Suchergebnisse

Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream. A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 377 pp., $17.95, ISBN 0-691-05827-X. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 377 pp., $29.95, ISBN 0-8476-8649-3. Jennifer A. Loehlin, From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 250 pp., $68.00, ISBN 1-85973-284-4. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 213 pp., $19.50, ISBN 1-85973-239-9. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending. European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Washington: The German Historical Institute and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 477 pp., $19.95, ISBN 0-521-62694-3.The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of studies tracing the development of
the principal institutions of 'mass consumption' in Westernised societies during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of leading department stores and the
marketing policies of major firms, publicity and sales methods, have sought to
increase understanding of the actors or 'professions' instrumental in the transformation
of such practices, their methods and scope, the reasons for their success and by
extension the reasons for the failure of alternative practices, 'small' shopkeepers and
'small' industrialists who felt threatened by the wave of change.

Goody, J. Death and the interpretation of culture.--Stannard, D. E. Death and the Puritan child.--Saum, L. O. Death in the popular mind of pre-Civil War America.--Douglas, A. Heaven our home: consolation literature in the northern United States, 1830-1880.--French, S. The cemetery as cultural institution.--Kelly, P. F. Death in Mexican folk culture.--Meyers, M. A. Gates ajar: death in Mormon thought and practice.--Ariès, P. The reversal of death

"With illustrations, and a carefully prepared index for reference." ; Includes index. ; Electronic reproduction. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 44

References: TPL 802; Watters (2nd ed.), p. 985. ; Errata--p. [3] ; "Est quoddam prodire tenus si non datur ultra. -Horace." ; Electronic reproduction. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; 44

Abstract The article discusses the concept of Political Opportunity Structure, central to the Political Process Theory, which emerged in the 1960s, in North America, and is essential to the study of social movements. Its objective is to nuance the use of this concept, after presenting its context of initial formulation and addressing the main criticisms, reformulations-internal and external-and a proposal to include the category of violence, notably from Latin American experiences. From a qualitative approach, with an extensive bibliographic review, it concludes that the neglect of the polysemical category of violence provided an often mistaken reading of the classic questions of this field, namely, how and why subjects mobilize. Furthermore, we come up with readings that definitely include the different uses of violent practices both in social movements and to repress them in the analysis of political opportunities.

"Ten Hills Farm tells the powerful saga of five generations of slave owners in colonial New England. Settled in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Ten Hills Farm, a six-hundred-acre estate just north of Boston, passed from the Winthrops to the Ushers, to the Royalls--all prominent dynasties tied to the Native American and Atlantic slave trades. In this mesmerizing narrative, C. S. Manegold exposes how the fortunes of these families--and the fate of Ten Hills Farm--were bound to America's most tragic and tainted legacy. Manegold follows the compelling tale from the early seventeenth to the early twenty-first century, from New England, through the South, to the sprawling slave plantations of the Caribbean. John Winthrop, famous for envisioning his 'city on the hill' and lauded as a paragon of justice, owned slaves on that ground and passed the first law in North America condoning slavery. Each successive owner of Ten Hills Farm--from John Usher, who was born into money, to Isaac Royall, who began as a humble carpenter's son and made his fortune in Antigua--would depend upon slavery's profits until the 1780s, when Massachusetts abolished the practice. In time, the land became a city, its questionable past discreetly buried, until now. Challenging received ideas about America and the Atlantic world, Ten Hills Farm digs deep to bring the story of slavery in the North full circle--from concealment to recovery." -- from publisher's website

A review essay on a book by J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britan and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).

Northern Europe and North America have dominated the world stage for more than two centuries. Using a wide range of sources, this book provides the first coherent account from a multi-national perspective of the ideas and perceptions that, from the Renaissance onwards, fuelled the North's rise to prominence, and enabled it to rival the traditional cultural and political hegemony of the South. This includes not only the fascinating conquest of the polar regions, but also the religious upheaval of the Reformation, the changing view of nature engendered by Romanticism, and, not least, the revival of ancient Nordic and Celtic culture. Finally, the book offers an indispensable historical background to current events in the Far North, where the past and the future meet in a complex web of dramatic environmental concerns, the exploitation of natural resources, and the strategies of politics and commerce.