and activities to extend the reading or educational experience for their audience. They also show links to consumerism and reproductions of gender and other divisions.
The most popular titles include the longrunning, general interest Highlights for Children, with a circulation of 2.5 million and a stated mission of “fun with a purpose” for children aged between two and twelve. Boy’s Life, the Boy Scouts of America publication, has a circulation of 1.3 million tied to its institutional framework. National Geographic World, a geography magazine for children between the ages of six and twelve, drawing on the popular adult magazine, has a circulation of 1.2 million.
As Boy’s Life suggests, magazines for children recognize and reproduce gender differences. Girls magazines include American Girl (circulation 700,000), a spin-off of the popular American Girl books and dolls, and New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and their Dreams (circulation 28,000), which encourages pre-teen girls to become confident young women with dreams and positive role models from various ethnic communities.
Teen-oriented Girl’s Life includes traditional features such as pen pals, family advice, horoscopes and reviews of CDs.
Science and nature magazines include: Chickadee (ages three to nine); Kïds Discover and Odyssey, for elementary school students; Owl; Ranger Rick, the National Wildlife Federation publication for elementary students; and 3–2–1 Contact, the flashy and savvy science magazine for children aged eight to twelve, published by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTV also has a preschool magazine, Sesame Street). Most have web-sites that extend children’s experiences beyond the magazine.
The CTV and American Girl connections also suggest synergy in children’s magazines and consumption. This permeates publications like Crayola Kïds, Disney Adventures, a hundred-page, digest-sized publication covering television, sports, music and twenty-five pages of comics, and Nïckelodeon, from the cable network.
Magazines with historical/cultural emphases include Cobblestone, Calliope and the anthropological Faces (for ages nine to fourteen). Meanwhile, Cricket, Spider and Ladybug provide stories, poems and games. Stone Soup provides a forum for writers and artists up to age thirteen. Other specialty magazines, whether Zillions, from consumer reports, or Sports Illustrated for Kïds and Soccer Jr., identify children as junior adults.
Industry:Culture
Children’s museums began in the United States with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (1899). The Association of Youth Museums has almost 400 members; of these, 200 museums are currently in operation and 100 are in the planning stages. Children’s museums take many forms, from interactive centers for art, science and nature to handson discovery rooms in larger museums, not to mention museums entirely for children.
They tailor exhibits to the developmental capabilities of children, complete with activities, language and displays appropriate for children of various ages, learning styles and developmental abilities.
When the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was founded, John Dewey was teaching the thenradical notion that individuals learn powerfully through personal experience. Maria Montessori also influenced the early development of children’s museums with her theories of teacher as facilitator and the value of children having independence and sharing activities and equipment. In 1901 the Smithsonian opened its first Children’s Room with the theme “Knowledge begins in wonder.” In the 1960s, Jean Piaget’s theories of child development affected educational institutions in powerful ways, particularly his assertion that to know an object is to act upon it. In 1961 Michael Spock, son of the famed pediatrician Benjamin Spock, took charge of the Boston, Massachusetts Children’s Museum and revolutionized the museum world for children. He designed exhibits meant for interaction—the first being “What’s Inside,” showing the inner workings of everyday things such as toasters, water heaters, a car engine and a sewer system.
In keeping with Piaget’s concepts of the stages of children’s development, the staff developed spaces for children’s needs. For example, for the sensorymotor stage (birth to age three), the staff developed a baby pit with mirrors, blankets and small climbing structures. A toddler area had small group activities like blocks, and older toddlers had arts and crafts materials available along with puzzles, play structures and activity tables.
Staff members became interpreters who were ready to answer questions and demonstrate components of exhibits. The Boston Children’s Museum philosophy was that “the museum was for somebody rather than about something.” The hands-on science and technology center was born when Frank Oppenheimer opened San Francisco, CA’s Exploratorium in 1969. He believed “visitors should control and manipulate the elements of the exhibit and that staff or volunteer ‘explainers’ could help them understand what was happening” (Cleaver 1988:10). His Exploratorium inspired the many science and technology participatory centers across the country Most children’s museums strive to engage visitors in the experience of learning about the world they inhabit and encourage discovery dealing with unknowns in a safe way and making sense of new experiences. Exhibits created with an emphasis on the process of learning help visitors—whether children, teenagers or adults accompanying them— understand more about their own learning style and motivations for learning, whether visitors take a random or a linear or methodical approach to experiencing the museum.
Industry:Culture
Circular bread crust with tomato, cheese and other toppings adapted from Italian sources (New Haven, Connecticut claims priority) has become a ubiquitous American meal.
Strong regional variations have emerged—especially Chicago, IL deep dish versus Northeastern thin crust—while status and quality are marked by mass preparation as opposed to hand-crafted pizza at home or in restaurants. Yet as a mass food item— available frozen, in mixes and by competing delivery services—it has become a staple for children, parties and even school lunches, while being re-exported through franchises like Dominos and Pizza Hut. Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk Snow Crash (1992), in fact, makes pizza delivery emblematic of a future American dystopia.
Industry:Culture
