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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Descendants of the 2 million Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, emigrants from Ulster, the northern province of Ireland, who arrived in the US from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. “Scotch Irish,” a North American term, was increasingly used to distinguish them from the Catholic Irish Americans who emigrated to America after the Great Famines of the late 1840s. One in eight Americans traces ancestry to the Scotch Irish.
While found everywhere in the US, most live today in Pennsylvania, the Virginias and the Carolinas. They have excelled in American education, publishing, commerce, finance, the military, religion and politics. No fewer than ten presidents of the US were of Scotch-Irish descent.
Industry:Culture
Descended from the sonic experimentation of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground and the glam performance of the New York Dolls, punk rock developed in New York City, NY at the CBGB club on the Bowery in 1974. The sound was alternately loud and fast, abrasive, discordant and melodic as practiced by such performers as the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group, and the Heartbreakers. Both retro-populist and avant-garde experimental, punk was defined more by attitude than musical style, as expressed in such song titles as “I Don’t Care,” “Blank Generation,” and “I Wanna Be Sedated.” In 1976 punk traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, becoming an international media sensation when British groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash topped the charts with their scandalous calls for anarchy and violence. In London and New York punk caught the spirit of the decline of the West in the 1970s.
Punk rock spread in the following years and, by the end of the 1970s, vibrant local scenes had developed in Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, Austin, TX, Athens, GA, Vancouver, British Colombia (Canada) and countless other towns across North America. By 1980 a mutant offspring called hardcore had developed, most vibrantly in the suburban communities of Southern California. Bands such as Black Flag, the Middle Class and the Adolescents carried on the spirit of punk protest through such songs as “No Values,” “Love is Just a Tool,” and “Kids of the Black Hole.” The hardcore punk scenes were especially noted for their violence, both between various punks and between punks and police.
Industry:Culture
Despite a long history of immigrant successes, accusations of gang formation often challenge new groups in American society. These stereotypes emphasize different lifestyles or opportunities, but may also control community organization or justify exclusion because of culture, race, class or generation. These charges have denigrated African Americans, Irish Americans, Chinese Americans and Cuban Americans in turn. Meanwhile, the specter of clandestine organized crime—whether tongs among Chinese, or the Mafia among Italians—has justified police surveillance, mass media sensationalism, missionary reform and policies ranging from vague urban renewal to gated community withdrawal.
Those defined by such negative views have been more diverse. Criminal behavior emerges from many social forces, including realistic socialization in urban life. In many cases, however, the neighborhood or ethnic group smeared by the acts of a few has been deeply divided by these same actions. This is evident in African American community campaigns against contemporary black-on-black violence. Gang accusations, moreover, often show groups embodying fundamental American beliefs. Virtue, for example, is defined in loyalty to groups and localities, although gangs have promoted strong individualism as well. Gangs also gender crime—they have been strongly associated with males, while females, although likely to belong to associations, are depicted as isolated criminals or fallen women. Finally gangs have come to symbolize negative traits of urban disorder versus rural tranquility or the safety of the small town and the protected suburb.
The twentieth-century history of gangs has been more complex. In the 1920s and 1930s, as urban wars winnowed crime families, new youth gangs continued to spring up in changing environments. The transformations of American society after the Second World War, however, changed the ideological landscape of crime and fear. As suburban havens welcomed the middle class, the city could be perceived as a “realm of hoodlums”. Nonetheless, hot rodders (with anti-social “traits”) turned hallmarks of suburbia—cars and nurtured teenagers—into problems evident in Marlon Brando’s The Wild One (1954).
Study and policy υis-à-υis gangs also have been shaped by politics and representation.
Hence, in the 1960s, researchers sought integrative solutions as their authors detailed portraits of young men in gang nations such as Vice Lords of Chicago, IL or the streetcorner networks of New York City and Washington, DC. Blacks, and later, Hispanics, figured prominently among depictions of urban problems: Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1961) recast Romeo and Juliet as a conflict between Puerto Rican and “American” teenage gangs. Nonetheless, some gangs were incorporated into urban renovation and neighborhood/racial pride.
As urban residents demanded equality however, new questions surfaced. Riots, shifting family patterns and urban decay in the 1960s emphasized the social problems facing new generations. By the 1970s, statistics on gangs and organized opposition increased.
Meanwhile, drug trafficking and new weaponry which linked organized crime and local gangs, heightened urban violence. As consumerist values in the media bombarded those with less access to resources, drugs and crime proved tempting, despite consequences.
When new immigrants formed associations to facilitate assimilation, they were also tainted by reference to gangs. Thus, established Chinese American communities complain about the violent incursions of Fukienese and Southeast Asians.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed new extensions of crime and association. Women have increasingly public roles in all levels. In 1992 riots in Los Angeles, CA, the notorious gang nations of the city Crips and Bloods, emerged as potential peacemakers, which the Los Angeles Police Department could not be. Meanwhile, news and policy-makers continue to focus on drugs, corruption and drive-by violence.
Mass media have long contributed to a sense of gangs as a pervasive urban problem.
Gangsters have been a movie staple from James Cagney in Public Enemy (1931) to modern depictions such as The Godfather Trilogy (1972; 1974; 1990), New Jack City (1991) and Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as documentaries like A. Mishan’s Bui Doi (1994).
Quite apart from the real and violent nature of many other aspects of American society crime, gangs and other associations around illegal activities have multiple meanings and interpretations, encompassing assimilation, protest and solidarity as well as mere gain or pleasure. Gangs develop from strength as well as weakness, solidarities and alliances as well as divisions. As such, they entail neither simple problems nor simple solutions.
Industry:Culture
Despite restrictive quotas, American immigration has also valued an American model of family and kinship. This allows those with legal residency to automatically sponsor spouses and children; citizens can also sponsor parents and facilitate entry of unmarried siblings. As these bring in further kin, a “chain” results which may underpin business and social cohesion. This process has become especially associated with networks in post-1965 immigration, although critics have charged abuses based on false marriages, fictive connections and the use of children born in the US to legitimate illegal immigrants.
Industry:Culture
Developed in the nineteenth century as adult health foods, cereals became a multi-billion dollar American way of breakfast, especially for children, in the twentieth century Toasted and stewed grains have given way to flavored, highly sweetened convenience foods served with milk. Commercials aggressively market their tigers, leprechauns and rabbits and other product tie-ins on or in the box. Concern with children’s nutrition as well as adult health has widened the range of cereals to incorporate new grains and fruit/nut mixtures, while some advertising stresses associations with nature or sports (Wheaties, “Breakfast of Champions”). Still, it pays to read the label.
Industry:Culture
Diet refers to both the foods we normally eat and to special selections made for reasons of health or change in body weight. In a country where you can never be too rich or too thin, the term’s cultural signification is tied to calorie cutting and weight loss. The combination of vast disposable income and variety of foods greater than any nation on Earth, with the equation of beauty and thinness, has contributed to Americans’ schizophrenic approach to nutrition. Over half of the population has at one time or another attempted to control weight by controlling food intake. With the weight-control industry booming (miracle supplements, powders, “light” foods, prescription drugs, fitness clubs, tens of nationwide diet programs, such as Weight Watchers, and thousands of diet books and magazines), three-quarters of Americans are overweight. But regimens of near-starvation in order to be thin are also growing, especially among teenagers, where levels of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are staggering.
The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) recommends a variety of foods, low saturated fats, more consumption of fruits and vegetables and controlled carbohydrate intake. But the nation’s quasi-obsession with fat has not yielded the desired results. The preponderance on the market of “low-fat,” carbohydrate-rich snacks has coincided with high rates of obesity While some may resort to fad diets (juice or cabbage soup anyone?), it is worth noting that the oldest, healthiest people alive today survived wartime food shortages and (gladly) ate steak. Food for thought.
Industry:Culture
Different from a French café or bar/tabac or an English pub, bars, even for the everyday visitor, are more of a retreat from the public sphere than an extension of it. Generally the whole family does not go to the local bar.
Bars in America are often refuges, especially for smokers and drinkers, who are almost entirely pathologized. Similarly for homosexuals, gay bars are a hideaway a place to mingle with other homosexuals without the intrusion of the law, although, until recently, Stonewall gay bars were often raided. Bars are the place of sexual possibility and hookup; sometimes any single woman in a bar is seen as available (the novel/film Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), for example, played out the “punishment” of such a single woman).
In the 1970s, heterosexual single bars rivaled certain gay bars as spaces specifically designated for the playing out of mating rituals for the adult human.
Novelist Charles Bukowski sought out inspiration in such bars and found the inspired everyday poetry of the denizens of these darkened spaces. Bars also have been crucial places for the development of new forms of popular music, such as jazz (bebop) and new genres. Bars often host new talent before the performers either disappear or move into more traditional, official spaces with higher cover charges (patrons in bars are not charged unless there is live music or a live DJ).
In the 1990s, 1950s/1960s cocktails such as the martini and the Manhattan, as well as the new “Cosmopolitan” came back in style and demanded appropriate settings. These bars, either opened or redesigned with retro or contemporary styles, brought sophistication back. Live DJs replaced the jukebox, which allowed the user to set the tone. However, this “new” rendition does not entirely eclipse the bar’s primary function as a space to drink, to mingle, to find someone new.
In some bars, the pool table is a crucial ingredient (as might be video and pinball machines, but slightly less dramatically). Leading pool players challenge one another and develop audiences as players drink and play in a game that involves skill and seemingly indicates sexual prowess. In other bars, pool is a playful pastime that fills up the hours among “regulars” who know one another and call the bartender by name.
The bartender plays a crucial role in the bar as a purveyor of alcohol, but also as a master of ceremonies who knows the ins and outs of the establishment. Friendly or curmudgeonly, the bartender sets the tone of the bar and introduces the new customer or initiate to its culture. The bartender serves the drinks to the customers (it’s never a selfservice situation) so that both power (and the rapidity of a buy back) places the bartender, structurally in an esteemed position. This is particularly true in the early twenty-first century when the bar once more is a refuge from a restrained larger culture.
Industry:Culture
Direct action on political issues through popular vote, either by legislative or statutory demand or as a result of citizen petition. Control on legislative activity through referenda has been especially strong in Western states and in cities; there are no equivalent federal redresses. Referenda commonly cover major bond, taxation and expenditure issues as well as structural changes in government. Divisive issues like statewide gambling may also be put to a popular vote. As citizen actions, however, they have embraced topics as diverse as controls on re-election, immigrant rights, property taxes and the use of medical marijuana.
Industry:Culture
Disco emerged in the early 1970s as the most important form of dance music in Euro-American markets—seen as affixed to a hedonistic, escapist and drug-drenched lifestyle—reaching its apex in New York’s Studio 54. As a genre, the music featured syncopated rhythms placed forefront in the mix, with the use of many studio synthesizer effects from strings to percussion, as well as anonymous studio musicians. The tempo of disco songs was fast; the singers, mostly female and African American, decried their sufferings while insisting upon fortitude and resolve as in the disco anthem recorded by Gloria Gaynor “I Will Survive” (1977). Disco, by nature of the music and its outlets, furthered the careers both of singers and of record producers. Other disco stars include Donna Summer, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Cheryl Lynn, Grace Jones and the openly gay Sylvester (in fact, the Village People, another disco act that both mimicked and lampooned gay stereotyping, were not openly gay).
Although disco music was influenced by a pop predecessor, glam rock and its emphasis on the fantastic and theatrical, disco was often seen as opposite to heavy metal and album-oriented and arena rock that was also popular by the late 1970s and well instituted on the FM dial. In fact, by 1977, before punk spread, there was a “disco sucks” movement sponsored by radio stations that attracted suburban white youth, who insisted that disco was escapist, synthetic and overproduced. The music was biased in favor of the producer—as producers like Jacques Morali and Giorgio Moroder also became stars—but disco music attracted an urban audience of gays, blacks, Hispanics and Italian Americans clad in sparkles and prints who sang along with Alicia Bridges when she sang “I Love the Nightlife” (1979). It also fascinated film-makers again in the late 1990s.
Industry:Culture
Discussions of the information society at the end of the century resonate with the prestige and immediacy of news from the earliest days of television to the present. Adding pictures and gradually building in on-site coverage and commentary by distinguished correspondents, television news also celebrated its independence from government control and the limits of print. Over decades, news became the flagship of network prestige—anchormen like Walter Cronkite mediated the memories of a generation dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, the Moon landing and Vietnam. Yet critics have assailed network news for confusing journalism and entertainment, like the O.J. Simpson trial and Clinton sex scandal, adapting to corporate needs and ratings rather than investigation or truth—a charge argued in movies like Network (1976), Broadcast News (1987) and Mad City (1999). Indeed, even the visual elements of television may work against complex non-visual news (like coverage of the Supreme Court).
Meanwhile, network news is losing viewership and money In 1997 only 42 percent of the viewing public watched network TV evening news, down from 60 percent in 1993. The majority of viewers, moreover, are sixty-five and older.
We must be careful, however, to relate news to multiple changing contexts. In the early days of television, seasoned white male journalists delivered “truth,” although later critics may forget that even serious commentators were also involved with celebrity interviews, product endorsements and game shows. While Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame (1959), documenting the plight of migrant farm workers, is taken as a milestone of television news, for example, Murrow also visited stars’ homes in his weekly Person to Person (CBS, 1953–61). And in the years before television reported the medical impact of tobacco, cigarettes were props and endorsements for thoughtful commentators.
Nonetheless, generations including John Cameron Swayze, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley Eric Sevareid and others established a mantle for the authoritative anchor subsequently inherited by long-term network anchors Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather.
The introduction of women as anchors—pioneered by feature interviewer Barbara Walters—and the presence of blacks and other minorities as reporters and anchors respond to perceptions of audiences and issues rather than intrinsic shifts in perspectives or news. Dramatic visual images of civil rights that galvanized America were conveyed by white reporters and camera men; declines in affirmative action or issues of the Third World have been ignored by culturally diverse networks in the 1990s.
It is clear that news coverage does have an impact on how Americans understand and react to events. Hence, television news coverage on politics has sparked constant debates.
Early TV news offered American politics, gavel to gavel. The immediacy of political conventions and the Watergate hearings drew millions to the tube, and TV news was credited with providing a relatively transparent representation of the US political process.
Other Sunday-morning panels also have allowed politicians and newsmakers to discuss serious issues with journalists as hosts and interrogators. Yet, facing telegenic political contests (Kennedy versus Nixon, Clinton versus Dole), one must ask if media are channel or cause. Moreover, with the rise of the political consultants, who are adept in creating media events for the candidates or politicians, TV viewers learn to view politicians as media-generated icons, while images and soundbites avoid more substantive issues.
Television news has been accused of only reporting the horse-race aspects of elections, concentrating on opinion polls and personalities.
In the 1980s and 1990s, network news has expanded into prime time as magazine format shows. These feature network personalities and stories of corporate corruption, personal tragedy medical triumphs (and tragedies), celebrity gossip and natural disasters and have become almost nightly staples. The most senior and popular of this format, Sixty Minutes, has remained among the top ten shows for years since its beginning in 1968.
Local news magazines have tended to concentrate on nostalgic history minority populations and special events. Another extension of the morning/ evening schedule was the introduction of ABC’s Nightline (1980–), which grew from coverage of the Iran hostage crisis into a monographic report after local news. PBS news has always been considered as quality and liberal news; however, researchers have pointed out that the guest list in the famous McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (PBS) often favors white males.
Cable, however, provides the most telling shift in American news. CNN, with its axis in Atlanta, GA, rose to national and international prominence through coverage of the Gulf War via 24-hour news. C-SPAN, as a public service offered by cable providers, offers complete, relatively neutral coverage of events, including sessions of Congress.
Other cable news services have added talk, call-ins and gossip; many like MSNBC, suggest Internet connections for immediate updates, while CNBC promotes finance and business information.
With TV a mature medium, producers, journalists, politicians, as well as the audience all understand how to manipulate or simply use the medium to their advantages. While many in the audience still believe that the evening TV news is authoritative, more are skeptical. The news media, including the print press, and electronic media were attacked by the American public for their handling of the Clinton scandal. In the end, Clinton was not convicted, no matter how big the story was.
Local TV newscasts have faced other difficulties despite strong revenues. While some early newscasts for metropolitan centers drew on extensive station resources and journalistic pools trained in radio and newspapers, others have relied on photogenic announcers and wire services to create their news. Over decades, additions like local color features, movie reviews, medical news and product testing have blurred the dimensions of “serious” news, while sensational crime and weather stories in far-away places in the country will appear on local news if the footage is good. Basic services including news, weather and sports also have been smothered with local boosterism and “happy-talk” formula that wraps every story in banter among the anchors.
Local news stations nonetheless remain linked to network affiliates and practices— acting as frontline and feeders for breaking stories, honing anchors and other personalities and following up on major stories. As they have expanded to 1- or 2-hour broadcasts in the afternoon, some even cover national and global stories before the national reports. National news, in turn, has picked up the features and, in news magazines, the chattier format of the local desk.
Industry:Culture
