- Industry: Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 1330
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Explanation of the origin of the Earth on the basis of Biblical interpretations. In an extreme form, adapting fundamentalist interpretations that life was created by divine action 10,000 years ago; a moderate vision notes that the complexity of life systems shows evidence of a supreme intelligence. The debate between religion and science formed the heart of the famous 1920s Scopes trial in Tennessee; many thought this a dead issue in the postwar era. Yet creationism remained a prominent issue in local Christian activism in the South and Midwest. While the Supreme Court ruled that this could not be forced on school curricula, partisans have also attacked evolution as an “unproven theory.” In 1999, for example, the Kansas School Board ruled, over protests from teachers and scientists, that macro-evolution and the big bang theory could no longer be included in state science curricula.
Industry:Culture
Extended (30-minute) advertising that often masquerades in the more neutral formats of a talk show or news program. Celebrity endorsements as well as testimonies from “ordinary people” sell kitchen equipment, body-care products and self-help/get-rich programs, especially on late night cable channels.
Industry:Culture
Fashion in America can be discussed from two different perspectives—as a general statement about American styles, based on generally casual conformity or in terms of the growth of an art and industry of couture as artifice. In the latter realm, American designers freed themselves during and after the Second World War from slavish imitation of European models to compete in a global market that ranges from Paris and Milan to Tokyo and Hong Kong. In either case, fashion tends to be a highly gendered, classed and racialized enterprise where commodities transform bodies, sexuality and identity.
An American style, in the broader sense, has been less defined by aesthetics than by comfort and mass consumption. In the twentieth century Americans bought more than 9 billion items of clothing annually but they do not necessarily stress individual panache in everyday dress. Workplaces tend to mean conventional clothes (uniforms or pseudouniforms, like dark suits and white shirts). Teenage conformity long has been epitomized by the dominance of blue jeans and T-shirts as basic wardrobes, but also reflects trends in apparel, accessories and style (see Clueless, 1989), as well as race relations. Hip hop baggy pants and baseball caps have different meanings on white suburban college students and black, inner-city youths; minorities also display designer labels as marks of status and identity Clothing needs are met by a variety of prices and qualities of merchandise, with competition for brand name recognition pitting GAP, J. Crew, Express, Limited, Delia and others against each other, for example, for the youth market. Other brands have established reputations for conservative clothes for the workplace—Brooks Brothers, Anne Klein, Talbot, etc. Names have also created wider markets by moving from clothes to perfumes, accessories and household goods. Many people buy clothes according to what they can afford, whether in boutiques, department stores, discount stores or thrift shops, or via catalogs and online commerce. Still, the appeal of vintage clothing or sales shopping allows consumers to extend budget and style.
While certain Americans may have gained global reputations for their individual senses of style—Wallis Simpson, Grace Kelly, Jackie Kennedy Onassis—other prominent women have been embraced for their “sensible” look—like First Ladies Mamie Eisenhower, Pat Nixon, Barbara Bush or even the power-suited Hillary Clinton.
Hollywood stars are often taken as the epitome of male fashion, from Cary Grant to Denzel Washington. For men not directly involved in fashion or media of display an interest in fashion is often taken as anomalous, or even a failing in masculinity. Despite the “Peacock Revolution” of the 1960s, which introduced hippie clothes, colors and extravagant styles, American male fashion in public realms remains conservative and unobtrusive.
Despite these consistencies in general choices and ideal types, the American fashion industry has offered more and more new choices and forms of consumption and display since the end of the Second World War rationing. It has also aggressively asserted an American ethos in fashion—and fashion production—in distinction to European couture.
The pioneer designers of the 1960s included Halston, Mary McFadden and Anne Klein, who extended their influence through ready-to-wear clothes, many of which appealed to middle-class women entering the workforce, balancing jobs and style. The 1960s were also marked by more idiosyncratic fashions associated with hippies and imported Carnaby Street designs, as well as the rise of designer jeans.
Subsequent decades saw the rise and globalization of many important American designers. Donna Karan designed clothes for the professional woman, Ralph Lauren offered classic, “preppy clothes,” while Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis and others established visible looks and trademarks. The 1980s, according to Silverman (1986), became an era to celebrate aristocratic clothes in design as well as exhibits—and in the presidential style of the Reagan White House.
Designers continued to emerge and change in the 1990s. Tommy Hilfiger has appealed to the youth market, while Vera Wang and others competed in specialty gowns. New designers debut at New York’s Fashion Week or outside Bryant Park. Production of many of these labels, however, has moved offshore. Americans also continue to buy from European designers: elite shopping areas like New York’s Fifth Avenue, Los Angeles’ Rodeo Drive or Miami’s Bal Harbour offer boutiques for Chanel, Prada, Fendi, Gucci, Armani, Zegna and other global fashion logos. Meanwhile, American designers have been hired to revitalize staid European lines.
Many of these designers, in fact, offer multiple divisions to reflect differential purchasing power. While Donna Karan’s name marks her expensive line, for example, DKNY provides a pricey but mass market alternative; Calvin Klein and CK follow the same division, reinforcing a design empire through multiple products and sales, although also risking over-extension.
While these lines reinforce divisions of class and gender, fashion also raises important questions about age and race. High fashion often offers clothes that look good on the young, but often only the older rich can afford them. Certainly, female fashion models, who have emerged as celebrities in their own right, have tended to offer young, thin and sometimes exotic looks and bodies. This has led to complaints about the objectification of the female body and the negative impact on female self-images. Male fashion models only gained some celebrity recognition in the 1990s with brooding, lean and muscled bodies whose display remains linked to questions of sexuality and identity as well as clothes. In both groups, exotic racial mixtures have been highlighted without serious integration of the design establishment or couturier clients. Design remains dominated by white males.
Fashion is constantly tied to other media. Stars at the Academy Awards become advertisements for designers and “looks.” Media events such as the phenomenal success of Titanic (1997), Clark Gable’s appearance without an undershirt in It Happened One Nïght (1934), or the King Tut blockbuster exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum all had an impact on design and taste in subsequent seasons. Other tie-ins occur through celebrities and labels: Michael Jordan is linked to both Warner Brothers’ character clothing and sneaker endorsements, while logos of sports teams are popular in male casual wear.
Some of these trends, of course, may be lamented by those who attend New York’s Fashion Week or those who have pontificated on American fashion from the pages of major periodicals like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, or the more trade-oriented Women’s Wear Daily. Nor will they be preserved, perhaps, in museum collections devoted to fashion like that of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Nonetheless, they embody rather literally, the complexity and creativity of American life.
Industry:Culture
Federal development project in the Upper South. Constructing sixteen dams between 1933 and 1945, the Tennessee Valley Authority brought jobs and training, flood control and electricity to marginal rural areas in seven states. By the postwar period, TVA converted the extensive valley into a balanced industrial, military and agricultural core for the future Sunbelt. Since the 1960s, the agency has been criticized for its environmental record, including pollution and reliance on stripmined coal, and its disastrous interests in nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s. These are signs, perhaps, that the region has outgrown its engine of change.
Industry:Culture
Field sport that resembles both soccer and hockey, with a ball being moved towards the goal through the air using nets attached to sticks. Lacrosse’s origins are found in the American Indian sport known as Baggataway, but it owes its spread in the US to elite prep schools and colleges. NCAA tournaments have been held since 1971 to establish national champions for both women and men’s colleges, with the Ivy League universities initially dominant, but much less so thirty years later. Wooden sticks have been replaced by ones with plastic heads and aluminum shafts, which have made the stick lighter so that players are able to develop much better stick skill. The women’s stick is of a slightly different design that requires greater finesse, possible in the women’s game because less physical contact is permitted. For the men’s game, though, protective gear, especially around the head, is required. The game is opening the doors to commercialization as indoor semi-professional leagues have been started, taking advantage of the diversity of sports coverage made possible by cable television, and as equipment makers sponsor exhibitions around the country and abroad to spread the sport.
Industry:Culture
Filipino Americans constitute the second-largest group of Americans of Asian descent; almost 60,000 Filipinos enter the US every year. Filipino immigration to the US prior to the annexation of the Philippines to the US in 1898 was negligible. By 1910, Filipinos could travel freely to the US, which started a slow trend that continued after Philippine independence in 1934 (when immigrants reached 100,000). Most immigrants were male farm workers. Military collaboration also facilitated naturalization and acceptance during and after the Second World War.
The 1965 Immigration Act, coupled with neocolonial economic difficulties in the Philippines, increased the number of Filipino Americans from 200,000 in 1965 to over 1,400,000 by 1990. Women now predominate among the immigrants, some to join their husbands, but most because there are now more employment opportunities for women than men, especially as nurses. The largest Filipino American communities are found in California (52 percent) and Hawai’i (12 percent), but they have also spread out to the Midwest and the East Coast. Most reside in metropolitan areas, including, for example, Manila Town in Los Angeles, CA and middle-class enclaves like Daly City near San Francisco, CA.
Filipinos, despite their long presence in the US have a muted media exposure in comparison with other Asian groups. By contrast, the US has become a central locus of Filipino life and identity in the works of Filipino novelists such as N.V.M. Gonzalez and Jessica Hagedorn.
Industry:Culture
Film agents are negotiators on behalf of actors, directors and others within Hollywood dealmaking of the post-studio era. Typically portrayed in mass media as leeches because of their lack of creative roles and the high percentages they demand (10–15 percent of the deal), they increasingly represent important packagers of film and television productions and even gateways into the profession, a role that has spread into sports, arts and other arenas (see Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, 1996). Major talent agencies have included MCA and William Morris, while agents like Michael Ovitz have gained name recognition in their own right.
Industry:Culture
Film and imaging company founded by George Eastman (1854–1932) in Rochester, New York. Eastman produced rollable film on transparent cellulose that made the camera an everyday family experience and fostered the growth of motion pictures and x-rays. The company which became Eastman Kodak in 1892, pioneered color film, safety film and a range of home products from Brownie cameras to smaller instamatics in the 1960s, as well as home movie cameras and slide projectors. In the 1990s, Kodak remained a global corporation with sales of $13.4 billion in 1998 (down $1 billion from 1997), facing competition from innovative film and camera technologies abroad and digital media, where it has struggled to stay abreast.
Industry:Culture
Financial capital of the Sunbelt and, through aggressive banking mergers, for all US finance. The city was founded in colonial days; in the 1930s, nearby Gastonia became famous for violent strikes in the growing textile industry in the region. Yet, opportunities in banking and service have attracted people and investments in a spectacular transformation in the late twentieth century for both the cityscape and the society. While cultural facilities and government initiatives are grappling with growth, expansion sport franchises (Hornets in basketball and Panthers in football) have also laid claim to status as a “major-league” city. Yet despite 20 percent growth in the 1990s (expanding metropolitan population to 1,383,625), other North Carolina development in the Research Triangle (Raleigh-Durham/Cha-pel Hill, with both Duke and the University of North Carolina) has outstripped it and may well pass Charlotte by 2020. With strong growth in Greensboro, and resort development in the mountains and on the coast, this suggests fundamental re-orientations ahead in a state once defined by white conservative politics (see Helms, Jesse) and an older Southern heritage of race, class, religion and regionalism. Thomas Hanchett’s Sorting Out the New South City (1998) provides a detailed analysis of Charlotte’s development and insights into both the South and the Sunbelt.
Industry:Culture
FIRE—finance, insurance, real estate named were the watchwords of urban development in late twentieth century America as the spaces of the city themselves became central commodities and motors of growth. Real estate as a focus of speculation for both individuals and corporations underpins both prosperity and debt.
For most individuals, housing is their primary investment and often, via the mortgage, their primary debt. Federal programs for buyers and developers as well as deductions on mortgage interest for income taxes have made this a central financial operation of the middle class (see public housing). At the same time, given American mobility the home is an investment middle-class homes should accrue value, whether pioneers of gentrification or suburban enclaves. Threats of loss of value, in turn, have spurred white flight.
Yet real estate also represents a major national and international market in which large developers negotiate with cities, states and federal governments for breaks that will presumably be offset by jobs or other revenue increases, and newspapers cover trends and projects in detail. As an investment, in fact, real estate has also attracted money from pension funds, healthcare corporations and other economic sectors. Red-hot markets, in turn, have posed problems for other land uses, whether environmental controls, preservation, planning or even basic questions of the location of schools and services.
Perhaps it is indicative of the centrality of real estate to urban and exurban planning— and American discourses of profit and success—that Donald Trump, known primarily for real-estate development in New York (and Atlantic City casinos) has been discussed as a potential presidential candidate for the Reform Party.
Industry:Culture
