Book picks similar to
A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 by Matt Garcia
history
non-fiction
chicano-studies
nonfiction
Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism
Thomas E. Patterson - 2013
Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong. Information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. Public opinion and debate suffer when citizens are misinformed about current affairs, as is increasingly the case. Though the failures of today’s communication system cannot be blamed solely on the news media, they are part of the problem, and the best hope for something better. Patterson proposes “knowledge-based journalism” as a corrective. Unless journalists are more deeply informed about the subjects they cover, they will continue to misinterpret them and to be vulnerable to manipulation by their sources. In this book, derived from a multi-year initiative of the Carnegie Corporation and the Knight Foundation, Patterson calls for nothing less than a major overhaul of journalism practice and education. The book speaks not only to journalists but to all who are concerned about the integrity of the information on which America’s democracy depends.
Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
David M. Oshinsky - 1996
Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary was the grandfather of them all, a hellhole where conditions were brutal. This epic history fills the gap between slavery and the civil rights era, showing how Parchman and Jim Crow justice proved that there could be something worse than slavery.
Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia
James L. Watson - 1997
What are the cultural implications of this phenomenal success? Does the introduction of American fast food undermine local cuisines, many of them celebrated for centuries? Does it, as some critics fear, presage a homogeneous, global culture? These are but a few of the questions confronted in this engaging study that vividly demonstrates how the theories and techniques of anthropology can be used not only to examine obscure peoples and exotic practices, but to shed light on the motivations and behavior of people conducting their daily lives in some of the major population centers of the world.Earlier studies of the fast food industry have emphasized production, focusing on labor or management. This book takes a fresh approach to the industry by concentrating on the perspective of the consumer. It analyzes consumers' reactions to McDonald's in five East Asian cities: Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo. What do they have to say about McDonald's? How is fast food perceived by those who pay to eat it? How do their preferences and biases affect the system of production?The book argues that McDonald's has largely become divorced from its American roots and become a "local" institution for an entire generation of affluent consumers in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo. In Beijing, the process of localization has barely begun, with consumers more interested in the experience of eating at McDonald's than in the food itself. In Seoul, many nationalists treat the Big Mac as a symbol of Yankee imperialism; meanwhile, increasing numbers of Korean children are celebrating their birthdays atMcDonald's.Localization is not, however, a one-way process; the corporation has also had to adapt in order to flourish in new settings. The book demonstrates how consumers, with the cooperation and encouragement of McDonald's management, have transformed their neighborhood restaurants into leisure centers, afterschool clubs, and meeting halls. The contributors pay special attention to the effects of these activities on family organization, education, and socialization, and conclude that it is no accident that the fast food boom corresponds to the rise of a child-centered consumer culture in East Asian cities.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Carolyn Finney - 2014
Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the great outdoors and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces. Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
Kevin M. Kruse - 2005
Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, however, so many whites fled the city for the suburbs that Atlanta earned a new nickname: "The City Too Busy Moving to Hate."In this reappraisal of racial politics in modern America, Kevin Kruse explains the causes and consequences of "white flight" in Atlanta and elsewhere. Seeking to understand segregationists on their own terms, White Flight moves past simple stereotypes to explore the meaning of white resistance. In the end, Kruse finds that segregationist resistance, which failed to stop the civil rights movement, nevertheless managed to preserve the world of segregation and even perfect it in subtler and stronger forms.Challenging the conventional wisdom that white flight meant nothing more than a literal movement of whites to the suburbs, this book argues that it represented a more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, Kruse demonstrates that traditional elements of modern conservatism, such as hostility to the federal government and faith in free enterprise, underwent important transformations during the postwar struggle over segregation. Likewise, white resistance gave birth to several new conservative causes, like the tax revolt, tuition vouchers, and privatization of public services. Tracing the journey of southern conservatives from white supremacy to white suburbia, Kruse locates the origins of modern American politics.
Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation
Estelle B. Freedman - 2013
elections confirms that it remains a word in flux. Redefining Rape tells the story of the forces that have shaped the meaning of sexual violence in the United States, through the experiences of accusers, assailants, and advocates for change. In this ambitious new history, Estelle Freedman demonstrates that our definition of rape has depended heavily on dynamics of political power and social privilege.The long-dominant view of rape in America envisioned a brutal attack on a chaste white woman by a male stranger, usually an African American. From the early nineteenth century, advocates for women's rights and racial justice challenged this narrow definition and the sexual and political power of white men that it sustained. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, at the height of racial segregation and lynching, and amid the campaign for woman suffrage, women's rights supporters and African American activists tried to expand understandings of rape in order to gain legal protection from coercive sexual relations, assaults by white men on black women, street harassment, and the sexual abuse of children. By redefining rape, they sought to redraw the very boundaries of citizenship.Freedman narrates the victories, defeats, and limitations of these and other reform efforts. The modern civil rights and feminist movements, she points out, continue to grapple with both the insights and the dilemmas of these first campaigns to redefine rape in American law and culture.
Fruit Infused Water - 80 Vitamin Water Recipes for Weight Loss, Health and Detox Cleanse (Vitamin Water, Fruit Infused Water, Natural Herbal Remedies, Detox Diet, Liver Cleanse)
Patrick Smith - 2014
Also known as vitamin water, it allows you to replace sodas, juice and other sugary beverages with healthy drinks that are just as delicious.In the fruit infused water handbook, you will find zero-calorie, low cholesterol recipes that boost your metabolism and help you lose weight. In addition, there are many recipes that help clean and cleanse the body of toxins. They are great in combination with liver detox programs and any detox diet. Also, if you have an interest in natural herbal remedies, this is a way to use herbs to your benefit in a simple way. Fruit Infused Water Can Replace Any Soda Here is a brief overview of what’s inside:
80 fruit in fused water recipes for weight loss and health
25 vitamin water recipes that boost your metabolism
25 fruit infused water recipes perfect for the gym and summer
30 fruit infused water recipes with detox properties that are perfect for detox cleanses, liver detox and more
No sugars, low cholesterol, no calories, no alcohol
Natural herbal remedies in the form of water
Much more!
As a health coach with a passion for fitness and nutrition, fruit infused water has accompanied me for a long time. Vitamin water is perfect for losing weight and getting nutritional contents at the same time. They also make a great counterpart to smoothies, not to mention how delicious they look. A glass pitcher filled with a mixture of water and fruits is an exotic thing to serve on parties and always gets a lot of attention. Would You Like To Know More? Get this book and join thousands of people that already use these vitamin water recipes to lose weight and live healthy lives. Today only, this book is on sale! Get it before the price goes back up to $4.99! Scroll to the top of the page and click the buy button to instantly download this book to your pc, mobile device or Kindle -----Tags: coconut oil,detox diet, detox cleanse, fatty liver, liver cleanse, 10 day detox diet, liver detox, fruit infused water, vitamin water
Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics
Ronald Brownstein - 2021
Los Angeles that year, in fact, dominated popular culture more than it ever had before, or would again. Working in film, recording, and television studios around Sunset Boulevard, living in Brentwood and Beverly Hills or amid the flickering lights of the Hollywood Hills, a cluster of transformative talents produced an explosion in popular culture which reflected the demographic, social, and cultural realities of a changing America. At a time when Richard Nixon won two presidential elections with a message of backlash against the social changes unleashed by the sixties, popular culture was ahead of politics in predicting what America would become. The early 1970s in Los Angeles was the time and the place where conservatives definitively lost the battle to control popular culture.Rock Me on the Water traces the confluence of movies, music, television, and politics in Los Angeles month by month through that transformative, magical year. Ronald Brownstein reveals how 1974 represented a confrontation between a massive younger generation intent on change, and a political order rooted in the status quo. Today, we are again witnessing a generational cultural divide. Brownstein shows how the voices resistant to change may win the political battle for a time, but they cannot hold back the future.
What Makes Sammy Run?
Budd Schulberg - 1941
He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.
Unreal Estate: Money, Ambition, and the Lust for Land in Los Angeles
Michael Gross - 2011
Jackson, Sly Stallone, Richard Zanuck, and relatives of an Indonesian dictator and Saudi Arabia’s king). He then flashes back to the creation of this fabled district, built on dusty lima bean fields and carved out of the rugged impassible mountains between the city and the sea. Using the century-long evolution from adobe huts to $100 million mansions as the baseline of the story, he reveals how a few powerful and often ruthless oil and railroad magnates imposed their idyllic vision of the good life on the Los Angeles landscape to create the legendary communities known as the Platinum Triangle. Gross goes on to give vivid, riveting accounts of the most lavish of the many lavish houses that started springing up almost immediately (with only a brief slowdown during the Depression). But the stories of these homes are just a window onto the lives of their owners and occupants over the course of the twentieth century, and onto the bigger story of a people and a storied region that have become, in Gross’s words, “the Mecca of self-invention.” As one might imagine, there is a truly glittering cast of characters. Apart from the many Hollywood stars who have passed through these houses—Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Harold Lloyd, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, George Hamilton, Tony Curtis, Cher, to name just a few—you will meet decadent Spanish land-grant families, desperado oilmen and railroad titans, the country’s first all-powerful corporate legends, con men and pyramid schemers, porn magnates, and Arab potentates, not to mention contemporary tabloid luminaries from the worlds of business and entertainment. Taken altogether, their stories read like a cross between Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood Babylon, and Gross’s own 740 Park—with a little of the film Chinatown thrown in too. Los Angeles provides Michael Gross with his broadest canvas yet; Unreal Estate will surprise, fascinate, and most of all entertain you with a story you don’t know about a place you think you do.
In the Country of Women
Susan Straight - 2019
After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at weekly driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight―and eventually her three daughters―learned the stories of Dwayne’s ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and gumption of women pushing onward―from Switzerland, Wisconsin, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan―those who become your family. She and Sims divorced after their third daughter was born, but he lives nearby and the family has remained close. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.
Diversity Beyond Lip Service: A Coaching Guide for Challenging Bias
La'wana Harris - 2019
Please read this book and help create workplaces with honest engagement and access for all." --Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Executive Coach and two-time #1 Leadership Thinker in the worldThe ugly truth about diversity is that some people worry they must give up their power for others to have a chance. La'Wana Harris's Inclusion Coaching method helps people realize that sharing power isn't the same as losing it.The elephant in the room with diversity work is that people with privilege must use it to allow others equal access to power. This is often why diversity efforts falter--people believe in diversity until they feel that they have to give something up. How do we talk them through this shift?La'Wana Harris introduces Inclusion Coaching, a new tool based on cutting-edge research that identifies the stages of preparation, implementation, and "self-work" necessary to help individuals, teams, and organizations build a sustainable culture of inclusion. Harris's six-stage COMMIT model--Commit to courageous action, Open your eyes and ears, Move beyond lip service, Make room for controversy and conflict, Invite new perspectives, and Tell the truth even when it hurts--provides a proven process for making people aware of their own conscious and unconscious biases and concrete steps to make inclusion an embedded reality.Harris offers managers and diversity coaches new models to empower everyone from employees to CEOs to "do" inclusion and address deep-rooted biases that are often invisible. She addresses the growing need to challenge bias and build authentic cultures where everyone can feel a sense of belonging.
Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America
Vegas Tenold - 2018
But in the last few years, that has all changed. Their racially-motivated violence has been on open display at rallies in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Pikesville, Phoenix, and Boston. In response to economic grievances, anger over the presidency of Barack Obama and the visibility of Black Lives Matter, and egged on by the rhetoric of Donald Trump, membership is rising and national politicians are giving validation to these groups. One young man has emerged as a powerful figure: Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Workers Party, who was once labeled the "Little Führer" by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Heimbach believes that cross burning and fight-ridden conventions are a waste of time. He understands political power, and has organized a coalition of white nationalists to bring these groups into the mainstream. Everything You Love Will Burn gives readers a front-row seat at violent white supremacist conventions, newly formed separatist communities, and backroom meetings with Republican operatives. We meet a neo-Nazi lieutenant and his daughter in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay; a bubbly, twenty-something Klanswoman in Tennessee; and a solemn skinhead recruit in Georgia, and learn about why they've tied their fates to these movements. By turns frightening and fascinating, Everything You Love Will Burn shows us the future of hate in America.
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice
Patricia Bell-Scott - 2016
The first lady appeared one day unannounced, behind the wheel of her car, her secretary and a Secret Service agent her passengers. To Murray, then aged twenty-three, Roosevelt’s self-assurance was a symbol of women’s independence, a symbol that endured throughout Murray’s life.Five years later, Pauli Murray, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring writer, wrote a letter to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt protesting racial segregation in the South. The president’s staff forwarded Murray’s letter to the federal Office of Education. The first lady wrote back.Murray’s letter was prompted by a speech the president had given at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, praising the school for its commitment to social progress. Pauli Murray had been denied admission to the Chapel Hill graduate school because of her race.She wrote in her letter of 1938: Does it mean that Negro students in the South will be allowed to sit down with white students and study a problem which is fundamental and mutual to both groups? Does it mean that the University of North Carolina is ready to open its doors to Negro students . . . ? Or does it mean, that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes, that again we are to be set aside and passed over . . . ?Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to Murray: I have read the copy of the letter you sent me and I understand perfectly, but great changes come slowly . . . The South is changing, but don’t push too fast. So began a friendship between Pauli Murray (poet, intellectual rebel, principal strategist in the fight to preserve Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, cofounder of the National Organization for Women, and the first African American female Episcopal priest) and Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady of the United States, later first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women) that would last for a quarter of a century.Drawing on letters, journals, diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and interviews, Patricia Bell-Scott gives us the first close-up portrait of this evolving friendship and how it was sustained over time, what each gave to the other, and how their friendship changed the cause of American social justice.
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss - 2013
They ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, almost none of which comes from salt shakers. It comes from processed food, an industry that hauls in $1 trillion in annual sales. In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how this happened. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century--including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more--Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research. He goes inside the labs where food scientists use cutting-edge technology to calculate the "bliss point" of sugary beverages or enhance the "mouth feel" of fat by manipulating its chemical structure. He unearths marketing techniques taken straight from tobacco company playbooks to redirect concerns about the health risks of products. He talks to concerned executives who explain that they could never produce truly healthy alternatives to their products even if serious regulation became a reality. Simply put: the industry itself would cease to exist without salt, sugar, and fat.