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After the VCR was introduced to the American mass market in the mid-1970s, the home entertainment options for many Americans were greatly expanded. In combination with the emergence of cable television and satellite, the VCR initially seemed to pose a substantial threat to the dominance of network television and movie theaters. The VCR not only enables viewers to rent movies that they can watch comfortably in their own homes, it also allows them to record programs from television, allowing greater flexibility in terms of viewing schedules. Renting videos is less expensive than the cost of a ticket (or multiple tickets) at a movie theater. Hence, the VCR has also transformed the film industry—film producers now make the most of their profits from video rentals (even in cases when films are quite successful at the box office). By the mid-1990s, over 86 percent of American households owned a VCR.
The VCR is not the last word on home entertainment, however. Films are also available on laser-discs and DVDs (digital video discs or digital versatile discs). These technologies promise to transform once again the home viewing experience. Laser-discs have been available in the United States since the late 1970s, but they never became popular. They are cumbersome and can only contain approximately 1 hour of material per side. Laserdiscs also have analog video components (like videotapes) so they suffer from some generational degradation. DVDs, on the other hand (available since 1996), hold more promise. They are digital, and therefore suffer very little generational degradation, and are comparable in quality to studio masters. They are also much smaller than laserdiscs, and can contain up to 4 hours of material (8 hours if both sides are used). Both laserdiscs and DVDs have features that videotapes do not have (such as scan and search functions), but only DVD is capable of interactivity. While all these new technologies allow consumers to have control over the time and space of the consumption of media goods, the goods are still primarily produced by Hollywood, allowing the New Hollywood to demand ever-increasing market share in the US and abroad.
Industry:Culture
Alligator farms, tigers at truck stops, homes of historical personages and monuments of kitsch, from giant animals to theme villages, grew up with and along American highways to service and amuse its mobile families. Offering respite for children and drivers, with souvenirs, fast food and motel rooms, they also reflect generations and class in road development. Those huddled along slow, two-lane roads seem quaint and crude beside the sophisticated advertising of regional tourist boards, highway hotels and major theme parks dominating interstate landscapes. Countless guides exist to both serious and tacky stops somewhere between democracy and chaos.
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Almost 4 million babies are born in the United States each year. The infant mortality rate has dropped to about 7.6 deaths per 1,000 live births, although this remains higher than some other developed nations. Still, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that 35–40 percent of all American families experienced an early death. Today fewer than 1 in 10,000 dies in childbirth. Public health concerns, nonetheless, focus on increasing prenatal care and nutrition in at-risk populations like teen pregnancies or mothers dealing with substance abuse.
Most births occur in hospitals, but expectant parents have a variety of options from which to choose. One-stop birthing rooms have replaced many of the multi-stage, multistep labor, delivery and recovery units. These rooms create an environment that intends to make the birth experience more welcoming. Besides having all the technology and monitors of hospitals, other options include a jacuzzi or tub for those who want to be immersed while in labor and even delivery as well as kitchens and subdued lighting for the room. These environments also bring the father/ partner and other family members into the birth process.
Techniques of birth vary in American culture. Mothers often prepare themselves—with the help of their spouse or a birthing partner—through systems of training, usually focused on relaxation and breathing techniques. Such techniques, often named after the individuals who developed them, include the Lamaze, Bradley Odent, Kitzinger Psychosexual Approach and the Active Birth Method. Classes provide the instruction, support and education for the expectant parents.
Most Americans do not like to tolerate pain, so a variety of options exists to endure, avoid or manage the pain. For some, hypnosis, acupuncture, reflexology aromatherapy homeopathic remedies such as St. John’s wort and Bach flower, or water provide the relief sought. For others, medications ease the various stages of labor and delivery Narcotics such as Demerol and Stadol are common drugs provided, but they may affect the babies. Nitrous oxide or other inhalant anesthetics may be given during delivery More common are local anesthetics, in particular the epidural, an anesthetic injected into the space outside of the spinal cord’s outer membrane.
Home births with family members present and a doctor or a midwife attending as well as underwater births attract a number of pregnant Americans. Nevertheless, what American women demand are options in the birthing process.
The length a woman can stay in the hospital following a normal delivery however, has been a subject of intense debate. Gone are the days when new mothers would spend a week in the hospital for a vaginal delivery and two weeks for a Cesarean. Insurance companies, in particular managed-care organizations, dictate the length of stay following most births. It took a federal act to allow new mothers a 48-hour stay.
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Along with the popularization of environmental concerns in the 1970s and 1980s came a growing critique of the highly consumerist, resourceintensive American lifestyle. In the wake of Earth Day 1990, recycling came to be seen as the perfect solution to these concerns, allowing each American to participate in a perceived ameliorative effort without actually making a substantial sacrifice in consumption. For many advocating recycling is synonymous with environmental awareness, while purchasing recycled products (paper and plastic goods abound) is seen as a kind of consumer activism. By social convention, all businesses and academic institutions are expected to recycle.
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Also known as “infantile paralysis,” this viral inflammation that left healthy children and adults unable to use their limbs became a source of terror for American parents and children, especially between 1945 and 1954 when it seemed as terrifying to the American dream as nuclear destruction or lurking communism. Thanks to a massive fundraising effort and targeted research, polio was conquered by vaccination, reducing its incidence dramatically and creating a new sense of power that would be recalled with cancer and AIDS. Nonetheless, post-polio syndrome has haunted survivors in the late twentieth century.
Although polio reached epidemic proportions in Sweden in 1885, the virus probably was experienced as a mild infantile condition until improved sanitation made that prophylactic exposure (via contact with fecal matter) improbable. A more virulent inflammation of the spine and its con sequences became regular threats in US outbreaks by 1916, although casualties never equaled the influenza pandemic. Polio outbreaks were met with sometimes hysterical responses—closing churches, schools and theaters as well as deserting pools and beaches to avoid the “summer plague.” In 1921 it struck rising politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose later resolute (and false) heartiness changed the image of the disease. Meanwhile, the National Infantile Paralysis Foundation raised money to support his center at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and more extensive research. In January 1938, with the help of radio/movie star Eddie Cantor and others, this foundation launched the March of Dimes, soliciting coins from radio listeners, children and adults, to total $1.8 million. By 1945 the NIPF raised $20 million, using maudlin appeals like its famous poster children.
The disease also took on new dimensions with overseas exposure for servicemen and the growth of new baby boom families and care. Cases rose from 10,000 annually in 1940 to 20,000 by the end of the decade. Cases peaked at 58,000 in 1952. This lead to real panic in summer months as well as isolation and stigmatization for those with even a mild case. Treatment, while improved over time, was still limited. Perhaps the most frightening image is that of the iron lung—encasing a body in a metal cylinder, causing utter dependency; immobilization was also practiced long after an Australian nurse, Sister Kenny, showed the efficacy of warm compresses and exercise.
Jonas Salk, among others, began looking for an effective vaccine in the mid-1940s, overcoming technical difficulties in producing dead virus vaccine and lack of support in the scientific community to achieve field tests in 1954, followed by widespread vaccination throughout schools. Dr Albert Sabin introduced an oral vaccine in 1958 and it soon replaced the Salk vaccine, effectively eliminating polio in the US for most populations.
In the 1980s, however, problems of new symptoms emerged. Whether recurrence of polio in an attenuated form or simply long-term muscle and nerve fatigue, post-polio syndrome has proven a haunting legacy of disease and triumph. Ironically at this same time, public debate erupted over the lack of depictions of FDR in his wheelchair in his newly constructed Washington memorial.
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Although “Arab” refers to members of a language group from the Middle East and North Africa, the term has been muddled in the US by historical shifts, global Islamic politics and widespread stereotypes of fanatic Muslim “others.” In fact, many Arab Americans are Christians (90 percent of those who arrived before the Second World War) and longterm citizens. Yet the 2–3 million Americans of Arab descent face continual possibilities of discrimination, vividly depicted in the mass round-ups of the 1998 movie The Siege, which spurred vigorous Arab American protest. These representations belie Arabs’ long presence in the States, their complexity and their integration into diverse settings.
Arab immigration began in the late nineteenth century with young males coming from Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman empire), pursuing wandering mercantile careers in North and South America; one is remembered as the “Persian” in the musical Oklahoma.
This brought family and friends over before 1920’s immigration curbs (perhaps a total of 100,000), and generally they became highly assimilated.
Immigration renewed after the Second World War with students and professionals from Arab states (primarily Muslim). Christians and Muslims from Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt and other areas have also escaped traumatic local conditions, as well as pursuing economic security. Men and families have led immigration rather than single women—Arab American women have felt special strains between new social mores and their roles within families and a variety of Arab/Muslim gender roles.
Most Arab Americans are urban, concentrated in New York City, Los Angeles, CA, Chicago and Detroit, MI (200,000 citizens of Lebanese and Palestinian descent). They belong to diverse Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, as well as Protestant faiths established by missionaries, although most are now Muslim. Valuing education and labor, they have established themselves in politics—senators James Abourezk (South Dakota) and George Mitchell (Maine), and Clinton Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, Wisconsin. They have also succeeded in mass media (comedian/impresario Danny Thomas, actor F. Murray Abraham), although they are sometimes typecast as other “ethnics.” Ralph Nader, consummate American crusader and presidential candidate, is also of Arab descent.
Yet divisions in the contemporary Middle East continually reinforce American prejudices. The Arab—Israeli war of 1967 became a watershed for Arab American identity, and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, among others, emerged in this era.
Nonetheless, in the 1990s, mass media caricatured Arabs as greedy merchants and oppressed, but sensual females in Disney and Star Wars, while denigrating Arab cultural and political claims as extremist in contrast with the moral values of Israeli lobbying.
Universities often treat Arabic as a dead language despite 246 million speakers worldwide and 355,000 speakers in the US—more than Hindi, Russian or Yiddish. Thus, Arab Americans are resisted within the melting-pot despite strong claims of history and participation.
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Although among the earliest immigrants from Asia, Japanese Americans have not experienced significant growth since 1960s immigration reforms. Instead, the Japanese American experience is divided between an older citizenry (shaped by the Second World War persecution) and modern sojourners who intend to return to Japan at some point in their lives. It is especially striking that the rhythm of these connections is shaped as much by Japanese outward orientations as by American policy.
The first Japanese came as laborers around the 1880s, escaping poor areas of Japan for Hawai’i and the West Coast. By the 1920s–30s, many became small-business owners and agriculturalists, and were able, unlike the Chinese, to import their families. Yet, with the rise of Japanese militarism and Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment grew. One hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans on the West Coast (40 percent of the total population) had property confiscated and were interned in remote camps scattered around the country. Those in Hawai’i and the East were not interned, nor were citizens of German or Italian descent. After the war, when the camps closed, many returned to the West Coast, although they had lost homes, businesses and communities. Nonetheless, some Japanese Second World War veterans, mostly American-born, were able to reap the benefits of the GI Bill, and eventually entered the professional class. Daniel Inouye, the first senator of Japanese descent (from Hawai’i), was a decorated veteran. For others, the struggle for compensation and even recognition and apology for a racist wrong lasted for decades before redress bills were passed and signed in 1988. Many Japanese Americans have examined this experience in literature and film, forcing mainstream America to look at their history Steven Okazaki won an Academy Award for Day of Waiting in 1991. Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride (1994), which focuses on the travails of earlier immigrants, gained studio funding and national distribution.
According to Bill Ong Hing (see Asian Americans), three factors have made America less attractive to Japanese immigrants since the Second World War. First, unlike the Chinese who were initially barred from bringing in families and then post–1965 established chain migrations, few Japanese people need to reunite with relations abroad.
Second, the strong economy and low birth rate in Japan (especially since the postwar recovery) present no incentive to leave Japan. Third, the internment proved to the Japanese that Americans would not welcome them in times of crisis, a negativity fanned by anti-Japanese sentiments whipped up around manufacturing and trade issues since the 1970s. Today many Japanese, however, enter the US not as immigrants, but as tourists and sojourners, including students, professionals and business people. Many stay in the US for a few years, orienting community reproduction towards their homeland through schools, grocery stores, bookstores and Japanese cable stations like those found in metropolitan New York City, Boutiques and department stores like Takashimaya also define a cutting-edge urban style.
Meanwhile, today’s third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans generally lack discernible residential patterns or linguistic differences. Japan towns in San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA are now commercial centers and tourist attractions, rather than residential ethnic enclaves.
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Although art museums and children’s museums constitute well-known genres of investigation and display, Americans have created many other centers that attract local visitors and tourists. Among the most important categories are historical museums and houses, science and natural history museums, ethnic museums, “professional” or thematic museums and more offbeat idiosyncrasies celebrated in private and commercial establishments.
Historical museums, like historical preservation, cherish and explain the past. Many historic homes refer to past elites as owners of history—Manhattan’s Tenement Museum, chronicling the struggles of European immigrants, is a rare exception. Nonetheless, social consciousness since the Civil Rights era has forced more explanation and discussion of slaves and servants who made life in the “big house” possible. Museums of cities, counties and states, as well as the Smithsonian as a national museum, have also sponsored diverse exhibits on the racial, gender, class and ethnic intersections of American history.
Historical museums may also include houses far out in the country—typical of many Southern plantation homes—or even entire rural villages which recreate snapshots of the past as open-air and working museums. Shaker settlements in Hancock, Massachusetts, and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, for example, represent modern attempts to preserve past utopian communities, while colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, was restored with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Natural history museums like Chicago, IL’s Field Museum or New York City, NY’s venerable American Museum of Natural History were popular attractions in nineteenthcentury cities. These, like the Smithsonian and university museums, have been centers for investigations of animals, plants and minerals. Some also have developed extensive collections for anthropological and archaeological investigation, especially in Native American research. The last was a point of controversy in the 1990s as American Indians demanded the return and reburial of bones and sacred artifacts.
Other science museums look forward to space, sometimes in association with planetariums or multimedia exhibits. Here, popular culture and science coincide—an exhibit on Star Wars was a major draw for the Smithsonian, while animated dinosaurs have drawn children into other science centers.
Ethnic museums may develop from collections of local ethnic societies or may represent revindications of past denials—African American historical museums, for example, have grown nationwide since the 1960s, while the Bicentennial spurred other ethnic projects. Churches, temples and seminaries may also sponsor religious/ethnic museums. These museums are as diverse as New York’s Museo del Barrio or Chinese Historical Museum, or the Swedish American museum in Philadelphia, PA. Some are highly involved in their neighborhoods, while others promote a sense of elite or historical culture. Sometimes, these museums have uneasy relations with collections built by American buyers in foreign homelands that present more orientalist visions of the “other.” These museums present connections between American citizens and larger historical stories, powerfully embodied in Washington’s Holocaust Museum.
Specialized museums also portray professions or interests—firemen, police, military museums, the elaborate Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan or the new Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. Naval museums, incorporating historic ships from the nineteenth century through the Second World War, have also become popular as America distances itself from the experience of war.
Museums can also shade over into more personal or idiosyncratic memorials.
Museums celebrating Liberace (Las Vegas), Elvis Presley (Memphis) or cowboy Roy Rogers turn celebrities into history; other museums celebrate, for example, dolls, plastic, pretzels and locks. While such diversity speaks to individual tastes and freedom, some are little more than roadside attractions.
Many of these museums, despite their collections, face constant struggles for survival, whether in endowment, fundraising, competition for government support or competition for members and visitors. This has led to increasing commercialization in both showbiz exhibits and museum shops that offer goods with high status value. At the same time, museums must be careful of whom they offend. As heirs and guardians of American culture, museums are also caught in its debates as they shape its future.
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Although founded in the US as a successor to the League of Nations (which the US had not joined) and headquartered beside New York City, NY’s East River, the UN has often faced problems and divisions within the US. Conservatives like the John Birch Society and others on the Right have rejected any implications of global sovereignty while interventionist presidents have chafed under its restrictions and censure on military actions or debates over China and the Middle East. The US has also become a notable delinquent in dues, representing both rejection and criticism of the UN.
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Although French critics coined the epithet “black film,” film noir represents a unique, indigenous American genre. Emerging after the Second World War, noir’s images and plots swirled with moral ambiguity skewed destinies and fractured relationships: inverting the American dream. Urban rather than suburban, sensual rather than domestic, driven by fate rather than any bright future, they spoke of postwar changes, nuclear threats and McCarthyite paranoia.
While underworld films had appeared in the 1930s, noir really erupted in the 1940s, drawing initially on hard-bitten mystery writers like Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain (screenplay and original novel for Double Indemnity, 1944). Noir was especially identified with RKO, although other companies like Paramount (Double Indemnity) and United Artists (D.O.A., 1949) produced classic examples. As Senator McCarthy evoked the Red specter abroad and at home, production swelled in the 1950s, surviving the dismantling of the studio system.
Production diminished rapidly with changing domestic and foreign concerns of the 1960s: Manchurian Candidate (1962) was withdrawn from circulation because of the dark shades it cast on the Kennedy assassination. Noir also lost to color and new marketing techniques as movies competed with the sunnier worlds of television.
The characteristic visual style of film noir relied on high contrasts in black and white, using night and shadows as primary elements. Camera angles were also less “neutral” than in Hollywood cinema: directing and yet disorienting the viewer. Frames were shattered by intervening objects, and characters were seen only in harsh light from the side or in shadows. Plots, driven by fate rather than logic, were morality plays rather than cogent narratives.
Film noir was also highly urban, underscoring the economic and moral tensions of the postwar city Warehouses, waterfronts, nightclubs and dangerous streets set the stage, although directors also used monumental architecture like train stations, skyscrapers and bridges. New York City, NY, Chicago, IL, and Los Angeles, CA became key noir cities, while “sunny sites” like amusement parks (Strangers on a Train, 1951) or California beaches took on destructive meanings (Kïss Me Deadly, 1955).
Women evidenced new power in film noir. While often duplicitous or even villainous, they moved the action along at the expense of men who were lost, confused or ignorant (Barbara Stanwyck versus Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity). The femme fatale’s slinky costumes, posture and inevitable cigarette identified her as openly sexual—the antithesis of the bright, cheerful suburban housewife. Men, by contrast, were baggysuited detectives, reporters, lawyers, insurance agents or policemen—trapped and destroyed rather than liberated.
Although film noir is identified with B-movies, Orson Welles produced one of the last great noir films in Touch of Evil (1958), while Hitchcock shared elements of noir style.
Moreover, noir continues to fascinate audiences and film-makers as diverse as Godard, John Woo and Wim Wenders. Both the style and the moral ambiguity of noir are used in later American movies like Chinatown (1974), Blade Runner (1982) and LA. Confidential (1997).
Industry:Culture
