wdh122253's clips tagged america

Commentary Online Article - Our Creed and Our Character

wdh122253 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:43:17 -0000

The same was true of the other arts as well. In novels like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), paintings like Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930, Whitney Museum of American Art), buildings like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (1935), plays like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), ballets like Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (1944, music by Aaron Copland), and films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), one encounters a brand of modernism that is at all times effortlessly and unostentatiously American.

Commentary Online Article - Our Creed and Our Character

wdh122253 — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 01:39:58 -0000

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Yet everyone who has reflected more than casually on the American national character has observed that religious belief is one of its most prominent features. We are, as G.K. Chesterton remarked of us in 1922, “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed . . . a nation with the soul of a church, protected by religious and not racial selection.” Today, at a time when Western Europe has become almost wholly secularized, 91 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 82 percent identify themselves as Christians, and 62 percent say they would not vote for a political candidate who was an atheist.

History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture - Chronicle.com

wdh122253 — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:22:11 -0000

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Who was Marcel Duchamp, and why did his painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" provoke so much outrage at the Armory Show in 1913? What does George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" have to do with both the Jewish and African-American experience in the United States? Why was Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises so influential for modern fiction and journalism? How did Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder, among many other émigré film directors, bring European cinematic styles and ideas to Hollywood? Why was Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire so revolutionary on stage and ultimately in the movies?

If you are an undergraduate or a graduate student taking a course in 20th-century American history, you are unlikely to find the answers to those questions. They won't even be posed. Nor will the names or the works of the artists, composers, novelists, filmmakers, and actors appear in the lectures or in the books assigned on the reading list. The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture — whether high culture or mainstream popular culture — as an essential area of study. The much-vaunted cultural turn in the humanities has run its course in one of the first disciplines it influenced.

The Real American Dream by Roger Simon on Creators.com - A Syndicate Of Talent

wdh122253 — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:56:49 -0000

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I have done some pretty awful things in the name of journalism. I have rushed up to interview mothers who have lost children, husbands who have lost wives, families shattered by a variety of emotional and physical calamities.

All reporters do these things. We wear a protective cloak of professional indifference while we write the names and ages and addresses in our notebooks. The deed is done quickly and quickly forgotten.

But I am going to have a hard time forgetting a long, cinder-block corridor in a small Wisconsin town that led to a bare, large room where eight girls sat on folding chairs facing a television set.

No accident had befallen these girls. No one had died or gone to jail or been shot. What had happened to them, instead, is just about the worst thing that can happen to a person in this country.

They had failed. They had wanted to be Miss America, and now they never would be.

Obese, gun-happy and violent; but that's half the story - Opinion - smh.com.au

wdh122253 — Sun, 27 May 2007 22:40:29 -0000

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The baggage we bring with us is considerable. American popular culture has long been globalised. For much of my time here, America felt like a giant movie set. And sometimes, it felt like being in the middle of a television sitcom. It is so easy and so tempting to describe and report on an America of gun madness, violence, junk-food fed obesity, scary religious fundamentalism, sickly sentimental patriotism and swaggeringly stupid politicians such as the President, George Bush.

Reality Show - washingtonpost.com

wdh122253 — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 21:18:36 -0000

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The central issue of this election is the war in Iraq, and the senator is the candidate most identified with making the case for war in the first place and for not leaving precipitously now. He did not shrink from the issue in his announcement, admitting the war "has not gone well" and referring to it in appropriately cautionary terms. "America should never undertake a war unless we are prepared to do everything necessary to succeed, unless we have a realistic and comprehensive plan for success, and unless all relevant agencies of government are committed to that success," he said. "We did not meet this responsibility initially. And we must never repeat that mistake again."