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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Founded in 1718 near the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans long has been a major Southern economic center with a unique cultural heritage. French and Spanish colonizers, alongside African American slave and free populations, created a distinctive Creole legacy, which survives in the architecture of the French Quarter (Vieux Carré), pervasive Roman Catholicism, Mardi Gras—America’s only established carnival—and renowned foodways based on rice, seafood and spices. Additional cultural influences have come from Cajuns and immigrants from Ireland, Italy Germany and the Bible belt.
New Orleans is not merely an artifact of the past, however it may be read as such by millions of tourists each year. Today the city of 464,840 (metropolitan area, 1.3 million) remains a vital economic center. Its many cultural and educational centers include Tulane and the black Catholic Xavier University Professional sports teams include the Saints (football) and Jazz (basketball), while black New Orleans is especially famous for both blues and Dixieland jazz.
The city’s personalities have evoked vivid fictional and cinematic portrayals from Jezebel (1939) to The Big Easy (1986). Many of these narratives deal with race and class relations, which improved slowly in the late twentieth century Beyond waterfront development and charming residential districts, in fact, crime, poverty racism and corruption have been consistent urban issues, influencing more recent debates over casino gambling and urban renewal. Today, New Orleans thus faces the continual challenges of fostering citizenship and maintaining authenticity, while selling itself as a major global destination.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1775, the US navy has played a significant role in US foreign policy during both war and peacetime. The mission of the USN is to maintain, train and equip combatready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the scas. The USN employs over 360,000 active duty personnel and almost 200,000 reservists. These officers and enlisted personnel are stationed at bases throughout the US and the world, while operating over 300 ships and 4,000 aircraft.
The USN, like the army and air force, is controlled by the president through the Department of Defense, to whom the Secretary of the Navy reports. These appointed civilian positions oversee the military career positions of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps. During times of war, the US Coast Guard may also fall under the command of the Secretary of the Navy if directed to do so.
Individuals working in the navy are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
This body of law replaces the Constitution as the governing authority of conduct, crimes and punishment. This is one of the more significant areas that differentiates an individual “in the military” versus a “civilian.” In addition to full-time work with benefits that include medical coverage and retirement provisions, many enter the navy for educational opportunities. The USN offers many programs that provide on-the-job skill training and collegelevel classes. The US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs for active-duty personnel.
People also join for opportunities for travel, the chance to fill the call of patriotic duty and the rewards of belonging to part of an extended tradition. It is not uncommon to find families that have had several generations that have either served or completed careers in this branch of the armed forces.
The navy has figured prominently in mass-media representations of military both as patriotic propagandists and in lighter pieces emphasizing travel and port activities. In addition to innumerable war films, serious modern naval works of stage and screen include The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Mr Roberts (1955).
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1778 at the falls of the Ohio River, Louisville (population 255, 511; metro 999,267) blends northern industrial urbanism and southern culture. A transport center, it also has produced cigarettes, bourbon, heavy appliances and automobiles. It is home to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs racetrack on the first Saturday in May the University of Louisville and broad-based local traditions in basketball, and Actor’s Thea-ter’s regional festival of New American plays. Rapidly growing Lexington (population 249, 139), 100 miles away is a center for Bluegrass horse farms and the University of Kentucky.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1790 as the Revenue Marine with the primary mission of protecting the United States from smugglers. The USCG acquired its current name in 1915 when the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life Saving Service merged into a single organization.
The smallest of the armed services, it is controlled by the Department of Transportation during peacetime and by the Department of Defense during wartime. Individuals who join the USCG are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and receive the same pay as members of the other armed services. Its primary missions include maritime search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, maintenance of aids to navigation, icebreaking, environmental protection, port security and military readiness. The USCG employs 38,000 active duty personnel and almost 43,000 reserve and auxiliary personnel.
These “Coasties” (as members of the USCG are often called) operate over 1,000 vessels and over 200 aircraft.
People volunteer to join the Coast Guard for many reasons. In addition to the work, benefits, training and educational opportunities, many people feel that a job in the USCG offers the chance to work along the coast and an opportunity to protect the environment.
On a typical day the Coast Guard will seize illegal drugs, rescue people offshore and investigate marine accidents. All of this activity contributes to an atypical career that many Coasties enjoy throughout their work life.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1846 and named for British scientist James Smithson, who had donated $508,318 to increase and diffuse knowledge in America. The largest museum complex in the world, most of its buildings cluster around the Washington mall. The Smithsonian includes sixteen museums in New York and the District of Columbia, as well as four field stations; the National Art Gallery is affiliated, with a separate board. Its collections encompass American art, space, natural history American history Asian art, African art, science and technology sculpture and associated themes of popular culture. The Smithsonian runs an African American history museum in Anacostia (Washington), the National Zoo and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York. The newest hall, to open in 2000, will be devoted to Native Americans, incorporating New York’s Museum of the American Indian.
All these museums are free to the public. The Smithsonian assembles important travelling exhibits as well, since less than 1 percent of the total collection can actually be exhibited at any time. It also has extensive educational outreach facilities. The Institution also constitutes an important center for advanced research, scholarship and publication through both its press and Smithsonian magazine. An independent agency its board includes the vice-president, chief justice of the Supreme Court, Congress members and citizens.
The Smithsonian, as America’s museum, often challenges the boundaries of what constitutes history and how it should be presented. It has added television memorabilia alongside the gowns of the First Ladies and taken American diversity into the mall in its Folklife Festivals. It was also caught in a bitter controversy in the late 1990s over how to present the reasoning behind and impacts of atomic devastation in Japan—the “Enola Gay” controversy—which remind us how complex the past can be for a contested present.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1885 by railroad magnate and political leader Leland Stanford and his wife in memory of their son, Leland Jr., who died as a teenager. Located 35 miles south of San Francisco, CA, at the northern tip of “Silicon Valley,” whose hitech business and research facilities the University spawned. Stanford emerged after the Second World War as one of America’s premier institutions. Its undergraduate and graduate schools consistently rank within the top five and it boasts numerous Nobel Prize winners on its faculty. Students and alumni have included President Herbert Hoover, Olympic gold medalist Summer Sanders, Astronaut Sally Ride, computer magnates William Hewlett and David Packard, Supreme Court justices William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor and Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1906, the National Collegiate Athletic Association spent its first years as a weak organization in the shadow of the American Athletics Union (AAU), which controlled most of amateur athletics and dominated the American Olympic Committee.
By the 1950s, however, this changed; college athletics became increasingly commercial and colleges and universities turned to the NCAA both to secure revenues from television and to control the labor market (to stop bidding wars between colleges for players and to keep students in line). As in other areas of American sport, college sports became centrally administered, the main intention being the pursuit of profit for the owners (the colleges) largely at the expense of the students. While the NCAA has managed to keep up the rhetoric of serving the interests of the “student athlete,” it is difficult to see how this has happened over the years, and the recent initiative of star players making their way to the majors without pursuing a college degree suggests that many of them agree.
Prior to the Second World War, colleges had allowed the NCAA to supervise tournaments, but the policing of the sports was left to themselves. These self-imposed restraints were found to be inadequate, so in 1940 a new constitution was accepted allowing for the expulsion of colleges by a two-thirds vote of member schools. The NCAA did not use this new power, however, at a time when the pressure to field winning teams was becoming intense and when violations of NCAA rules were common. A “sanity code” was adopted in 1948 permitting allocation of jobs and scholarships to athletes, but these were based solely on financial need. This was found to be unworkable, however, and from 1952 full scholarships were based only on athletic ability.
In 1951 a college basketball scandal was unearthed, considered the biggest scandal ever in American sport. The New York District Attorney’s office accused thirty-three players from seven colleges of “point shaving”—keeping the margin of points between teams within a range called for by gamblers in return for cash payments. In 1953 the NCAA reported that Michigan State, the nation’s top college football team, operated a slush fund from which football players were paid handsomely These revelations increased the demand for a stronger NCAA, which would actually suspend or expel recalcitrant colleges.
Television further enhanced the NCAA’s authority. First, colleges needed the NCAA to negotiate with networks to ensure that television did not take away the large crowds commonly attending football games. Later, the colleges wanted the NCAA to negotiate lucrative financial packages with the networks, a process successfully capped in 1994 by CBS’ agreement to pay $1.745 billion to cover basketball’s Final Four until 2002.
Since the 1950s, the NCAA has enforced a detailed code of regulations written and voted on by members of colleges and universities. It has assisted members of schools in complying with these regulations, administered more than seventy annual championships for both men and women, produced collegiate rules of play for twelve sports and compiled and distributed statistics in football and basketball, as well as publishing a weekly newspaper. It has divided colleges into different divisions, setting rules for student athletes in each of those divisions, and, in quite intrusive ways, has governed all college-level sport.
In effect, the NCAA has governed over the establishment of farm systems for the major leagues, especially the NBA and NFL. Apprentice athletes bring millions of dollars to their colleges without receiving any payment beyond scholarships, instead playing for the opportunity to be selected as one of the yearly draft picks (achieved by only a small percentage). The Heisman Trophy winner, the best player in college football, is assured of being a first-round draft pick and of receiving a very handsome salary from the team that selects him; so are the best ten to fifteen basketball players. With stakes so high and the demands on the body so extreme in some college sports, as The Program (1993) showed, many student athletes engage in widespread use of steroids and accomplish little academically. With scholarships tied to sports eligibility these apprentices tend not to graduate from their colleges, and those who do not make the majors end up with little to show for their labor on behalf of their colleges.
In January 1983, the NCAA adopted Proposition 48 to counteract this problem, placing the blame for the failure of the student athlete on the athletes themselves and their lack of preparation for college rather than on the practices of college sports programs. The proposition required incoming student athletes attending a Division I school to have a minimum 2.0 high-school grade-point average in a core curriculum of eleven courses and a minimum score of 700 (later raised to 820 out of a possible 1,600) on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in order to compete as a freshman. In its first year in effect, 1986, the proposition prevented almost 700 incoming freshmen from participating in their respective sports.
This proposition has been widely criticized, especially by Georgetown coach, John Thompson, and former Celtics great Bill Russell, who believe that it cuts off opportunities to African Americans in particular. Harry Edwards has noted the racial bias of SATs, but he (supported early on by Arthur Ashe) has backed the proposition, seeing it as a first step to rectify a problem that has seen large numbers of black athletes fail in college. The fact that only 31 percent of African American male athletes admitted to college in 1977 had graduated six years later, and that at Memphis State University no black basketball player earned a degree between 1973 and 1985, required some response.
One of the responses of players who could not meet the new requirements was spending a year at a junior college before transferring to a Division I school. Increasingly though, potential athletes have recognized the limited benefits they will receive from attending colleges. This tendency came to a head in the controversial basketball draft of 1996. Of the fifty-eight men registered for the draft that year, thirty-six were underclassmen (not graduated from college). Allen Iverson decided to leave Georgetown after only two years, while Kobe Bryant and Jermaine O’Neal (the latter not meeting the Proposition 48 minimum requirements) opted to skip college altogether. A few players had followed this path before (Moses Malone, Daryl Dawkins and Shawn Kemp being the most successful), but players were generally discouraged from taking this route into the NBA, many commentators and officials arguing that they needed more maturity (though the threat to the quality of the NCAA basketball product is also a factor). The success of Iverson at the Philadelphia 76’ers and Bryant at the LA Lakers represents a considerable threat to the long-term viability of the NCAA farm system.
Industry:Culture
Founded in 1972, at a time when “the second wave” of feminism was hitting its stride in America, this monthly magazine became the first nationally distributed commercial feminist publication. At the height of its popularity in the late 1970s, Ms. had a guaranteed circulation of 500,000. It was founded by feminist activist and writer Gloria Steinem and Patricia Carbine, editor-in-chief of McCall’s. Designed to fill a perceived gap in coverage by mainstream women’s magazines of feminist issues, it featured groundbreaking cover stories on domestic violence and sexual harassment, and eventually caused more traditional magazines to incorporate feminist material.
Industry:Culture
Founded in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1939, little-league baseball expanded rapidly into many suburban communities during the 1950s. With more than 5,000 leagues in the US and Canada, by 1960 baseball was easily the leading participant sport in the country Leagues are divided into different age groups up to the age of twelve (fifteen in the senior leagues); play is colored by baseball rituals including a little-league pledge. Its world series in Williamsport, televised on ABC’s Wide World of Sport, recently featured teams from Japan and Latin America.
While little-league has sponsored clinics in Latin American countries like the Dominican Republic (noted for producing major-league players), it has not sponsored them in the inner cities of the United States. Only 15 percent of major leaguers are now African American, whereas in basketball the figure is closer to 78 percent.
In the 1990s, little-league is losing out to soccer; it has not attracted the large numbers of girls engaging in sport since the 1970s.
Industry:Culture
Four students from North Carolina A&T College, a black college in Greensboro, asked to be served at the Woolworths’ lunch-counter in early February 1960. Remaining in place after they were refused service, they began the sit-in movement. News of the sit-ins spread rapidly and within two weeks Fisk students, led by James Lawson, had instituted their own sit-in at Nashville’s Kress store. The sit-ins were then copied in cities throughout the South, and soon sympathy sit-ins were being undertaken in Kress and Woolworths’ stores in northern cities Boston, Chicago, IL and New York, receiving the vocal support of northern black leaders Adam Clayton Powell. The fact that these stores belonged to national chains contributed to the success of the southern protests against segregation.
The sit-ins were first seen as an extension of the work of the SCLC, but, in fact, the Greensboro sitins were done independently of both the SCLC and the Congress of Racial Equality and never received the support of Martin Luther King, Jr. CORE, however, quickly attempted to lead the new sit-in movement, and the SCLC attempted to harness the energy of the student movement by establishing the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) later in the year.
The willingness of African Americans to withstand beatings and terror during the sitins opened the eyes of white southerners to the depth of black discontent. This discontent was not fully acknowledged by the SCLC with its stress on non-violence, and students became increasingly radicalized, shifting towards an emphasis on Black Power.
Industry:Culture
