- Industry: Printing & publishing
- Number of terms: 1330
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Formed when sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (primarily from coal-burning utility plants, automobiles and trucks) mix with water vapor in the atmosphere. The acidified water then falls to the Earth as rain or snow, where it can damage trees at high altitudes, leach nutrients from soils, damage buildings and public sculptures and, most notably, acidify lakes, where, in sufficient concentrations, it can kill off all aquatic life. The Northeastern United States, particularly the Adirondack mountains in northern New York State, have suffered the greatest harm from acid rain.
Acid rain first became the focus of scientific and political attention in the 1980s, and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 contained the first legislative attempt to deal with the problem. The law set a cap on sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants and reduced the amount of nitrogen oxides that could be emitted per unit of energy.
Industry:Culture
Formerly American Telephone and Telegraph Company AT&T was incorporated in March 1885 to take over the long-distance business of American Bell Telephone Company, founded by inventor Alexander Graham Bell and associates. As a monopoly it was for years the sole American company for long-distance telecomimmications. In December 1899, it became the parent company of the Bell System that provided local exchange. AT&T moved into radio in the 1910s, and after the First World War, it participated in the radio trust that set up RCA as a governmentsanctioned monopoly.
AT&T also owned the first station to accept advertising—WEAE. It was forced to divest itself of the Bell System in 1984. In 1995 AT&T split into three companies: a “new” AT&T for communication services; Lucent Technologies, for communications systems and technologies; and NCR Corp, for transaction-intensive computing.
Industry:Culture
Founded a century ago, these school-based groups bring parents into closer contact with their children’s education, support extra school activities and lobby for educational issues. In the 1950s and 1960s, they stressed classroom life and fundraising events like bake sales. The National Association of Colored Parents merged with the older association in 1970, focusing concern with desegregation. As tax reforms and social problems like violence have challenged both educational budgets and quality, these associations have taken on more important supplementary roles, although involvement varies according to class and gender, with women being predominant.
Industry:Culture
Founded as a dry-goods company in San Francisco, CA (1853) by the German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss, this company was transformed by a new process in 1873 that used metal rivets at stress points in denim work clothes. In the twentieth century these blue jeans escaped rough work—and playgrounds—to become uniforms for a casual lifestyle. Although baby boomers associated jeans with rebellions against established codes of dress, by the end of the century a vast variety of denims—in which Levi Strauss is only one competing brand—have become ubiquitous among all ages, classes and settings of the US as well as abroad. Levi Strauss, meanwhile, remains one of the largest privately held family corporations in the United States—a brief fling at public trading in 1971 ended with a 1985 buy back. Its worldwide sales stood at $6 billion in 1998 (slipping markedly from the year before), produced in thirty-two factories worldwide, with eleven in North America slated to close in 1999. Indeed, Levis, although a symbol of America, are more likely to be made worldwide in the region where they are purchased.
Industry:Culture
Founded as a mission in 1749, San Diego’s first transportation and production networks of California and the Southwest in the nineteenth growth came with its conflictive integration into century. Since the Second World War, Sunbelt metropolitan growth has boomed not only along the Bay, but also in northern, coastal and inland suburbs (La Jolla, Escondido, Imperial Beach) stretching south along highways towards Mexico. By 1990 San Diego became the sixth-largest city in the US (2000 estimates 1,208,998). Its Mediterranean climate and ambiance and attractions like the zoo and Sea World Aquarium bring in tourists, while military facilities and service-sector development have sustained economic growth. The University of California, San Diego and baseball’s Padres enrich the metropolitan area.
Tijuana, a contiguous Mexican boom-city has provided labor, consumers, leisure and “vice” for the US, especially since the 1920s. US—Mexico border issues today focus on industrial development, environment and immigration. While Tijuana remains famous for gambling and alcohol, illegal/cheap pharmaceuticals are big business and coastal resorts are growing. As in other border areas, the dialectic of development shapes both cities.
Industry:Culture
Founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1892 as an intellectual institution for the burgeoning metropolis, it has grown to be one of the most prestigious private, non-denominational universities in the world. The university has 12,000 students (75 percent graduate and professional) and more than 1,900 full-time faculty members on its Hyde Park campus, south of Chicago, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The university claims distinctions ranging from the birth of the nuclear age, with Enrico Fermi, to connections, especially in economics, with seventy-one Nobel laureates. It is also renowned for its innovative committees that move beyond disciplinary boundaries and a distinguished university press.
Industry:Culture
Founded by John Muir as an outing group in the 1890s, the Sierra Club was one of the first private organizations to advocate environmental protection. During the 1960s, club president David Brower led the group to national prominence by fighting the construction of dams within the Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon National Park.
Though still prospering, the Sierra Club has not played the same unquestioned leadership role in recent decades. Nonetheless, many Americans who wish to contribute to an environmental cause will become Sierra Club members because of its broad political agenda and widespread name recognition.
Industry:Culture
Founded by Larry Kramer, playwright, novelist and founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), in March 1987 in New York City. Kramer rallied a small group of gay activists to respond to the government’s refusal to deal adequately with the burgeoning AIDS crisis—a crisis disproportionately affecting homosexual men. Through an effective blend of agitprop street theater, massive protests and demonstrations at federal institutions, creative and media-savvy distribution of “safe-sex” information, and unified anger, ACT UP pushed the US government and the Food and Drug Administration into changing stringent and stagnant policies. ACT UP groups came into being across the country and eventually Paris and London also joined in. Without the activism of ACT UP, the US AIDS epidemic would have been even more devastating.
Industry:Culture
Founded by Wallace D. Fard in 1930s Detroit, MI, the Nation of Islam came to national prominence under Elijah Muhammad, who moved the organization’s national headquarters to Chicago, IL. Aiming at lower-class African Americans, Muhammad preached that whites were the devils and stressed both the need for self-help and a black capitalism for the whole community. The Nation was also socially conservative and very restrictive with regard to the rights of women.
Muhammad’s national spokesman, Malcolm X, helped the organization grow rapidly during the 1950s, establishing numerous temples around the country and heading Temple No. 11 in Boston and later Temple No. 7 in Harlem. The organization came to the national attention through a CBS documentary “The Hate that Hate Produced,” which focused on the Nation’s separatism and what the documentary described as the organization’s penchant for paramilitary methods of self-defense. Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam in March 1964, questioning many of Muhammad’s practices, and formed his own Islamic organization along with the Organization for African Unity He was assassinated a year later.
Following Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, his fifth son, Wallace Dean Muhammad, was chosen to succeed him. The new leader began to move the organization towards more orthodox Sunni Islam, leading to a split with Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X’s successor as national spokesman. In 1978, Farrakhan recreated the old Nation of Islam, retaining ideas of black nationalism, self-development and cultural conservatism.
Under Farrakhan, the Nation has been more actively political in this regard, following Malcolm X. It supported Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns (causing Jackson difficulties over anti-Semitism) and was linked to hostile foreign regimes like Libya. The Nation also provided the inspiration for 1996’s Million Man March.
Industry:Culture
Founded by writers in 1980 to honor their peers, the PEN/Faulkner Award has become the largest juried award for fiction in the United States. Its name recognizes both Nobel laureate William Faulkner, who used his prize-money to create an award for young writers, and its affiliation with the international writers’ organization PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists). Every year the award judges, themselves fiction writers, select five books. The top book earns a $15,000 award, while the rest receive $5,000 each. Funded by donations, in 1987 the PEN/Faulkner Foundation established an endowment for future awards.
Industry:Culture
