Author: Alisa Perkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 9781479828012
Category: Religion
Page: 308
View: 630
Explores how Muslim Americans test the boundaries of American pluralism In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation. Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents. Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life—particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping—Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.
Author: Sam Staley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351521581
Category: Social Science
Page: 294
View: 630
The drug trade is a growth industry in most major American cities, fueling devastated inner-city economies with revenues in excess of $100 billion. In this timely volume, Sam Staley provides a detailed, in-depth analysis of the consequences of current drug policies, focusing on the relationship between public policy and urban economic development and on how the drug economy has become thoroughly entwined in the urban economy. The black market in illegal drugs undermines essential institutions necessary for promoting long-term economic growth, including respect for civil liberties, private property, and nonviolent conflict resolution. Staley argues that America's cities can be revitalized only through a major restructuring of the urban economy that does not rely on drug trafficking as a primary source of employment and income-the inadvertent outcome of current prohibitionist policy. Thus comprehensive decriminalization of the major drugs (marijuana, cocaine, and heroin) is an important first step toward addressing the economic and social needs of depressed inner cities. Staley demonstrates how decriminalization would refocus public policy on the human dimension of drug abuse and addiction, acknowledge that the cities face severe development problems that promote underground economic activity, and reconstitute drug policy on principles consistent with limited government as embodied in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Designed to cross disciplinary boundaries, Staley's provocative analysis will be essential reading for urban policymakers, sociologists, economists, criminologists, and drug-treatment specialists.
Author: Lara Luisa Schöber
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 9783668788060
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 22
View: 496
Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Osnabrück, course: Urban Landscapes of Modernity, language: English, abstract: The United States with New York as the country's largest urban city passed through an immense development in the mid-19th and early-20th century. The metropolis changed in terms of urban landscapes, industrialization, pace of life and importance, which influenced people's views on the cosmopolitan city New York. It is a fact that the city's population is growing since the early 19th century continuously and becomes more and more attractive for people from the whole world. Different artists of different groups and art movements concern themselves with the metropolis New York and its advantages and possibilities. The aim of this paper is to show that the urbanization influenced the stereotypical American Dream in a negative way which has thus changed into a more realistic one. On this account this paper will show the shift of the American Dream on the basis of the metropolis New York, comparing the songs New York, New York and Empire State of Mind, in relation to urbanization within the city. The paper starts out by introducing its historical context: it points out the historical facts of cultural change of the American city in the late-19th and early-20th century, considering the industrialization, urbanization of landscapes and the integration of the urban metropolis into the American Dream. Further more the chapter focuses on the idea of the American Dream, its origin and development regarding the city's social and cultural background. The third chapter, involves the analysis of the two songs, which both pick out the metropolis New York and its opportunity as a central theme. The two songs are connected because of thematic reasons according to the depiction of New York in two different time episodes. Furthermore this chapter provides a stylistic and thematic comparison of both songs in relation to the American Dream, which existed at the time of both respective songs but differs in the late 19th century from the early 20th century. Comparing the similarities and differences of picturing the American dream, this chapter illustrates the change from then and now, giving consideration to the respective temporal circumstances. The fourth chapter contains a conclusion, which sums up all facts and gives an outlook on a possible shift of the American dream into a different direction and explains the maintenance of the American dream in a critical way.
Author: John Agnew
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781135667153
Category: Reference
Page: 320
View: 949
Routledge Library Editions: The City reprints some of the most important works in urban studies published in the last century. For further information on this collection please email [email protected]
Author: Carl J. Guarneri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317459026
Category: Business & Economics
Page: 376
View: 856
This comprehensive resource is an invaluable teaching aid for adding a global dimension to students' understanding of American history. It includes a wide range of materials from scholarly articles and reports to original syllabi and ready-to-use lesson plans to guide teachers in enlarging the frame of introductory American history courses to an international view.The contributors include well-known American history scholars as well as gifted classroom teachers, and the book's emphasis on immigration, race, and gender points to ways for teachers to integrate international and multicultural education, America in the World, and the World in America in their courses. The book also includes a 'Views from Abroad' section that examines problems and strategies for teaching American history to foreign audiences or recent immigrants. A comprehensive, annotated guide directs teachers to additional print and online resources.
Author: Betsy Klimasmith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780192846211
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 276
View: 216
Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City sheds new light on the literature of the early US by exploring how literature, theatre, architecture, and images worked together to allow readers to imagine themselves as urbanites even before cities developed. In the four decades following the Revolutionary War, the new nation was a loose network of nascent cities connected by print. Before a national culture could develop, local city cultures took shape; literary texts played key roles in helping new Americans become city people. Drawing on extensive archival research, Urban Rehearsals argues that literature, particularly novels and plays, allowed Bostonians to navigate the transition from colonial town to post-revolution city, enabled Philadelphians to grieve their experiences of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic and rebuild in the epidemic's aftermath, and showed New Yorkers how the domestic practices that reinforced their urbanity could be opened to the broader public. Throughout, attention to underrepresented voices and texts calls attention to the possibilities for women, immigrants, and Black Americans in developing urban spaces, while showing how those possibilities would be foreclosed as the nation developed. Balancing attention to canonical texts of the early Republic, including The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, with novels whose depiction of early cities deserves greater attention, such as Ormond, The Boarding-School, Monima, and Kelroy, this volume shows how US cities developed on the pages and stages of the early Republic, building urban imaginations that would construct the nation's early cities.
Author: Emine Lâle Demirtürk
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9781611475302
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 255
View: 644
This book examines how African American novels explore instances of racialization that are generated through discursive practices of whiteness in the interracial social encounters of everyday life. African American fictional representations of the city have political significance in that the "neo-urban" novel, a term that refers to those novels published in post-1990s, explores the possibility of a dialogic communication with the American society at large.
Author: Lois Weis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 9781438423609
Category: Education
Page: 342
View: 812
Most educators might agree that the hidden agendas on class, race, and gender, to a large extent, condition and determine the form and the content of schooling. But, how much of this situation is due to school factors, and how much to social background factors, is heatedly discussed and debated by scholars working within both the mainstream and critical traditions in the field of education. Class, Race, and Gender in American Education represents a groundbreaking overview of current issues and contemporary approaches involved in the areas of class, race, and gender in American education. In this book, the first to combine a consideration of these issues and to investigate the manner in which they connect in the school experience, authors consider the particular situations of males and females of divergent racial and class backgrounds from their earliest childhood experiences through the adult university years. While providing valuable original in-depth ethnographic and statistical analyses, the volume also incorporates some of the important current theoretical debates; the debate between structuralists and culturalists is highlighted, for example.
Author: Roscoe C. Hinkle
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791419312
Category: Social Science
Page: 448
View: 116
This book presents a comprehensive, extended, and systematic analysis of social theory as it developed between the two World Wars, a period during which major transformation occurred. Centering on the continuities, on the one hand, and discontinuities on the other, in substantive theory, it deals with the major ideas of Cooley, Ellwood, Park, Thomas, Ogburn, Bernard, Chapin, Mead, Faris, Hankins, MacIver, Reuter, Lundberg, H. P. Becker, Parsons, Znaniecki, Sorokin, and Blumer. Finally, the problematic relevancy of the past for the present is directly confronted. The author examines how basic assumptions of theory in particular periods have used relatively unique schema and generated considerable controversy.