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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Privately negotiated written agreements, which are binding on succeeding property owners, imposing limitations on the use and ownership of real property. Pre-dating governmental zoning and land-use controls, they created privately enforceable rights involving such benign matters as offensive businesses and design aesthetics. Racially restrictive covenants, limiting property ownership to Caucasians, were widespread, including their use in the original Levittown. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) the Supreme Court held the enforcement of racially restrictive covenants by state courts unconstitutional. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 further prohibited racial discrimination in the sale, rental and advertisement of housing.
Industry:Culture
Professionals educated in graduate programs and licensed by state bar associations to prepare and plead cases in lower courts and appeals courts, as well as to provide legal counsel to clients. The adversarial nature of the American common-law system provides lawyers a broad and flexible role. This includes investigating facts, gathering evidence, trying cases, negotiating settlements, formulating business transactions, drafting legislation and urging courts to create new legal precedents. Competition, globalization and the impossibility of thoroughly mastering multiple areas of the law have lead to speeialization, and have rewarded the combining of legal specialists into ever-larger law firms. Despite being authorized to perform a broader range of functions than colleagues in most European systems, lawyers are professionally constrained by only a loose construct of ethical standards, enforced by a largely self-regulating system administered by state bar associations and judicial tribunals.
Lawyers saturate US society The California State Bar alone has close to 170,000 members. Although declining, the number of annual applications to law schools is 70,000. Roughly 40,000 enroll each year as first-year students at American Bar Association approved law schools. Many of these view a legal education as a tool, a method of critical thinking and problem-solving, and never practice law after becoming licensed attorneys.
Lawyers are despised, scorned and vilified for their adversarial role and simultaneously respected for their wealth, skill and power. More than 60 percent of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 which drafted the United States Constitution were lawyers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century lawyers account for 43 percent of the members of Congress and 16 percent of state legislators. Lawyers, such as Thurgood Marshall, were responsible for every watershed legal ruling of the Civil Rights movement. The legal profession’s best face is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union’s protection of civil liberties and the thousands of hours of pro bono service lawyers provide the poor.
Lawyer television shows and films maintain enduring popularity despite having moved in the past twenty years from largely favorable portrayals to current characterizations, especially in films, of lawyers as cut-throat, often incompetent, predators. These same television shows and films also fail to reflect the reality of the profession’s lack of racial and ethnic diversity. While the number of women attorneys at large firms has increased to 30 percent, only 7 percent of lawyers in the United States are from minority groups. Three percent are African Amer-icans, 2 percent are Latinos and less than 1 per-cent are Asian Americans or Native Americans, a problem that the decline in public affirmative-action admission programs will exacerbate.
The litigious nature of American society and the necessity of legal assistance in making many crucial life decisions assure the continued number and power of lawyers, despite the persistent public lack of confidence in the profession.
Industry:Culture
Proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that was designed to do away with all sexually discriminatory laws and practices. Approved by Congress in 1972, it was never ratified by the requisite number of states and went down to defeat on June 30, 1982 by a narrow margin. The text of the amendment passed by Congress in 1972 declared simply: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923 by a militant women’s suffrage group, and reintroduced without success each year thereafter through the 1960s.
As far back as the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, feminists had recognized that much of the discrimination women faced was supported and nurtured by the legal system itself. In the 1970s, led by the then-fledgling women’s advocacy group NOW, feminists revived the push for an equal rights amendment that would, in one fell swoop, eradicate these long-held discriminatory laws and practices.
Labor unions, however, continued to oppose the measure on the grounds that it would nullify state laws designed to protect the health and safety of women workers. Only after federal courts had voided many of these protective labor laws under Title VII did organized labor drop its opposition to the ERA and provide critical support to NOW’s efforts to urge its passage.
After an unprecedented nationwide feminist campaign, the ERA was finally approved by a landslide in both the House and Senate in 1972. Before it could be formally adopted as a constitutional amendment, however, the ERA had to clear one more hurdle: it had to be ratified by a minimum of thirty-eight of the fifty states. It was ratified by only thirtyfive, despite the efforts of a powerful pro-ERA coalition. ERA opponents, consisting primarily of conservative religious and political organizations, had managed to convince just enough people that the measure would unduly jeopardize traditional lifestyles.
In the end, the ERA’s defeat became largely symbolic. With the rise of feminism, many of the discriminatory laws the ERA was originally designed to eradicate had already been struck down, one by one, during the decade-long struggle for the amendment’s ratification.
Industry:Culture
Proposed by John Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1960. The idea of American volunteers scattering around the world to promote democracy and development came to epitomize the sometimes contradictory youthful commitment and liberal initiatives within a Cold-War framework. Organized by Sargent Shriver and Bill Moyers in 1961, the Peace Corps recruited 70,000 volunteers over the next decade. It sent them out after training rather weak in language and skills and strong on theory and physical and psychological training. Once abroad, these Americans found themselves less pioneers and saviors than uneasy participants in negotiations about the future that called into question their own values and identities—especially among minorities and women cast into unfamiliar settings. The Peace-Corps process became cooperative and open rather than developmental; in this way it may have helped shift American awareness of the non-European world towards a more complex global consciousness as Fritz Fischer argues in Making Them Like Us (1998). In later decades, the Peace Corps improved training and selection for useful skills, while operating on a smaller scale, especially under hostile Republican regimes. Its alumni found places in the Carter administration and in academic and policy circles.
Industry:Culture
Protests by NAACP, La Raza and other activists in 1999 highlighted the absence of minority characters on new network shows, leading NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS to scramble to retrofit, offering and forcing them into negotiations about ethnicity and casting as well as longer-term commitments to employment behind the camera. At the same time, other networks like UPN were accused of pandering to young African American demographics with irresponsible teen shows. The dearth of Asian Americans on any network beyond roles as newscasters or passing characters was hardly discussed.
Meanwhile, cable opportunities like BET and the growth and changes of Spanishlanguage stations like Telemundo and Univision complicate any simple conclusions about race and television even before one considers the limited minority presence in the upper echelons of the broadcast industries as producers, directors and writers. If television both reflects and shapes America, it is important to understand how it has dealt with—and continues to deal with—critical divides like race and ethnicity.
In the golden age of television and its aftermath, “whiteness” functioned as a norm against which some black racial stereotypes emerged in crossover shows from radio like the popular albeit racist Amos’n Andy or the roles given black women as maternal servants in shows like Beulah. The Nat Kïng Cole Show (1957) was the first African American show on prime-time network TV, but disappeared after one season. Asians took on such safe domestic roles in generations of cooks on Bonanza, Bachelor Father and Dynasty, while Hispanics added local color to westerns. There was hardly any presence of Native Americans outside westerns, or people of Arab and South Asian origin.
Julia (1968–71), which cast Diahann Caroll as an attractive, educated black professional single mother, seemed to be a breakthrough in fighting stereotypes, although some critics argued that the character and plots were so anodyne as to make race irrelevant. The lack of black men was also problematic, although the spy series I Spy (NBC, 1965–8) had brought Bill Cosby as Alexander Scott onto screen as a Rhode’s scholar and arch commentator on companion Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp).
In fact, the presence of African American stars seemed to grow thereafter. The Jeffersons (1975–85), whose upwardly mobile title characters spun off from Norman Lear’s All in the Family, provided comic yet edgy commentary on problems like intermarriage, class and exclusion in American society played out by African American characters with evident flaws. Good Times, a spin-off of another Lear series, played out even grittier issues in a working-class family in public housing. Capping off this golden age of minority television, in a sense, were such miniseries as Roots (1977, 1979). In 1982 Cosby began his decades of involvement with the Cosby Show and other productions, while Miami Vice (1984–9) confused categories of ethnicity and virtue.
At the same time, African Americans and others began to be integrated into the faces of television, including news, sports coverage and ensemble television—long-running hospital, crime and scifi dramas (Star Trek and its heirs) invariably had at least one African American star amid other minor minority characters. Critics have argued that the additions of minority characters only serve as tokens of diversity although at times of national convulsion like the Los Angeles riots, these became pivotal perspective characters.
Yet, if urban television implied local color, it was also clear that other shows had lengthy careers in segregated worlds—whether the sometimes leftist humor of Murphy Brown or the sophisticated urbanity of Frazier, where the whole cast is white. These were balanced by (almost) all-black shows that soon found a special home on UPN. The division, however, was one of audience as well as plot, as black and white viewers consistently chose different shows as their favorites—Seinfeld, for example, did not appeal to black audiences. When City of Angels brought the predominantly black innercity medical drama to prime-time network in 2000 it thus challenged not only network history, but consumption of media within a segregated society. Moreover, it asked whether the integrated model of dramas and soaps or the separate but equal presentations of UPN and the networks more accurately reflected the state and desires of race and ethnic relations in America at the end of the century.
Industry:Culture
Psychoactive drug derived from cannabis sativa that has become a symbol of freedom or decay depending on audience, regulators and use. Federal surveys of the 1990s noted that 69 million Americans over the age of twelve have smoked pot, including 10 million who had done so in the previous month. Nonetheless, 500,000 are also arrested annually as legislators, medical establishments and law enforcement crusade against the drug and its ramifications.
Established as a countercultural narcotic in the 1930s, marijuana also became a symbol of the vulnerability of (white) American youth in exploitation films such as Reefer Madness (1936), later seen as a camp classic. Here, marijuana was portrayed as the addictive first step on the road to dissolution, hard drugs and depravity This image was challenged by the 1960s, when pot became a more mainstream form of countercultural relaxation, from cultivation in large fields to small artesian plantings, distinguishing forms of selection and processing (sensimilla, hashish, hash oil) and colorfully named varieties like “Maui Wowie.” Paraphernalia for processing and smoking became accoutrements of alternative lifestyles, available in headshops alongside tie-dyed clothes and ethnic items. Hence, presidential candidate Bill Clinton could carefully identify himself with a generation by admitting that he had smoked—but not inhaled— pot in his college days.
Marijuana, nonetheless, became a special target of later wars against drug use, including propaganda about effects ranging from decreased brain function to risky sexual and school behavior to schizophrenia. This led to destruction of domestic supplies and prosecution/vilification of users. This new criminialization not only changed patterns of “acceptable” public use, but decreased supplies and raised costs, even while more addictive drugs remained accessible.
There remains a continuing lobby for legalization, including NORML (the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws). In the 1990s, these sometimes worked with those promoting marijuana for medical use (dealing with the effects of chemotherapy glaucoma, AIDS, etc.). A 1999 Gallup poll showed that 73 percent of Americans favor legalization of medical marijuana; some western states have exempted patients from prosecution. These ballot initiatives, however, have been challenged by federal policies and enforcement. Marijuana, then, remains a divisive issue for baby boomers despite a more tolerant and experimental past.
Industry:Culture
Public affairs broadcast cable channel specializing in live and total broadcasts of major events and debates.
Industry:Culture
Public education has been a primary institution for the creation of American citizenship since government-supported schools became widespread in the mid-nineteenth century.
Despite concerns about content and efficacy it has coalesced as a comprehensive network with interlocking local, state and federal control. It also represents a major commitment in tax support of both the people and multiple governments. Private schools at the primary and secondary levels, by contrast, offer choices, which may involve exclusivity based on religion, race, gender or class. In the early twenty-first century choices also reflect concerns with public schools, their educational methods and contents, or violence and social issues that lead parents to seek alternatives.
The Roman Catholic parochial school system is the largest private system nationwide (religious orders also run private schools). Jewish day schools, at least elementary are also widely available, while groups like the Amish have fought to maintain educational autonomy Episcopalians and Quakers also run longstanding private schools less exclusively denominational in tone. Religious private schools also include Christian academies that emerged with white flight. Many private schools, however, have no formal religious affiliation.
Private schools have also been associated with class divisions, especially with regard to elite “prep” schools. New England academies like Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (founded 1778), Phillips Exeter (founded 1781), Lawrenceville, Groton, Deerfield and ChoateRosemary Hall offer strong curricula and teachers, distinguished active alumni, historical buildings and campus landscapes, extensive facilities and welltrodden paths to the Ivy League, although few rival the $400 million endowments of Phillips Andover and Phillips Exeter. This entails selectivity in academic excellence and cost, since tuition may run from $15,000 to 120,000 annually before board (although schools provide financial aid). This model has been depicted in literature like Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville Stories, and figures in Hollywood portrayals of private schools, such as Dead Poet’s Society (1989).
Other metropolitan areas offer a competitive, varied hierarchy of selective private schools—competition for placement in New York City can start almost from birth—as well as variation in costs and financial aid. In general, private schools claim to offer a superior education in facilities, teachers and selection of students. Some also offer innovative programs, including Montessori formats, more libertarian “free schools,” foreign residential opportunities and seminar settings. Private schools may offer singlegender education, although many have become co-educational since the 1970s.
Debates over public and private schooling are often debates about finance, control and the nature of the public sphere. Some argue that the competition of private schools regulates and energizes public education. Here, choosing private schools criticizes the failures, moral and educational, of the public system. School vouchers, for example, that allow parents to take money from the public system to subsidize their choice of private education have been especially controversial. Proponents of public schools, meanwhile, characterize private schools as privileged and their supporters as opponents of the idea of a heterogeneous public educational space in which different races, classes and levels of ability meet. Regulations about contents, practices and standards for measuring student success remain areas where government and private schools intersect. These debates continue to rage in legislatures, school boards and mass media as well as the classroom.
Industry:Culture
Public health is a set of techniques by which communities can uniquely complement individual efforts to maintain health. Although much of public health practice is carried out by local health departments at the municipal, county and state level, lately large employers, some managed-care groups (HMOs) and some civic organizations have begun to perform public-health functions. Historically public-health efforts were focused primarily on efforts to control contagious diseases. The basic operations still persist as governments maintain standards for environmental safety and sanitation. Regional health departments maintain diseasereporting systems to permit early control of communicable disease outbreaks. Part of communicable disease control has also involved subsidizing personal health services such as immunization, treatment and preventive counseling for potentially contagious community members who are uninsured or not inclined to overcome other social obstacles to care that remain despite insurance. Access to care remains a large problem for the American healthcare system. Many local health departments find that the traditional public health functions can be overwhelmed by the demand for personal health services.
The causes of death and disease have changed in the last hundred years. In 1895 the principal causes of death were tuberculosis and pneumonia. In 1995 the primary causes of death were heart disease, stroke and cancer, while injuries remain the leading cause of premature death. Perhaps more fundamentally the cultural construction of disease has shifted as epidemiological investigations repeatedly implicate personal and social behaviors as modifiable risk factors for disease. The frontier of public health threats now includes violence, unintentional injury substance use, tobacco, unsafe sex, dietary fat and community disempowerment. These factors move the locus of action away from the biomedical concerns of clinical medicine, and require interventional skills quite unlike those historically stressed by medical schools. The medical community drifts piecemeal towards developing behavioral skills that do not resemble the technical aspects of clinical intervention in which it excels. Conflict between medical culture and public-health culture has been slow to resolve.
Because public-health techniques now include social marketing, media techniques and information campaigns, employers and insurers with a natural interest in the health of their populations have begun to engage in public-health practice. Public and private sectors will continue to show a greater confluence of interest and practice in public health.
A natural dilemma arises for public health as it addresses behavioral determinants of disease. There is conflict between eliminating risky behavior (abstinence) and making risky behavior safer (protection). Public-health workers tend to think in practical terms and often consider both goals compatible means to the end of disease reduction. To its chagrin, the public-health community has frequently found the puritan strains of American culture vigorous enough to squelch or temper the battle cry, “Don’t indulge! But…if you do, do it safely.”
Industry:Culture
Public Radio International, founded in 1983 as American Public Radio, acquires, develops, funds and distributes programming from a variety of station-based, independent and international producers. It was founded to provide more diversity in programming sources. Together with NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it began AMERICA ONE, a 24-hour English language audio channel headquartered in Munich.
PRI features programming in four general areas: news and information; comedy and variety; classical music and contemporary music. Programming includes St. Paul Sunday Morning, A Prairie Home Companion, Whad’Ya Know? and The World, a collaborative 1-hour weekday with the BBC.
Industry:Culture
