- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Intended to offer a greater range of students access to various educational options, financial aid to schools and students comes in several forms. Private schools are maintained primarily by high tuition rates, but many private schools have endowments which allow them to offer partial or complete financial support to some of their students.
Public school education from kindergarten through 12th grade is free to students, and funding sources include revenues generated from local property taxes, allocations from the state based on levels of poverty, and monies from the federal government, usually in the form of grants for special needs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 included titles aimed at enhancing educational opportunities for “underprivileged” children, including Title I, which provides funds for the improvement of educational programs for students identified as educationally “at risk.” While K-12 public education is free, postsecondary education is not, and there is a range of financial aid possibilities available to students wishing to attend both public and private institutions beyond the high-school level. Three major financial aid sources are college scholarship money, drawn from endowments; grants or aid, which are a variation of loans with low to no interest; and work-study money from the Department of Labor, including Pell grants and Stafford loans. Application for aid is made through the colleges, each of which receives a particular allocation of loan money and colleges must adhere to various guidelines by which federal money is allocated and recipients selected.
Industry:Culture
International celebrations hosted by American cities (and American participation abroad) has highlighted the growing strength of the nation and significant visions for the future.
Chicago, IL’s World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) shifted American urbanism towards the planned City Beautiful, while the 1939 New York World’s Fair (controlled by Robert Moses) foreshadowed technological shifts to follow the Second World War.
Later, while Seattle (1962) focused on science and the 1964–5 New York World’s Fair introduced exciting futuristic visions and Disney audio-animatronics, other fairs have been seen as economic and urbanistic failures (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1982; New Orleans, LA, 1984); enthusiasm shifted towards the Olympic media stage. American participation abroad has produced notable buildings but it, too, has lacked enthusiastic government and corporate support, especially in Brussels (1958) when exhibits treated America’s social problems. Subsequent exhibits abroad have stressed space and technology as well as innovative design like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome for Montreal (1968).
Industry:Culture
International television news organization that broadcasts news and features worldwide through local cable television companies, satellite providers and the Internet. Founded by businessperson Ted Turner and headquartered in Atlanta, GA, CNN began continuous broadcasts of news stories to cable television subscribers on June 1, 1980.
The network initially lost money and was dismissed as a farce by the three other American television networks. Live Gulf War coverage vaulted it into a more respected position, which was sustained by numerous local affiliates and advancements in satellite technology. Now owned by media conglomerate Time Warner, the network consists of various stations that broadcast on particular topics, such as sports and finance, to specific parts of the world. CNN currently has over 70 million subscribers in the United States alone.
Industry:Culture
Introduced onto the market by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in 1988, Prozac (Fluoxetine) is taken to combat depression experienced by as many as 17 million Americans. The first of many such antidepressants (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs), Prozac is now the brand name that is generally used to refer to current medical responses to chemically induced depression, though doctors often choose to prescribe Zoloft instead. Many doctors believe that depression may be caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin, which a daily capsule of fluoxetine can correct with few side-effects, though the drug’s safety has been brought into question recently. Often considered the wonder drug of the early 1990s, Prozac has received widespread attention, from medical practice to humor.
Industry:Culture
Invented in 1895 at the Holyoke, Massachusetts YMCA by William G Morgan, the expansion of volleyball traces global interests in the twentieth century. Taken up in the Philippines and Cuba when these were colonies, volleyball was played by soldiers on the western front after the United States joined the First World War. It expanded through out Asia and into Latin America, often through the YMCAs, between the wars; during the Second World War further expansion occurred from the South Pacific to Western Europe.
At the Tokyo games in 1964, volleyball was accepted as an Olympic sport, with the Soviet Union winning among the men and the Japanese winning among the women.
Since then Latin American teams like Brazil have grown in stature, while the end of the Cold War led to a decline in East European teams and a rise in American fortunes.
For many Americans, volleyball means the beach. This game is played informally at all resorts around the country but recently has become a major televised sport, with its base in California. In the early 1920s, courts were put up at Santa Monica, and volleyball quickly became a popular recreational sport, sometimes associated with European nudist camps. By the 1950s, tournaments were held regularly at five beaches in California, and the sport became linked to surfing and teenage culture. Since 1974, when Winston cigarettes sponsored a tournament in San Diego, beach volleyball has been a commercial sport. In 1986 professional beach volleyball made its network debut on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and, at the Atlanta Games in 1996, beach volleyball became an Olympic sport. It is still dominated largely by Californians, like Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes among the men, and Karolyn Kirby and Liz Masakayan among the women.
Industry:Culture
Is there an “American body”? Foreigners visiting the US often remark on the obesity of an affluent society where one-quarter of children and one-fifth of adults are overweight.
Parents of teenagers worry about skinny female actors and models who may force daughters into eating disorders, or the dangers of steroids or violence for their sons.
Medicine and Hollywood stress fitness—the chiseled, toned bodies of both male and female stars in the 1990s make romantic leads of the 1950s look flabby to young audiences. Yet, are the bodies of advertising, film or Playboy “typical” or “real”? Is the body more like a machine (a common American trope in the twentieth century) or do we read it in more complex ways? Whatever body an American has and however he or she feels about it, the body remains a fundamental site of identity pleasure, anxiety representation, conflict and change. This article suggests linkages through the body with issues discussed at greater length elsewhere.
The body after all, is where issues of race and gender are marked by appearance more than genetics (hence, issues of “passing” for white or cross-dressing and transsexual identities play upon the body). American phenotypic ascription of race is immediately read from the body imposing biology on it. Gestures and fashion may distinguish racial and ethnic groups, at least in common stereotypes—Asians are “quiet,” while Italian Americans “talk with their hands.” Race and ethnicity are also demarcated by hair— whether “good” or “bad” hair among African Americans or the pervasive influence of a northern European blond coloring in mass media (although one faces contradictory images of “blondes having more fun” and “dumb blondes”).
Gender is also affirmed by differences in fashion and ornamentation of the body as well as appropriate “behavior” and activities in sports, war or other arenas. This is particularly true in clothing and exhibition of the body although variations in costumes like swimwear illustrate vast differences in attitudes towards appropriate display often with an underlying puritanism about revealing body parts associated with sex and desire.
Nude beaches and skimpy beachwear are less common in the US than in Europe; the US has also continuing debates over the appropriateness of breastfeeding in public.
Gender also shapes American alterations and manipulations of the body including widespread circumcision for American males, body piercing (especially ears for women), tattooing, with a faddish appeal in the 1990s, dyeing hair, depilation and various forms of plastic surgery now found among men and women, young and old. Cleanliness and avoidance of odor (except for appropriate perfumes), introduced in childhood as demands on girls more than rough-and-tumble boys, also form part of general body culture in contemporary US culture. These, too, are areas of anxiety in which advertising and media portray “the good body”.
Gender and sexuality issues also have raised important questions of privacy and control of the body in the postwar period with regard to contraception and, above all, abortion—a point over which men and women have fought for decades about control of a woman’s body and her right to make choices. Feminism has often argued the need for women to reclaim control of their bodies, as the title of a popular health manual—Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973)—evoked. Gay sexuality has also raised issues, cultural and legal, about rights to do with one’s body as one chooses and where one may do this—the bedroom, the bar, the dance floor or the street. Other issues of body and privacy have emerged in terms of medical records and surveillance, especially in an Internet/information society.
Class is less clearly marked in the body in postwar America (although it converges with markings of race and ethnicity), although there are strong correlations of obesity and poverty Images of class and clothing—“white collar” (middle class) versus “blue collar” (working class) or redneck—remind us of the complexities of these markers and divisions in American society These issues all converge in issues of activities by and on the body especially violence.
The body is part of sanctioned violent activities, especially for men in sports and war, where it endures the demands and sacrifice of citizenship. Women have made gains in participation in same-sex contact sports, although their roles in combat and other areas of bodily threat (police) may still be debated in any crisis in which a woman is hurt.
Violence against women by men, whether domestic abuse or rape, has been a major issue for debate over the rights of the gendered body in the 1980s and 1990s.
The body is also a site of aging, leading to specific concerns in development and activities through the life cycle. The “rights of the fetus” have become part of the abortion debate as well as medical experimentation. Babies and children are closely monitored in terms of normal development, while teenage years are often characterized by a disjunction between bodily changes and social control. Bodies of children and teenagers, however, also demand particular protection in terms of potential exploitation in pornography and sex, themes constantly driven home by mass media.
With maturity diet, fitness, cosmetics and plastic surgery become elements in a battle against aging that affirms the primacy of the youthful, trim body as an American ideal, especially since the rise of the baby boom (see American Beauty, 1999). While older models appear in advertisements and women past fifty have been featured in Playboy, they represent exceptions or appeals to particular audiences. In the US, old age is deeply associated with the failure of the body and with medical efforts to sustain its function.
Aging, gender and other representations and experiences mark the body as a site for medicalization—expert knowledge and rights to control actions. Here, interventions range from curing to manipulation to insistence on Cesarean births rather than “natural” childbirth to proscriptions on bodily activities like smoking in the name of general health.
Medical research has also probed the frontiers of the body in genetic research, transplant/replacements and questions of reproductive technology while staking claims via patents on “body parts.” Emily Martin (1994) and others have highlighted these changing metaphors of the body and their wider implications.
Industry:Culture
It is arguable that the “gay and lesbian” press began with the dramatic moment when Oscar Wilde was seen carrying an issue of The Yellow Book on his way into prison for acts of “gross indecency.” Although gay and lesbian “issues” covertly (or not so covertly) emerged during the early part of the twentieth century in theater and arts journals like Broadway Brevities and the avant-garde journal View, it was not until 1953 that gay and lesbian political concerns came to the fore in the publication One (under the auspices of the Mattachine Society) and in the Daughters of Bilitis’ newspaper The Ladder. Since Stonewall (1969), the proliferation of the gay and lesbian press has been tremendous if not (in some cases) troublesomely banal (Out, for instance).
Industry:Culture
It is hard to define independent films/videos—“indies”—in late twentieth-century America. Indies can include training tapes made by a drugrehab center, orientation films for new employees, Todd Hayes’ Poison (1985) or the Oscar-winning big-budget Dances with Wolves (1990). Broadly speaking, independent films/videos are those not made by major studios which are vertically integrated with their own production and distribution arms. Film remains the primary medium for theatrical release, while videos gain audiences through broadcasting. Industrials are shown within an organization, while independent documentaries and lower-budget and shorter features seek exposure in film festivals, museums or on television. While Oscar winners like Platoon (1986) and Silence of the Lambs (1991) are considered independent films, directors like Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino blur the sense of independent as divorced from big money and big distribution. This entry concentrates on films not made by Hollywood stars and packagers.
The US offers little government subsidy for the promotion of independent works.
Limited funds come from both private and public foundations, like Ford, MacArthur and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which runs programs like ITVS (Independent Television Service), and NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association). Independent film/videomakers also rely on private donors as well as personal funds, including credit cards, to make their projects.
Once the indie is made, the film-maker needs to find a distributor. Some send their works to the film-festival circuits, others will try to approach distributors directly. Public or cable-access channels and the educational market are less remunerative; some products simply are not shown much.
Many indies flaunt lower production values as badges of authenticity but some can have budgets of up to millions. However, there is also a tendency for independent works to challenge the formal styles of more mainstream works. Experimental and avant-garde works range from works by Maya Duran or the video art by Bill Viola to shorter essays and animation. Independent films have been strong showcases for minority and political issues, especially through documentaries, which always find more space in the indie’s world. Examples include Marlon Rigg’s Tongue Untied (1989) on gay issues in the African American community Finding Christa (1991) on motherhood and adoption and The Women Outside (1995) on Korean women who “serviced” American soldiers in Korea.
On the other hand, other independent works starting at a very low budget eventually acquire national distribution, acting as a stairway to Hollywood for directors like Richard Rodriguez, whose El Mariachi (1992) cost only $7,000 to make. The Blair Witch Project (1999), made with a budget of $67,000, grossed more than $40 million in its first four weeks of release. These, however, are the exceptions.
Besides film festivals, indies rely on distribution companies, like Third World Newsreel, Latino Consortium and National Black Programming Consortium, for the nontheatrical markets as well as for-profit distribution companies that cater primarily to the education market, from Facet Videos to Churchill Films. Small associations like AIVF (Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers) and New Days Film provide relevant information and support to independent film/ video-makers, as does the Sundance Institute, which began an Independents Archive in 1997.
Industry:Culture
Its origins in nineteenth-century attempts to professionalize the practice of American medicine and bring it under the control of a single corporate organization, the American Medical Association became the dominant force shaping medical practice in the United States following the Second World War. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, as lawyers have chipped away at doctors’ prestige, seeking redress for patients in cases of alleged malpractice, and as insurance companies increasingly pushed physicians to cut costs, the AMA has had to fight to maintain its dominant position.
Throughout its existence, the AMA has remained the main bastion of opposition to what it describes as “socialized medicine”—anything that might resemble a national health system. Frequently the AMA was able to stifle debate on this issue by drawing on widespread disdain for anything that might be associated with America’s Cold War adversary the Soviet Union. Post-Second World War prosperity has enabled many in the burgeoning middle class to afford private insurance. Many prefer a medically advanced, but unequal system to one that provides universal access, but which may involve more inferior medicine.
When the federal government endeavored to provide assistance for those who fell through the cracks in this system, generally the elderly and poor, the AMA did its best to oppose such efforts. The AMA campaigned against Medicare (healthcare for those over sixty-five years old), for example, because physicians believed it represented a step towards socialized medicine and would lead to the establishment of a “bureaucratic task force” that would invade “the privacy of the examination room.” Both Medicaid and Medicare ended up being adopted in Johnson’s “Great Society” legislative package, but only after they were framed as extensions of the existing Social Security system. Doctors had been assured that they would be able charge their usual fees for elderly and poor patients.
Attempts were made to push for a national system of healthcare during the first Clinton administration. Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plans were successfully undermined by a powerful alliance of the AMA and insurance companies, as well as by the First Lady’s inability to build a consensus on the issue, but this was also just one, albeit premature, initiative and not necessarily the end of the story.
Pressure to change may lead the AMA to alter its position in the future. The so-called “Patient Bill of Rights” (while offered in different guises by Democrats and Republicans) represents an attempt by Congress to respond to considerable dissatisfaction among Americans with the current healthcare system. With so much disaffection evident, the issue of healthcare reform is likely to remain an important issue in future presidential and congressional campaigns. Added to this, the AMA continues to feel threatened by the power of both attorneys and insurance companies.
Under a private system of healthcare the pressure to sue for malpractice is greater than under a nationalized system, partly because one physician is forced to advertise his or her services as superior to another’s and also because the provision of healthcare is given a price tag (inevitably leading to the question of whether the patient has received value for money). As malpractice suits increase in number, doctors’ own insurance fees escalate, and attorneys’ ongoing investigations of doctors bring to light a growing body of information that further reduces the public’s faith in the performance of medical practitioners. The AMA under such circumstances has tried to restrict such information and has even stated its opposition to reporting medical errors occurring at hospitals around the country. But if the Association pushes too hard in this direction it runs the risk of attracting further journalistic muckraking and of seeming to be akin to tobacco corporations (that withheld information about the dangers of smoking). The likely result would be ever-larger jury judgments in malpractice suits against physicians.
In addition, insurance companies, particularly the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) have already begun to interfere with the sacred doctor—patient relationship once prized by physicians in the AMA, and which it was feared a socialized system might undermine. As the HMOs begin to give doctors and hospitals less reimbursement for the services they offer, and also endeavor to ration particular services (again as it was feared a socialized system would do), many hospitals have been going bankrupt. The result is that there is at present a problem rather similar to the high levels of competition that capitalists found inimical to their interests during the Progressive Era, and which led them in the direction of greater corporatism and increased government regulation. With the AMA currently feeling embattled, and with options open that were not there during years of rabid anti-communism, it is not out of the question that some form of national healthcare system will receive the support of America’s physicians during the next decade.
Industry:Culture
Japanese—American relations are often described through starkest conflict or cooperation. Prior to and during the Second World War, hostility prevailed. Yet, after the defeat of Japan, the relationship was envisioned by the US in terms of the cooperation needed to ensure Japan as a bulwark against Communist expansion in East Asia.
Nonetheless, once the Japanese economy recovered from the war, a growing sense of competition returned, with many Americans feeling threatened by Japanese economic ascendancy even while believing that emulation of Japanese business methods and strategies was crucial. The 1990s recession, devastating economies like that of Japan and the Asian “tigers,” reduced many tensions between the US and Japan, although struggles over market access and control continue. However, Japanese—American relations have been more complex than these depictions suggest.
In the years leading up to 1941, Americans did not necessarily believe that the modernizing Japanese threatened their interests. Theodore Roosevelt even promoted Japanese interests in the region in 1907, supporting them in negotiations against Russia, and secretly agreeing to allow Japan control of Korea in exchange for limiting Japanese immigration to the US. Woodrow Wilson gave Japan the Chinese territory of Shantung (formerly controlled by Germany) in 1919, but refused to insert Japanese language supporting racial equality into his League of Nations Covenant. In addition, the two nations’ economies were intertwined, with Japan relying on exports to the United States (where the “Made in Japan” label was becoming common. The Depression in America, thus helped eradicate Japan’s export market, hastening the collapse of its liberal government, and the turn to military expansionism). And, in the war, Americans vilified and punished both Japanese and Japanese Americans.
Following the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the American agreement to allow the Emperor Hirohito to remain in place (though with altered powers), American regional interests, confronted by growing nationalist and communist insurgencies, seemed to warrant the rebuilding of Japan under US occupation (1945–52). The US retained military bases like Okinawa as staging posts for operations in Korea and as escapes for Vietnam “R&R” (“Rest and Recreation”). With America’s strict limiting of Japan’s military the Japanese were able to develop their export economy gaining ascendancy in global auto production and electronics, while seemingly limiting American imports to baseball. Harmony between the two nations was sometimes strained as American military expansion became increasingly reliant on a nuclear arsenal. Since the Japanese had experienced the real effects of “mutually assured destruction,” they often have been outspoken in opposition to the use of nuclear arms (potentially stimulating American guilt about using these weapons).
With the slowdown of the American economy in the 1970s, the collapse of the American auto industry in the face of more fuel-efficient cars from Japan (2 million cars were imported in 1981) and the related growth of the US trade deficit with Japan ($16 billion in 1981), antagonism grew between the two governments. The Reagan administration pushed the Japanese to pay a larger share of its defense costs, trim car exports to the US and reduce barriers to the importation of American agricultural commodities. But the impact of these initiatives, continued during the Clinton presidency (though with less urgency), was limited owing to the generally recognized superiority of Japanese manufactured goods throughout the 1980s.
Some racism inflects US responses to the Japanese; Japan sometimes virtually becomes “The Yellow Peril,” though with some modification over older images. The fear that the Japanese were buying up many American companies, for example, was exaggerated (especially given larger purchases made by the English). Americans quickly provided cultural reasons to explain Japanese economic supremacy: lack of corruption or Japanese educational methods. Such talk disappeared during the 1990s, however.
Competition with the European Community increased, thereby diminishing concern about Japan. When the Pacific Rim nation hit a severe economic crisis, this exposed high levels of corruption and inability to respond to new loci of competition like China. But, if trade disputes are lessening, other disputes grow. Japan shows signs of wanting greater military independence, including growing hostility to the presence of US naval bases, exacerbated by the rape of a Japanese woman by an American sailor in Okinawa.
Images of the Japanese in American media reflect this history and complexity While Frank Capra’s Battle of China (1945) used racist stereotypes, postwar films like Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara (1957) promoted intercultural understanding. Japanese business in the US has received comic sympathy in Gung Ho (1986), although racist/Orientalist overtones haunted the American-made Black Rain (1989; to be distinguished from the 1990 Japanese film on Hiroshima) and Rising Sun (1993). These attitudes also subtly shape many news reports on Japan.
Industry:Culture
