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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Growing from the 1950s Stanford University Industrial Park, a university project to facilitate corporate and academic ties in research and development, “Silicon” Valley became the model for high-tech entrepreneurship and lifestyle in computers and related industries. This aura of constantly shifting boundaries of information and processing, instant billionaires and soaring realestate prices belied problems. These include the need for unskilled and low-paid workers in computer assembly (often third-world women), the lack of public culture and service centers and the fragility of technology rapidly exported to offshore assembly areas. Nonetheless, this technosuburb has provided both a model and a nickname for other research/production complexes like Massachusett’s Route 128 and New York’s Silicon Alley (as well as global avatars).
Industry:Culture
Haitians represent the largest nationality group among black Caribbean immigrants, numbering approximately 500,000 in the United States, 70,000 in the Greater Miami area alone. The first group of Haitians to arrive by boat on South Florida shores landed at Pompano Beach on December 12, 1965. These political refugees and the other early immigrants seeking political asylum in the United States generally came from the upperclass families who had opposed the Duvalier regime in Haiti. They settled in a section of downtown Miami, FL which has come to be known as “Little Haiti.” As was the case for anti-Castro Cubans, these first immigrants were followed by a wave of poorer immigrants, creating significant class tensions within the immigrant community.
American support for the Duvaliers, and for the democratic governments that followed it, has meant that Haitians have not been considered “legitimate” political refugees. In contrast to Cubans, whose island nation Washington considers a communist-pariah state, Haitians have never been given preferential treatment by immigration laws. The resentment that Haitians feel about this has become evident υis-à-υis immigration laws that have allowed Cubans who make it to the US to stay in the country Haitian refugees tend to be semi-skilled, have some education and have lived in urban areas in Haiti. But Haiti is generally undeveloped compared to the United States, and so, in addition to language difficulties as French speakers, Haitian immigrants have sometimes had more obstacles to overcome than their Caribbean neighbors. They have also remained separate and distinct from African American communities, divided by cultural, religious and language differences. In the late 1980s, widespread assumptions that immigrants from Haiti were bringing the AIDS virus into the United States also led to ostracism. The New York City, NY case of Abner Louima, a security guard arrested and tortured by members of the NYPD, has become a rallying cry for Haitians wanting to confront the bigotry against them.
Predominantly Catholic, Haitians have tended to worship within the parish church where they reside. Frequently they hold services in Creole, separate from other Catholics, and adapt the liturgy to reflect styles of worship in Haiti. The growth of the Haitian community has also led to increasing interest in Voudou and African-based religions.
Industry:Culture
Headquartered in New York, the ACLU is the largest public-interest legal organization in the United States, with over 60 staff attorneys, 2,000 volunteer lawyers and 275,000 members. The ACLU was founded by Roger Baldwin in 1920 in the wake of America’s Red Scare, when the Supreme Court upheld the criminal convictions of prominent American leftists who expressed unpopular political views. It is dedicated to the preservation of individual rights through litigation, legislation and public education, and also fought the mistreatment of women, gays and lesbians, racial minorities, political dissidents and prisoners. The ACLU has opposed the death penalty, loyalty oaths for government employees, state restrictions on free expression and abortion, and government entanglement with religion. Despite its defense of extreme right groups as well, “card-carrying members of the ACLU” have become standard targets for conservative attacks.
Industry:Culture
Healthcare in America is organized around a medical triad comprised by: (1) patients; (2) providers; and (3) payers. Each of these elements and their system of relationships have evolved in a complex interaction of culture with a changing epidemiological environment. America is split over the roles and responsibility of the collective versus those of the individual. “We are all in this together” clashes with “He/she should have known better.” As Americans have built systems to cope with health adversity the European communitarian ideal clashes with the ideal of the frontier household fending for itself in all things.
Over the last century tobacco, alcohol and lack of exercise have taken the place of tuberculosis, measles and whooping cough as major health threats. In a society that often seeks to place blame, a biological shift in potential culpability has accentuated the schism between communitarian and individualistic responses to healthcare. As we search for an answer as to why Americans remain unable to reform the widely recognized failures in their health system, the interplay between the new epidemiology responsibility and the medical triad loom large.
The US healthcare system relies on private insurance companies serving large groups assembled by the workplace. When insurance firms must assemble individual applicants into groups for health insurance, the result is much more costly both administratively and actuarially. Workplace-based insurance offers predictable gaps in any effort to cover the whole population. Not everyone is employed and not everyone is employed in a firm large enough to access low premiums and stable rates. The most glaring exclusions from employment-based insurance have been the poor and the elderly. Medicaid (for the poor) and Medicare (for the elderly) were piecemeal solutions that have staved off wholesale abandonment of the market-based approach. The remaining uninsured are primarily employed in small firms, earning wages high enough to disqualify them from Medicaid, but low enough so that payment of the substantially higher premiums (roughly 25 percent of the earnings of a minimum-wage worker) is not an option. The uninsured continue to number 10–15 percent of the population.
Uninsured patients have great difficulty in obtaining regular healthcare from privatepractice doctors for chronic conditions. For acute care needs of the uninsured, hospitals (but not private-practice doctors) are required by law to offer services to all regardless of the ability to pay Uninsured patients still receive bills from hospitals that they simply have no way of paying. Most US hospitals have adjusted to an environment that requires writing off a certain amount of services as charity care.
Healthcare costs have been another primary source of dissatisfaction with the US healthcare system. Even controlled for an aging population, US healthcare costs rise faster than inflation. Although, at 14 percent of GNP, US healthcare costs are higher than those of any other nation, stable high levels of costs would not be as much of a problem for the economy as the destabilizing effects of rising costs relative to all other goods. For employees whose rising productivity merits them increases in compensation the problem comes home in the typical corporate letter that reads “Congratulations on your five percent raise in compensation; however, because the premium for your health insurance has risen by twenty percent, your take-home pay will only rise by one percent.” For governments committed to funding healthcare entitlements the problem is that tax revenue goes up only as fast as growth plus inflation, but healthcare costs rise faster.
Govern ments must either raise revenues or control healthcare costs.
There is now consensus among health economists that the ultimate cause of rising healthcare costs is the steadily increasing volume and intensity of services due to technology. America is littered with cost-control efforts that have succeeded in achieving one-time reductions in healthcare costs. But the rise in costs always resumes.
No obstacle impedes the introduction of new and costly technology to healthcare, provided the technology is safe. Although some technologies have the potential to lower costs, many do not. The quintessential high-cost technology remains organ transplantation, which can cost $500,000 per quality adjusted life year. Americans’ insistence on fighting death, disease and suffering at every turn frequently leaves no medical options spared as long as there is any hope of success. Health insurers have found themselves powerless in their recurrent efforts to restrain costly medical treatments recommended by doctors. Although some customers might agree to forego coverage for costly life-saving technologies in exchange for lower premiums, American society is reluctant to enforce such contracts. American courts have not yet been able to say to the disgruntled dying, “you chose to spend your money on something other than extensive medical protection, now that you need expensive procedures you must bear the consequences.” By its nature, reform threatens those whose livelihood depends on the status quo. To explain the perpetual failure of healthcare reform in the US it is necessary to invoke more than the power of opponents to reform. America’s failure to provide better access to care stems from the inability of the working uninsured to attract society’s consensus that their hardship merits a social solution. For now, manifest opinion appears to be to withhold the safety net from the uninsured until there is proof that neither their health woes nor their lack of insurance can be solved through personal responsibility For rising healthcare costs, stabilization will eventually come. One cannot live by healthcare spending alone.
The point at which stability comes will speak volumes about just how much money Americans are willing to part with in order to maintain the battle against the onslaughts of nature.
Industry:Culture
High-school sports command enormous attention in American society In many cases, school athletics dictate the morale of an entire community. With the public’s mounting distrust of major professional and college sports, high schools are, to many the last bastion of the unadulterated competitive spirit.
Several probing cultural studies, nonetheless, illuminate the world of high-school athletics. The documentary Hoop Dreams (1994) follows two promising young basketball players and their NBA aspirations. For some inner-city African American males, basketball seems to represent the road out of poverty But, as the film poignantly illustrates, those who are talented and lucky enough to receive scholarships to college are few. The number able to make a living playing the sport they love is minuscule.
H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Nïght Lights (1991), by contrast, chronicles the 1988 football season of the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas, where every Friday night community members cheer the team with religious zeal. Bissinger’s study shows how the outcome of each game has an impact seemingly disproportionate to its importance: coaches face “For Sale” signs placed on their lawns following a loss against a rival. This devotion was only exacerbated, Bissinger suggests, by the 1980s collapse of the oil industry in Texas. A similar view pervades All the Right Moυes (1983), which spotlighted a fictional Pennsylvania high-school football program. Here, a heartbreaking loss to a rival also spawns unreasonable, disturbing reactions from fans, players and coaches.
Clearly enormous external pressure weighs on certain high-school athletes.
But not all high-school athletes receive this attention. Until recently the opposite was true for girls. This trend is slowly changing, due to legal requirements of Title IX at the college level and the popularity of college and professional leagues, including women’s soccer, vitalized by the 1998 World Cup. Other programs—gymnastics, martial arts, even wrestling—are eclipsed by the major sports—football, basketball and baseball.
Some alternatives are nonetheless associated with affluence. Golf and certain racquet sports have a long tradition of upper-class participation; such games require expensive equipment and/or unusual venues, and private (or prep) schools have more resources.
Nevertheless, some teams are also found at public schools. Lacrosse, squash and crew (rowing) are associated with white upper-middle class institutions. Swimming has also emerged at schools with special facilities.
Regardless of class, students who participate in high-school athletics are often characterized as “jocks,” a largely negative term suggesting limited intelligence (in spite of presidential candidate Bill Bradley’s coining of “intellectual jock” to describe himself). The attention paid to the student athletes often makes them popular and may give them what some see as excessive power over the lives of others in the school. This, in turn, has led to resentment, painfully evident in Colorado’s Columbine High School shootings, where student killers targeted several athletic stars. For all its faults, though, highschool sport is one of America’s most cherished institutions, and participation in athletic programs continues to be encouraged by parents and administrators alike.
Industry:Culture
Hinduism first emerged in India as a complex constellation of religious systems. There is a long and checkered history of the spread of Hinduism outside India centuries before the emergence of the political nation as we know it today In 1893 Swami Vivekananda delivered a lecture about Hinduism at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, IL. In more modern times, the growth of the Indian diaspora around the world led to a simultaneous spread of Hinduism outside India, most visibly as a set of cultural practices.
In the new millenium, one can conceivably study most of the world’s major religions in any of the metropolitan centers of the United States. The number of Asian Indians, a majority of them Hindus, in the United States has grown steadily since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, and stands at about 1 million today Hindu immigrants and their religious institutions struggled against considerable racial prejudice and discrimination before they began to be accepted as an integral part of American society.
Outside its land of origin, Hinduism has undergone several transformations unique to the diasporic condition of its practitioners, both in terms of ritual practices as well as in the role it plays in fostering and reinforcing community solidarity. As Raymond Brady Williams suggests, emigration involves a “crisis of epistemology” that focuses people’s attention on their traditions or narrative in order to establish a “known world” (Williams 1988). One way in which Hindu immigrant groups in different parts of the world attempt to resolve this crisis is by building temples and maintaining indigenous social and cultural activities in the new society Hundreds of Hindu temples and religious centers now dot the American landscape, enriching its multicultural milieu.
Many Indian immigrants indicate that they are more religiously active in the United States than in India. As distinctive identity markers religions, in particular, are mobilized and re-energized in the process of negotiating their identities in the new cultural environment. Hinduism, which was not an organized religion until the late nineteenth century in India, was considered to be more a philosophy and a way of life. Practice of Hinduism did not require visiting temples on a regular basis; rather, worshipping at home shrines was more important. However, in the United States, Hinduism quickly assumed a formal structure as fairly affluent, professional Indian immigrants, concerned about the socialization of their American Indian children, started establishing temples. Hindu temples in the United States are not only places of worship, but also serve as broader cultural centers that function as surrogate extended families to the community Large Hindu temples like the ones in Pittsburgh, PA, Houston, TX and Chicago, IL are traditional in their architectural style and aim to replicate rituals in as “authentic” a manner as possible. As in its country of origin, Hinduism in the US takes various ethnic and sectarian forms, displaying enormous diversity in its iconographic representations and ritual practices. Apart from temples, there are quasi-religious groups that congregate to propagate the teachings of various gurus and religious leaders. Newsletters, brochures and other ethnic mass media, along with rapidly proliferating web-sites on the Internet, aid in promoting horizontal communication among the believers.
While religion, in general, has helped community solidarity in a positive way, since the early 1980s Hinduism in the diaspora, as in the home country has become increasingly politicized. The World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) has established branches all over the world and supports religious nationalist forces in India. They hold summer camps in various parts of the US to socialize second-generation American Indians from a very young age, and the Hindu Students’ Councils attempt to further that process on college campuses. Many progressive Indians in the diaspora have organized themselves to challenge this pernicious process to destroy the secular ethos of the modern Indian nation. The struggle between these forces within the diasporic community represents an intense contestation over issues of identity.
Industry:Culture
Historically black colleges and universities number over one hundred institutions of higher learning. With a few exceptions, such as the Institute of Colored Youth, which became Pennsylvania’s Cheyney State University these institutions were established following the Civil War. Some, like the Hampton Institute of Virginia, were founded by missionary associations, while many were established by black denominations like the AME church to provide education for members and to train clergy.
The independent black educational institute became nationally renowned with the rise to prominence of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee in Alabama. But the growth of the NAACP brought a challenge to the notion of racially segregated education, and support for such institutions began to wane significantly in the 1920s. Campus strikes and protests during that decade over the demands for increased black faculty placed continued pressure on college administrations and presaged the coming black militancy that would flower in the 1950s on many campuses around the South.
During the early years of the Civil Rights movement, students at black colleges like Fisk in Nashville and North Carolina A&T in Raleigh developed lunch-counter sit-ins in five and dimes, and became key participants in freedom rides and registration campaigns of Freedom Summer (see Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi, 1968).
The radicalism/alienation of many of the students, out of step with conservative and elitist administrations, was captured in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).
The NAACP’s achievement in persuading the Supreme Court to make its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision had a significant impact on black colleges. Integration resulted in the loss of many of the best black students and athletes to the leading white colleges and universities. Lincoln University which had trained many prominent black lawyers and had a celebrated football program, now trained fewer attorneys and was forced to close down football in the early 1960s.
In the 1980s a financial revival began to occur at many of the colleges. Members of the black middle class felt that white-dominated institutions discriminated against them and so began to encourage their children to consider black colleges. This was matched by increased contributions to the National Negro College Fund (with its successful advertising slogan, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste”), placing the institutions on a more secure footing. Connected to this change was the growing public image of the colleges fostered by the success of Bill Cosby and the Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92). The Huxtables sent their eldest daughter to Princeton, but their second chose Hillman (loosely modeled on Spellman) and another went to Lincoln; Hillman became the setting for the spin-off A Different World (NBC, 1987–93). Cosby also supported these institutions: in 1986 he donated $1.3 million to Fisk and later gave the same amount to Central State, Howard, Florida A&M and Shaw. In 1988 he gave $1.5 million each to Meharry Medical College and Bethune Cookman College. His donation to Atlanta’s Spellman, in 1989, was of a different order, amounting to $20 million. While such largesse has fostered the continued viability of black colleges, they continue to face financial difficulties and, owing to their perceived inferior status, problems retaining faculty and attracting students.
Industry:Culture
History permeates contemporary Boston. While active as a state capital and financial center, the city’s institutions, ethos and cultural diversity are all shaped by its colonial heritage and later cultural roles which encourage contemporary tourism, as well as shaping local landscapes, politics and divisions within a metropolitan area of 5 million inhabitants in New Hampshire and Eastern Massachusetts.
Founded in the 1630s by English Puritan settlers at the intersection of the Charles River and the Atlantic Ocean, Boston was the main settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Boston was a seat of revolutionary activity during the late eighteenth century and is still closely associated with early American patriots Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, as well as the “Boston Tea Party” tax revolt of 1773. During the nineteenth century Boston was considered “the Hub of the Universe” because of its geographic importance in terms of transportation, economics and culture. The nineteenth century also saw significant geographic expansions with the creation of bourgeois neighborhoods such as the Back Bay and the South End. Immigration from Italy and Ireland also helped create an ethnic blue-collar neighborhood culture, which defines such areas as the North End, South Boston and nearby Somerville and Charlestown to this day Other cultural influences include African Americans (especially in Roxbury and the South End), Armenians (in Watertown), Portuguese and more recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Boston is still widely associated with white racism over such issues as busing and school integration. Loyalty towards the area’s sports franchises (Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox, Patriots) has also defined the character of the city. Boston’s ethnic neighborhood culture, well known for its distinctive accent, has been represented in such films as Good Will Hunting (1997) and television series such as Cheers.
Architecturally the city is characterized by brick town houses in the older neighborhoods and the triple-decker type in the suburbs, although this was dramatically changed by urban renewal in the postwar era, including the creation of the Central Artery and the destruction of the West End in the 1950s, and the creation of a new Boston City Hall (designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles), completed in 1969. Recently gentrification has attracted many young professionals back into the city and Fanieul Hall is typical of urban festival marketplaces in historic locations.
Boston and its surrounding towns host over sixty colleges and universities, including Boston College, Boston University and Northeastern University Cambridge, across the Charles River, is the site of both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has long been considered a center of progressive politics and local nightlife. This large urban student population stimulated active underground music and art, producing such artists as Nan Goldin and rock bands as the Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.
Industry:Culture
Holidays embody multiple calendars, memories and agendas within contemporary American society. Many formal national holidays tend to reinforce shared civic and historic values, yet they also have become foci of protest, illustrated in the anti-Vietnam book and movie Born on the Fourth of July (1989). Other celebrations are divided by religion, ethnicity region and political meanings. Moreover, holidays vary in scope and seriousness. Thanksgiving produces national respite (and the heaviest travel of the year as families re-unite), while President’s Day (combining Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays) is generally marked only by department-store sales, school lessons and post office closings.
An annual cycle of patriotic festivities has emerged since the founding of the nation, celebrated on Independence Day (July 4), usually outdoors with picnics, political rallies and fireworks. Other holidays remember the war dead (Memorial Day, last Monday in May) and workers (Labor Day, first Monday of September). These also delineate the summer/vacation season, underscored by the 1971 movement of Independence Day and Memorial Day, among other holidays, to Monday to create three-day weekends.
Thanksgiving, chartered by stories of pilgrims and Indians celebrating their friendship and survival at Plymouth Rock with a meal of turkey squash and potatoes, was proclaimed a national holiday by George Washington in 1789. It was fixed on the fourth Thursday in November by Lincoln; Franklin Roosevelt moved it a week earlier to promote shopping. Here, diverse family traditions of food and fellowship blend with charity (meals at soup kitchens), commercial events (parades mark the beginning of holiday consumerism) and sports. While Thanksgiving evokes criticism by Native Americans, it remains the most widely celebrated expression of united national identity.
Other national public holidays include Columbus Day (October 12 or the second Monday in October), Veteran’s Day (November 11) and presidential birthdays. A holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (third Monday in January) was added to national and state calendars amid intense polemics in the 1980s.
Special national commemorations have included massive celebrations of the American Bicentennial in 1976, and similar anniversaries of wars and battles, sometimes with reenactments or political opportunities/speeches. The presidential inauguration celebrated on January 20 every four years has also taken on trappings of a national festival. In addition, whole months (Black History Month (January), Women’s History (February), etc.) and days for specific causes and celebrities are recognized at the national, state and local level.
New Year’s Eve, while not a patriotic holiday, inscribes the nation through shared media coverage of the crystal ball dropping in New York’s Times Square, as well as urban festivals like First Night and many private parties. January 1 has become the day for parades and football bowl games deciding the rankings of the college season. African American communities have also celebrated January 1 as Emancipation Day.
In addition to civic celebreation, holidays of Christian origin are widely shared and secularized. Halloween (October 31) has been transformed from a feast of the dead to a night celebrating children and neighborhoods, as costumed kids roam from door to door asking for candy. In some inner cities it has also become an excuse for arson and mayhem. Christmas (December 25) once dominated rhythms of school and work, but judicial decisions since the 1960s have tended to dis-establish its presence in public forums. Nonetheless, its general coincidence with Hanukah and the more recently invented Kwanzaa, which celebrates African American values, defines a winter holiday season for public life and commercial intensification.
Easter by contrast remains a more Christian holiday (with separate dates for Western and Orthodox traditions), but also proves less obtrusive since Sunday normally functions as a weekly public and business holiday. The proximity of Easter and Passover also reaffirms the centrality of Judaism and Christianity to American civic religion.
Hence, other religious ceremonies tend to be regarded as minoritarian, although they may demand special recognition, such as barring exams during Ramadan. Meanwhile, these holidays can take on the form of other American holidays, stressing family reunions and parties (as in the adaptation of Dimwali among South Asians), gifts or invitations to public awareness.
Religious and national festivals, celebrated in parades, rituals, picnics and fairs, also transform and delineate ethnic enclaves. These include St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) for urban Irish, Columbus Day for Italians and the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12) and Cinco de Mayo (May 5) for Mexicans. These are also popular events for politicians seeking ethnic votes. Firecrackers, dragon dances and restaurant specials announce Chinese New Year for tourists as well as Chinese Americans; other Southeast Asian spring festivals have also blossomed in new immigrant communities.
Localized communities also celebrate special founders or events. Confederate Memorial days were widespread in the South, although their celebration has waned with integration and immigration from the North. Abolition Day (March 22) (Puerto Rico), Pioneer Day (July 24) (Utah) and Huey P. Long Day (August 30) (Louisiana) all teach and celebrate local events. Emergent communities make use of the same American model to publicize their identity—Gay Pride Week and its parades have become major celebrations in New York City and San Francisco, CA.
Life-cycle holidays tend to reflect individual rhythms—birthdays, quinceañeros (fifteenth-year parties, especially among Cuban Americans), weddings, retirements, etc.
However, commencement/graduation season, in the spring, produces rounds of parties among school-related networks.
Ultimately, many US holidays combine sentiment and commercialism. Mother’s Day (second Sunday in May since 1912), for example, has become a major celebration of “family values,” although long-distance telephone congestion, preprinted cards and flowers by wire underscore the spatial divisions of modern families. Father’s Day (second Sunday in June) was a later addition, followed by derivative recognitions like Grandparent’s Day (first Sunday after Labor Day) or Secretary’s Day (April 23). Paula Jones cited failure to recognize Secretary’s Day as evidence of her mistreatment by Bill Clinton.
Most major festivals share “American features,” including a stress on family/community food (both public and private) and opportunities for both internal rituals and outward celebration in parades, speeches and parties. Whether one-time events like the Bicentennial or annual celebrations with multiple interpretations like Thanksgiving, they define shared memories and points of challenge within the national cultural project.
Industry:Culture
Hollywood dynasty chronicling changing meanings of American life and celebrity.
Henry Fonda (1905–82) embodied the speech and values of middle America in dramatic and comic roles on screen and stage, from Young Mr Lincoln (1939) and Grapes of Wrath (1940) through the wartime reflections of Mr Roberts (1955) to the aging love of On Golden Pond (1981), for which he won an Oscar. Henry’s daughter, Jane (1937–), underwent more volatile transformations—from the sexual protégé of husband Roger Vadim in Barbarella (1968) to an antiwar activist, married to Tom Hayden, to a star/producer of exercise videos in the 1980s, and finally to the wife of media titan Ted Turner. Her brother Peter (1939–) became identified with the hippie rebellion of Easy Rider (1969), which he produced and starred in, only regaining stardom in the 1990s.
Peter’s daughter, Bridget (1964–), has established herself as a forceful female lead actor.
Industry:Culture
