The book on societey : "Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology"

Description
RACE, CLASS, AND, GENDER, includes many interdisciplinary readings. The author's selection of very accessible articles show how race, class, and gender shape people's experiences, and help students to see the issues in an analytic, as well as descriptive way. The book also provides conceptual grounding in understanding race, class, and gender; has a strong historical and sociological perspective; and is further strengthened by conceptual introductions by the authors. Students will find the readings engaging and accessible, but may gain the most from the introduction sections that highlight key points and relate the essential concepts. Included in the collection of readings are narratives aimed at building empathy, and articles on important social issues such as prison, affirmative action, poverty, immigration, and racism, among other topics.

About the Author
Margaret L. Andersen (B.A., Georgia State University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is the Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the co-editor of the best-selling anthology, RACE, CLASS AND GENDER, Sixth Edition (Wadsworth, 2007; with Patricia Hill Collins), author of THINKING ABOUT WOMEN: SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SEX AND GENDER, Seventh Edition (Allyn and Bacon, 2006); SOCIOLOGY: THE ESSENTIALS, Fourth Edition (Wadsworth, 2007; also co-authored with Howard F. Taylor), and UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY: AN INTRODUCTORY READER, Second Edition (Wadsworth, 2004; co-edited with Kim Logio and Howard F. Taylor). She is a recipient of the University of Delaware’s Excellence-in-Teaching Award and the College of Arts and Science Distinguished Teaching Award, former president of the Eastern Sociological Society, and chair of the National Advisory Board for the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, where she has been a visiting professor. She has received the American Sociological Association Jessie Bernard Award (2006) for broadening the horizons of sociology to include the study of women and has also received the 2004-2005 SWS Feminist Lecturer, an award given annually to a social scientist who has made significant contributions to the study of women in society.

Patricia Hill Collins is Wilson Elkins Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of numerous articles and books including BLACK SEXUAL POLITICS: AFRICAN AMERICANS, GENDER AND THE NEW RACISM (Routhledge, 2004) and BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT: KNOWLEDGE, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE POLITICS OF EMPOWERMENT (Urwin Hyman 1990; Rothledge, 2000) which won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her forthcoming book is FROM BLACK POWER TO HIP HOP: RACISM, NATIONALISM, AND FEMINISM (Temple University Press, 2005).

Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates

Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates

Description
Bringing together the classic statements on social stratification, this collection offers the most significant contributions to ongoing debates on the nature of race, class, and gender inequality.

American Social Classes in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Review: By Christopher W. Chase "Christopher W. Chase"

Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers" is a well known compendium and analysis of the nature and development of social classification during the 1950's-a period marked by explosive growth of the U.S. economy, especially among young white families. The thesis of the book, as explained by Packard, is that rather than the creation of a largely classless society in which "all" were gaining the benefits of democratic capitalism, the creation of an "affluent" society simply highlighted and created new stratifications, both horizontal, and vertical, of social class based on race, religion, behavioral and consumptive practices.

Packard sought to demonstrate his thesis by compiling and synthesizing then current sociological studies, as well as conducting informal interviews among members of various economic classes, policy experts, and professionals in different cities, towns, and states. There is little in the book that represents original thought, but the form, promotion and style of the book made it a best-selling nonfiction work among the general public.

It was precisely these qualities that drew so much ire from many critics, especially those drawn from the circles of New York intelligentsia-it was often attacked for its own pretense to provinciality and romanticism of an agrarian, frontier past. The Status Seekers nonetheless stands as a significant work in American Studies, precisely because of its ability to bring scholarly information, especially regarding the vertical stratifications of race and religion, to bear on the nature of class in America, and stands out as a dissenting voice in the consensus ideology and politics of containment that ruled public discourse at the time. Other criticisms of the book, such as the charge that it portrayed status seeking voyeuristically and hypocritically--- insofar as buyers used it to advance their own status---- are charges more appropriate to the willingness of the buying public to commodify and use as a tool any weapon in the fight to gain greater status. While books are meant to be read, conveying information about such timely topics is bound to get caught up in the politics of the very phenomenon studied. That is not Packard's fault.

There are other criticisms, more from a contemporary standpoint, that could be made of Packard's work. It is true that he took from conservative liberalism a predisposition to see affluence as the problem, rather than the lack of it for so many people within the society he studied. It is also true that he played more to the prejudices of the day, especially regarding race and gender, and failed to aggressively question some of the roots of the problems he sought in terms of these prejudices. But the point of his text was not to make a critique of American institutions as such, but rather the interpretations of those institutions as held and manipulated by consumers for their own benefit.

On the one hand, we should chalk this up to Packard's Cold War liberalism. Moreover, as pointed out in the excellent introductory essay by Daniel Horowitz, Packard was once a socialist radical, but experienced the realpolitik of Stalin's Soviet Union negotiations with Hitler, and correctly understood the USSR as a form of state capitalism (much like C. L. R. James). It would be worst sort of ex post facto presentism to hold these sorts of criticisms too hard against Packard.

Christopher W. Chase - PhD Fellow - Michigan State University

Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective

Review: By Midwest Book Review

Social Stratification In Sociological Perspective is a college-level treatise on social issues affecting class, race and gender appears in its second edition to discuss the evolving field of stratification. College students will find a survey of stratification research, with articles in different sections examining the field and its broader issues and controversies. This comprehensive reader may well serve as a classroom text on the topic for sociology courses.

Editorial Reviews
Review of Radical Political Economics
"Grusky's book is unique.... It is an active text forcing the essays out of an intellectual vacuum and into an environment where they are up against other essays with differing view points.... A service to the complex field of stratification research, whether for the beginning student, where it serves as an excellent introduction to the field, or for the more experienced individual, where it can serve as a top-notch reference.... Highly recommendable."

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Review: By Renee Thorpe
Bitingly witty and embarassingly well focused look at the main classes within American society.

Yes, there is an American aristocracy, but they aren't driving around in Ferraris or living in Beverly Hills. There is even a sort of aristocracy amongst the working class people whom Fussell generally refers to as proles.

Fussell's sharp eye has found and catalogued an amazing array of signs that indicate class in America. Try to spot these signs at your next social gathering, or even subject your own living room to the survey at the end of the book (frighteningly accurate way to determine one's class)!

This is a book based on pigeon-holing people, and that is probably what most annoyed readers can't stand about Fussell. But class distinctions do exist, like 'em or not. The middle class hope to rise in class by sending their kids to Harvard or Yale, the Proles hope to do the same by getting more money. Lucky "X Class" people don't give a hoot about such climbing, and fortunately more of us are just veering sideways into that final category which Fussell charts as a kind of class alternative.

Actually, the book could also be a helpful guide to those with a need to temporarily masquerade as a member of a given class... Unfortunate but true that you will get better service at a jeweler's or other tony shop if you dress not so much "up" but into the highest class you can accurately manage. And if you want to blend in at the truck stop, there are plenty of hot tips to be gleaned from this book.

Yes, yes, we should best judge each other only by virtues like honesty and willingness to help, but the book is about class, that dazzling (and now not so mysterious) thing.

Not without the odd mistake (I argue that books piled around the living room are not so much a sign of the upper class as an intellect), it is an excellent, juicy

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Race and American Culture)

Description
The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism.

Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language.

At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself.

Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.

Review

"All readers...will be hard-pressed to deny North's revisionary insight for twentieth-century literary studies: black dialect as performance is an unrecognized bridge between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. With North's generative paradigm, we can examine the movements together in new ways."--American Literature
"[A] long overdue study....This may be the most significant rereading of traditional American modernists in years."--South Atlantic Review
"Michael North's new book makes an indispensable contribution to the study of transatlantic modernism....Of the many recent attempts to historicize modernism, North's stands out as what will surely become an enduring model of literary and sociological analysis."--Novel

American English: Dialects and Variation (Language in Society)

Review
“This book has become a staple in the study and instruction of American English… The second edition provides the same balance of detail, clarity, breadth and sophistication offered by the first edition, but with an improved organization and up-to-date information. It is clear that the authors took seriously the task of revising and updating this new edition so that its users could enjoy the maximum benefits of its structure and contents. They will be pleased to know that their efforts were not in vain. The book will undoubtedly continue to be used as one of the key texts in the instruction of American dialects for many years to come.” Journal of Sociolinguistics

"This is an indispensable book, not just for students but for anyone who wants to know how the English language varies in the United States and how this variation has been studied… It is comprehensive, comprehensible and dense with detail." Language in Society (of the previous edition)

"The strengths of the book include its style and the authors’ consideration of how the book might actually be used as a text… the chapters are divided into subsections with helpful headings; exercises calling for creative responses by students are scattered throughout… each chapter ends with a short annotated bibliography for further readings." Language (of the previous edition)

Description
This book provides a very readable, up-to-date description of language variation in American English, covering regional, ethnic, and gender-based differences.


* contains new chapters on social and ethnic dialects, including a separate chapter on African American English and more comprehensive discussions of Latino, Native American, Cajun English, and other varieties,

* includes samples from a wider array of US regions

* features updated chapters as well as pedagogy such as new exercises, a phonetic symbols key, and a section on the notion of speech community

* accessibly written for the wide variety of students that enrol in a course on dialects, ranging from students with no background in linguistics to those who may wish to specialize in sociolinguistics

The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)

Description
In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

Review: By Miguel B. Llora

The Interpretation of Culture by Clifford Geertz is concerned with articulating a particular view of what culture is, what role it plays in social life, and proposes a methodology with which it should be studied. Geertz posits that culture should not be seen as a science in search of law but instead as an interpretation in search of meaning. "The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical. But this pronouncement, a doctrine in a clause demands itself some explication" (p5)

In part 1, Geertz begins with "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture". This, the first essay in the series explains the complexity of culture and what it is. Geertz explains his semiotics when he writes: "To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action - art, religion, ideology, science, law, morality, common sense - is not to turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean realm of deemotionalized forms: it is to plunge into the midst of them. The essential vocations, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said." (p30) In part 2, Geertz explores different dimensions of culture. Culture is a "template" or "program". As individuals, we learn it then modify it. Geertz fails to explain how these templates come to be and be modified but posits that they become "common sense" of Platonic propositions and continue to be so. "In attempting to launch such an integration from the anthropological side and to reach, thereby, a more exact image of man, I want to propose two ideas. The first of these is that culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns - customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters - as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms - plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call "programs") - for the governing of behavior. The second idea is that man is precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such as cultural programs, for ordering his behavior." (p44) Part 3 centers on religion. Part 4 is the "thickest" sets of essays including "Ideology As a Cultural System" and "The Politics of Meaning". In chapter 8, Geertz identifies what he sees as the phenomenon of ideology and how ideology is vilified as a space for something that is epistemologically "Other". "That the conception of ideology now regnant in the social sciences is a thoroughly evaluative (that is, pejorative) one is readily enough demonstrated. "[The study of ideology] deals with a mode of thinking which is thrown off its proper course,"" (p196)

The final section part 5 is where is all come together for me. The last portion is his examination of Levi-Strauss and Geertz's "breaking through the veil" in "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." I will deal with the latter first then tackle what I see as his inability to see merit in the universals. As if transported by some form of deja vu, I "feel" Geertz when he wrote about suddenly being part of the milieu. In "The Cerebral Savage: On the work of Claude Levi-Strauss" Geertz takes apart Levi-Strauss and his humanistic/scientific project. Geertz sees this form of inquiry as bankrupt as anthropologists have "...taken refuge in bloodless universals". (p5). Geertz elaborates on this premise in his critique of Levi-Strauss and his work in "Tristes Tropique". Coming out in a generation that was starting to reflect on "how" they were writing rather than "what" they were writing about, Geertz's critique is a reflection on Levi-Strauss' lack of self reflexivity. In a move that parallels Foucault's in "The Order of Things", Geertz begins his anti-humanist attack on a less reflective mode of writing that, on the inside causes epistemic violence and on the outside is naive and self delusory. "In Levi-Strauss' work the two faces of anthropology - as a way of going at the world and as a method for uncovering lawful relations among empirical facts - are turned in toward one another so as to force a direct confrontation between them rather than (as is more common among ethnologists) out away from one another so as to avoid such a confrontation and the inward stresses which go with it. This accounts both for the power of his work and for its general appeal. It rings with boldness and a kind of reckless candor. But it also accounts for the more intraprofessional suspicion that what is presented as High Science may really be an ingenious and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend a metaphysical position, advance argument, and serve a moral cause." (p346-347). I agree with Geertz and Foucault with regards to the complexity and need to effect a "thick" description. However, much can still be learned from that scientific/humanist Man centered project. The Enlightenment and its project has been credited for the wonderfully contradictory le mission civilastrice which accord to Fanon is such a contradiction in that the ideology that places man at the center, is responsible for so much killing. If Levi-Strauss is doing the same thing theoretically, then he is complicit in this move to reinforce placing Man at the center and to submit us to its results. With Geertz and Foucault we can hopefully find a more "enlightened" middle ground.

Miguel Llora

Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology

Description
More than any other anthropological subdiscipline, economic anthropology constantly questions and debates the practical motives of people as they go about their daily lives. Tracing the history of the dialog between anthropology and economics, Richard R. Wilk and Lisa C. Cliggett move economic anthropology beyond the narrow concerns of earlier debates and place the field directly at the center of current issues in the social sciences. They focus on the unique strengths of economic anthropology as a meeting place for symbolic and materialist approaches and for understanding human beings as both practical and cultural. In so doing, the authors argue for the wider relevance of economic anthropology to applied anthropology and identify other avenues for interaction with economics, sociology, and other social and behavioral sciences. The second edition of Economies and Societies contains an entirely new chapter on gifts and exchange that critically approaches the new literature in this area, as well as a thoroughly updated bibliography and guide for students for finding case studies in economic anthropology.


About the Author
Richard R. Wilk is professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University. Lisa C. Cliggett is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky.

Review: By William A. Brown

Wilk begins his theoretical survey of economic anthropology with a review of the debate that spurred the birth of the field: the debate between the "substantivists" and the "formalists" during the 1950's, '60's, and early '70's. Wilk contends that, while some of the points made by both factions are valuable and deserve revisiting, each camp in effect argued past the other because of their shared mistaken belief that their respective viewpoints represented conceptually integrated, mutually exclusive wholes. The argument eventually sputtered out rather than came to a definitive conclusion, Wilk says, because this fundamental mistake fed into a series of ever-more-intractably convoluted polemics, but also because other issues (for example the emergence of applied anthropology) caused economic anthropologists to shift their interests toward other pursuits.

Wilk then divides the body of economic anthropological literature into three groups according to three major outlooks on human motivation. Unlike the case of the substantivists and the formalists, he maintains, these three are conceptually integrated and mutually exclusive: 1) humans are motivated by self-interest; 2) humans are motivated by an intrinsic sociability; or 3) humans are motivated by deeply ingrained, culturally instilled morals or values. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Wilk also suggests that each school of thought may share some themes or dimensions in common with the others, and he discusses the work of two anthropologists who have employed all three models in hybridized or eclectic fashion.

The dominant undercurrent of Wilk's survey is a deep dissatisfaction with the fractured state of economic anthropological scholarship. The field remains fractured along these party lines, he says, because each takes certain fundamental propositions about human nature on faith rather than testing them. One consequence appears to be that each perspective seems to work out well enough only some of the time, there being copious counterexamples for each (not to mention those cases which might be just as well explained by one perspective as by another). The conflicted and fractured academy will remain so, he says, so long as each perspective's core concepts are held in such high, unimpeachable esteem.

I agree with Wilk that many of these allegedly self-evident and ergo unimpeachable presuppositions are in fact quite easily felled by well-known ethnographic data. I also agree that most or all explanation should rely on empirical testing. But I believe that Wilk goes to far in reviving the bad faith of the 19th and 20th century positivists (I find Karl Popper's expression to be the most articulate and historically informed of the positivists . . . a fact which also makes him the most articulate advocate of positivist bad faith, as pointed out by Thomas Kuhn): like the positivists, Wilk seems to insist that the epistemological veracity of every single proposition that we make about anything must lie in our ability to successfully hold it up against empirical testing, yet also like the positivists, he fails to recognize that this relentless policy of testing the hell out of every possible statement must also undercut our very ability to test because it must also bring under inspection any and every conceivable descriptive lexicon we use to formulate our empirical observations (whether linguistic or graphic).

Put differently, there can be no proposition rooted in empirical observation if there are not also propositions whose veracity has nothing to do with empirical observation; the descriptive lexicon or apparatus must remain a prerequisite of empirical observation, testing, and scientific explanation, not the subject of its inquiry. And from an epistemological standpoint, admitting that every empirical investigation begs certain conceptual associations is a far better option than being incapable of even formulating a simple descriptive proposition, or capable only of semantically unstable, eclectic corpus of statements; we must be comfortable with the fact that conceptual implications are an inescapable, incontrovertible side-effect of every descriptive apparatus, that we can derive an awful lot from even the simplest descriptive statement without ever having to qualify ourselves empirically.

The real problem of science, then, is striking a balance between maintaining a descriptive lexicon and choosing one which is immune from empirical falsification.

Unfortunately, though, Wilk acts in positivist bad faith. His "social-temporal" grid, ostensibly conceived to sidestep the dogmatic behavior of the factions he spends most of his book critiqueing, lands him in the same basic sort of activity. He also makes other dogmatic statements about human motivation while discussing the grid: "People want their acts to be ambiguous and hard to pin down; they may want to conceal their motives even from themselves." (150) But doesn't "want" fall into the same basic semantic domain as "motivation"? In the end, Wilk's descriptive apparatus turns out to be as endowed with conceptual baggage as do any of the schools he critiques, the main difference being that he is blind to his own presuppositions.

I don't mean to ride Wilk too roughly on this point. There are many excellent dimensions to the book, central among them being his contention that most of the major arguments in economic anthropology center around the issue of human motivation. Also, while the book is not a textbook in the conventional sense, it will immerse the reader in a survey of anthropological history comparable to Marvin Harris' "The Rise of Anthropology," both in terms of its breadth and its critical depth (though nowhere near as voluminous). I must also confess that I find Wilk's social-temporal grid to be more capable of doing what it is intended to do -- describe -- than any apparatus conceived by any of the other major schools of thought, exactly because it covers the broad variation of human motivations presumed not to exist by those other, more exclusive schools of thought. Yet I cannot keep with Wilk's epistemological bad faith; unlike Wilk, I am quite conscious of the presuppositional nature his descriptive grid, and as a pragmatist I am willing to accept the implications of whatever it might imply.

American Cinema/American Culture

Description
Ideal for Introduction to American Cinema courses, American Film History courses, and Introductory Film Appreciation courses focused on American Film, this text offers a cultural examination of the American movie-making industry, with particular attention paid to the economic and aesthetic institution of Hollywood.

Review : By C. Burkhalter
Years ago I took an intro-level film class at a community college. This was the text for the class. It was accompanied (at least in my class) by a PBS video series that combined film clips with interviews and historical information. Going into the class I had little more than a passing interest in film and film history. But after taking that class, my passion for film has grown exponentially with each year. But back to the book, I really liked this book and highlighted my way from the front cover to the back cover. There are of course limitations to this book. Firstly, it deals only with American films. Secondly, this book barely breaks the 300-page mark - hardly a comprehensive volume. You aren't going to get any information on John Cassavetes here or anything. Now if you have a chance to use this book in conjunction with the PBS films, I think you'll do much better (in fact I think the vids even give a nod to Cassavetes), but even then please note that this material is for an INTRO-level film class, and won't be much good for someone who already knows a fair amount about American film. But with that in mind, the book still has a lot to offer someone looking to introduce themselves to film history.

The first third of the book starts with the birth of film, moves quickly on to the Hollywood studio system, and walks us through the basics of film style (camerawork, lighting, editing, etc.). The second third covers the basics of film genre; there is a chapter about film noir, one on comedies, one on war films, and one on westerns. This second section was particularly useful to me. I could read each chapter, jot down a list of promising titles, hit my local video store, and I was good to go. The third section covers American film after World War II. In this section things seem a little compressed. 110 pages for 50 years of film? A lot is lost on the cutting room floor. But there's lots to dig into all the same. There's a chapter on Hollywood during the McCarthy years (yikes!), one on film's evolution during the emergence of television, a chapter on 1960s counterculture films, one on the film school directors of the 1970s and 1980s, and finally a pretty weak chapter on film in the 1990s. Oh yeah, and at the end of the book there's a handy glossary (in case you're ever stuck on what point-of-view editing is) and a pretty thorough index.

Again, not a book for someone who already has a good feel for film history. But definitely a great resource for someone new to film studies, or for someone who has trouble finding a movie at Blockbuster on Fridays. It did a great job getting me excited about movies, and I imagine its done the same for others.... A good companion to this text (or possibly an all-out replacement of it) is Scorsese's VHS/DVD, "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies."

Fundamentalism and American Culture (New Edition) (Paperback)

Product Description
Many American's today are taking note of the surprisingly strong political force that is the religious right. Controversial decisions by the government are met with hundreds of lobbyists, millions of dollars of advertising spending, and a powerful grassroots response. How has the fundamentalist movement managed to resist the pressures of the scientific community and the draw of modern popular culture to hold on to their ultra-conservative Christian views? Understanding the movement's history is key to answering this question. Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.
For Marsden, fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives; they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight. In Marsden's words (borrowed by Jerry Falwell), "a fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something." In the late nineteenth century American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. By the 1920s a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches and changing mores in the culture. Building on networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and missions agencies, fundamentalists coalesced into a major protest movement that proved to have remarkable staying power.
For this new edition, a major new chapter compares fundamentalism since the 1970s to the fundamentalism of the 1920s, looking particularly at the extraordinary growth in political emphasis and power of the more recent movement. Never has it been more important to understand the history of fundamentalism in our rapidly polarizing nation. Marsen's carefully researched and engrossing work remains the best way to do just that.


Review: By Jacob Aitken

The thesis of this book parallels that of George Marsden's similar book on American culture, Religion and American Culture, that Fundamentalism shaped and was shaped by the surrounding culture. Marsden builds upon the work of earlier historians of Fundamentalism, namely that of Ernest Sandeen's book The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism. Sandeen's thesis is that Fundamentalism is the outgrowth of the "millenarian" movement that developed in late nineteenth-century American, especially through Bible institutes and conferences concerning the interpretation of biblical prophecies. Sandeen's thesis, according to Marsden, has much to commend it in connecting millenarianism and Princeton theology to the movement; however, it does not deal adequately with the militant anti-modernistic slant of the movement. Fundamentalism can briefly be defined as militant anti-modernist Protestantism that took on its own identity as a patchwork coalition of representatives of other movements.
Overview of the Book
Marsden divides his book into three sections (these sections are different in intent than the above themes. Marsden uses these sections to expand on his themes), Evangelicalism before Fundamentalism, the Shaping of Fundamentalism as a Movement, and the Crucial Years in which it gained popularity and its subsequent exodus of public life. In understanding the rise of Fundamentalism at the end of the nineteenth-century one must understand the backdrop from which it arose-nineteenth-century evangelicalism.
Conclusion
Marsden concludes the book by re-emphasizing his definition of Fundamentalism as a militant anti-modernist conservative force. For Marsden this should be the starting point for defining the movement. Militant anti-modernism applies to all types of Fundamentalism and any definition that goes beyond this must have qualifiers so that false stereotypes are not applied to the wrong group. As an Evangelical I enjoyed this book as I saw where the mind-set of conservatives and liberals developed. I also learned to what extent my own beliefs were influenced by this movement. I suggest that this book be read alongside another book on the shaping of American Christianity for a full understanding. I would also like to see an analysis of Fundamentalism from a more mainline perspective, although I believe Marsden is objective in this work. My main qualm with this book is in Part Three. In discussing the peak and soon-to-come fall of Fundamentalism, Marsden tried to put too many ideas into too few words. To keep up with him I had to re-analyze several chapters. However, due to the length of the book already, I can understand his attempt to save space. I would recommend this book to people of all political and religious persuasions so that they may have a fair understanding of this branch of early twentieth-century American religion.

American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture (3rd Edition)

Book Info
Popular cultural reader focuses on the traditional mainstream values that have attracted people to the United States for well over 200 years and traces the effect of these values on American life. Paper. DLC: English language - Textbooks for foreign speakers. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture, Third Edition, by Maryanne Kearny Datesman, JoAnn Crandall, and Edward N. Kearny, focuses on the traditional values that have attracted people to the United States for well over 200 years and traces the effects of these values on American life.

Chapter themes include diversity, the family, education, government and politics, religion, business, and recreation. Cross-cultural activities --- from discussion topics to writing projects --- encourage high-intermediate to advanced students to compare their own values with those discussed in the readings.

New to the Third Edition:

* Expanded pre-reading exercises preview the chapter content and Academic Word List vocabulary.
* Improve Your Reading Skills helps students become independent readers.
* Build Your Vocabulary features collocations and exercises that expand on the Academic Word List.
* New Internet activities offer opportunities for further research and study.

The Twilight of American Culture

From Publishers Weekly
American culture is in crisis, argues Berman, pointing out that "millions of high school graduates can barely read or write"; "common words are misspelled on public signs"; "most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens"; and "40% of American adults [do] not know that Germany was our enemy in World War II"--never mind that most students don't even want to learn Greek or Latin. Berman's lament that "like ancient Rome [American culture] is drifting into an increasingly dysfunctional situation" at first makes his book seem like a neoconservative treatise along the lines of the late Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. But Berman, who teaches in the liberal arts masters program at Johns Hopkins University, doesn't locate the cause of this malaise in multiculturalism or postmodernism, as Bloom did (although he is no fan of either one), but rather in the increasing dominance of corporate culture and the global economy, which he claims creates a homogenous business and consumer culture that disdains art, beauty, literature, critical thinking and the principles of the Enlightenment. Berman's provocative remedy is to urge individuals who are appalled by this "McWorld" to become "sacred/secular humanist" monks who renounce commercial slogans and the "fashionable patois of postmodernism" and pursue Enlightenment values. While Berman's eclectic approach often makes for engaging reading, his quirky and almost completely theoretical solutions are unlikely to galvanize many readers. Agent, Candice Fuhrman. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com
"If you have finally had it with CNN and Hollywood and John Grisham and New Age 'spirituality,' then pull up a chair, unplug your phone (beeper, TV, fax machine, computer, etc.), and give me a few hours of your time. I promise to do my best not to entertain you."

A slightly forbidding introduction to a book, but indicative of its author's disgust at the homogenized McWorld in which we live, and an enticing challenge to read on. As the title The Twilight of American Culture suggests, Morris Berman's outlook is somewhat bleak. Analogizing the contemporary United States to the late Roman Empire, Berman sees a nation fat on useless consumption, saturated with corporate ideology, and politically, psychically, and culturally dulled. But he believes that this behemoth--what Thomas Frank called the "multinational entertainment oligopoly"--must buckle under its own weight. His hope for a brighter tomorrow lies in a modern monastic movement, in which keepers of the enlightenment flame resist the constant barrage of "spin and hype." Ironically, despite his disdain for "the fashionable patois of postmodernism," he approvingly quotes poststructuralist theorist Jean-François Lyotard's maxim "elitism for everybody" in describing this cadre of idiosyncratic, literate devotees, these new monks.

Berman is plainspoken and occasionally caustic. The Twilight of American Culture is an informed and thought-provoking book, a wake-up call to a nation whose powerful minority has become increasingly self-satisfied as their stock options ripen, while an underclass that vastly outnumbers the e-generation withers on the vine and cannot locate itself on any map. It is a quick and savage read that aims to get your eyes off this computer, your nose out of that self-help book, and send you back to thought and action. --J.R. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Society

Society is a grouping of individuals which is characterized by common interests and may have distinctive culture and institutions. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society may be a particular people, such as the Saxons, a nation state, such as Bhutan, or a broader cultural group, such as a Western society.

According to a sociologist Richard Jenkins, addresses a number of important existential issues facing people: How humans think and exchange information – the sensory world makes up only a fraction of human experience. In order to understand the world, we have to conceive of human interaction in the abstract (i.e., society).

Many phenomena cannot be reduced to individual behavior – to explain certain conditions, a view of something "greater than the sum of its parts" is needed. Collectives often endure beyond the lifespan of individual members.

The human condition has always meant going beyond the evidence of our senses; every aspect of our lives is tied to the collective (Society, 2008. par.1-4).