University of California Press Blog

Ed Sullivan's America

This week, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a feature of Gerald Nachman's Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan's America. The Chronicle's Regan McMahon interviewed Nachman in Oakland, where Nachman grew up, and weaves together the author's own story with that of Ed Sullivan's groundbreaking show. "Nachman astutely examines the show as a cultural watermark, something that united the country as nothing has before or since...", McMahon says.

As a television critic for the San Jose Mercury News, Nachman's first review was of the Ed Sullivan Show. "I packed the review with wisecracks," he recalls in the book. Nachman (above, at a book launch party hosted by friends) characterizes primordial TV as a grey and dismal entity, shrouded in the shadow of radio and Hollywood, and the Ed Sullivan show as a kind of revolution, a catalyst not only for TV's initial success, but for popular culture across America: "Sullivan's show was something beyond even what it first envisioned for itself: it became the great equalizer, relentlessly democratic, cutting across all age, class, cultural, and ethnic boundaries..." he says in the book. It was the place for aging stars and new talent, and and harnessed the social changes that were transforming the country, entertainment, and celebrity. And it brought people together—as Sullivan and McMahon both point out, the Ed Sullivan Show drew 47 million viewers on a weekly basis in 1955, compared to 35 million who watched the American Idol finale in 2008.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle article, A Toast to Bygone Era of 'Ed Sullivan Show'

Listen to an interview with Gerald Nachman on our podcast page

Bryant Simon on the Starbucks Promise

Starbucks took hold so quickly and opened stores in so many places so fast that we learned to characterize a place as with Starbucks or without it—as part of the stream of American life or far outside it. As the ubiquitous green disk promised a decent—if expensive—cup of coffee, the Starbucks sign also became for its patrons a mythic symbol of community and belonging. And then, just like that, stores began to disappear. To understand what was happening, Bryant Simon traveled around the world visiting Starbucks after Starbucks after Starbucks. Probing beyond the trendy barristas, dozens of movie references, and millions of hits on Google, what Simon discovered about Starbucks can tell us a lot about America.

In an interview last week, Simon spoke to Public Radio's Here and Now about his research and his book, Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks. Simon finds that while Starbucks at first seemed to fulfill desires for identity and culture, over time, "people aren't seeing the same cultural values, and they go increasingly for utility, a place to sit, or just the quickest caffeine fix." He discusses how the Starbucks brand is changing as consumers increasingly value the local, sustainable, and inexpensive.

Listen to the Here and Now interview: "What Does Starbucks Say About America?"

Listen to the UC Press podcast with Bryant Simon.

Read Bryant Simon's Red Room blog.

Bryant Simon on Coffee Culture

When Starbucks first started out, a $4 coffee was virtually unheard of. However, as Bryant Simon observes in Everything but the Coffee and on his Red Room blog, $4 at Starbucks went farther than just a morning wake-up—it bought admission into an elite world. There, you were not just another lowly worker who needed a boost to get through the day. Instead, reflected in the glass of the pastry case was a person interested the arts, global issues, and the environment, a cultured person of values and standards—and carrying a Starbucks cup broadcast this to the world. Suddenly our coffee said something about us, and who wants to be a lonely single espresso when you can be a tall extra-hot flavorful macchiatto? People bought the idea—and the coffee, and Starbucks soon popped up around the globe. Simon finds that, far beyond building brand loyalty, Starbucks reached into the hearts and souls of its customers to build emotional and social bonds with them, and fulfilled deep unmet needs for community, status, and identity. Simon also explores how Starbucks' popularity contributed to its decline in cultural cachet, and how it is working to reclaim its status and meet the needs of a new generation of consumers. Continue the conversation with Bryant Simon on his Red Room blog.

The Living Legacy of West Virginia Coal Mining

Ever since companies began extracting coal from the West Virginia hills, coal mining has been a way of life in many parts of the state. Generation after generation of miners descended into the earth in the morning and emerged again at twilight, covered with coal dust. This work fueled the American economy for many decades, but it also inflicted deep wounds on the region. Protesters have campaigned against the environmental costs of mining methods like mountaintop removal, including a recent high-profile protest during which actress Daryl Hannah and others were arrested, putting West Virginia coal mining in the international spotlight.

There are human costs as well, and according to West Virginia University’s Dr. Michael Hendryx, these costs far outweigh the economic benefits to the region. On June 26, Steve Curwood, host of the Public Radio International program Living on Earth interviewed Hendryx, the author of a new study that assesses the economic toll of coal mining on a community. Hendryx's research in West Virginia shows that 10,000 excess deaths occur per year in mining areas than in non-mining areas. He estimates that the actual dollar value per year of those lost lives is between $42 and $80 billion, while the coal industry brings only about $8 billion yearly to the region. The study attributes these excess deaths to higher rates of poverty, environmental exposures, and pollution in mining communities. Listen to the interview and read a transcript at the Living on Earth website.

In a region long defined by the coal industry, mining work is increasingly hard to find, as new methods require fewer workers. In some areas, left economically crippled by the changing times, life is marked by chronic poverty, that passes through the generations like the mining jobs once did. Ken Light and Melanie Light, in the documentary tradition of James Agee and Walker Evans, visited West Virginia's forgotten towns and rambling hills, interviewing and photographing the people there. The Lights collected stories from retired miners, a city mayor and a coal industry employer, a snake handler, a grandmother who supported her family by restoring and reselling discarded items, and other remarkable residents of all perspectives and backgrounds. In their book Coal Hollow, the people of the West Virginia coal mining legacy tell their own stories, in their own voices, and together they paint a stark and moving living history. This video segment includes some of the striking images from the book, an interview with photographer Ken Light, and indigenous music and interview excerpts recorded by Melanie Light.

Pop L.A. Wins 2009 Eldredge Prize

Cécile Whiting's book Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (2006) is the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2009 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. The annual prize honors an American art book, published in the past three years, that exhibits outstanding research and craft and expands the realm of traditional art scholarship. Pop L.A. succeeds with "impeccable yet adventurous research, which invites a reconceptualization of pop art and opens a discussion about a region and a period that needed further exploration," the Smithsonian said.

In the sixties, Los Angeles was in the depths of awkward adolescence; it was a nebula of suburbs searching for an orbital center, aware that it was different but unsure exactly how. Critics dismissed L.A.'s art scene as the superficial sister of the New York art world, a sun-drenched haven of popular culture where artists went to waste time. Cécile Whiting shows how artists like David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Llyn Foulkes, Allan Kaprow, and Dennis Hopper defied these clichés and transformed the city from formless void into a distinct artistic and urban environment. Whiting examines "Pop" as a sense of place rather than an art style, and reveals how L.A. artists were connected not by the gallery but by their surroundings: the beach, the mountains, the highways, the dilapidated buildings and suburban sprawl, the sun glaring off a billboard, the scratch-the-surface world of Hollywood. By reimagining and representing the many faces of Los Angeles in their work, artists inked over the city's penciled outline and built its enduring urban identity.

The Eldredge Prize carries a $3,000 award, and the winner presents the annual Eldredge Prize Lecture. Whiting will deliver the 2009 lecture, titled "California War Babies: Picturing World War II in the 1960's," on December 3 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Previous Eldredge Prize winners from UC Press include Rebecca Zurier's Picturing the City, Elizabeth Johns's Winslow Homer, David M. Lubin's Shooting Kennedy, Anthony W. Lee's Picturing Chinatown, and The Great American Thing, by Wanda Corn.

Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture

Allison J. Pugh is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia. Pugh's latest book, Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture was published by UC Press in February 2009. For more information on Pugh and work, please visit her website and her blog, Care Work Live. In her blog entry below, she talks about how recent economic woes effect parental spending.

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By: Allison J. Pugh

Apparently, the age of consumption is over.  Time Magazine is proclaiming this the era of the New Frugality.  The New York Times conducted a poll reporting that 71 percent of Americans say they've cut back on luxuries.  The Wall Street Journal contended there was "good reason" to believe that America's turn to thrift will outlast the recession.

To be sure, the recent economic dislocations are profound.  There is no doubt that many people are cutting back where they can.  But what counts as "luxuries"?  What are viewed as the basics, the fundamental priorities for a strapped budget?  What is consumption for, anyway?

For the children I observed for three years in Oakland, Calif., spending on things as mundane as GameBoys or Magic cards served as critical markers of belonging in their social worlds.  Had they seen that recent movie the girl sitting nearby just mentioned?  Could they talk about that kind of Lunchable, what came on the tray, what it tasted like?  Had they been to Marine World? Kids continually had to negotiate their way in and out of conversations that formed a sort of "economy of dignity," a system of fleeting moments of belonging.

What did they do when they did not own or had not experienced whatever everyone else was talking about?  Most children had multiple strategies for handling those incidents, strategies that I explore in my book Longing and Belonging.   While they could manage those difficult moments, however, children up and down the class ladder also disliked them intensely as felt instances of deprivation.

Parents felt the ensuing pressure, and in most cases, even under dire economic conditions, responded by making sure children had what they needed to participate in the social world at school.  I visited with one mother who bought her daughter a full bedroom set, even though she herself was sleeping on the floor.  Even when financial necessity forces parents to reshuffle creditors, they often put their child's desires first.

At the same time, when parents talked to me about their buying habits, what they reported was not quite as straightforward as those news reports of cutting back on "luxuries" suggest.  Affluent parents would tell me how little they bought, maintaining that they were not materialistic or spendy.  Low-income parents would tell me how much they bought, how they could really take care of their child's needs and desires.  Both seemed to view their kids' consumer desires as the psychological need to be normal.  Is that a "luxury"?  Only to those few parents who actually did resist, who had the convictions or biographies that inured them to the social risks of their children's difference from others, risks that their children bore on their own at school or in the neighborhood.

We don't know exactly how most American households will respond to the changing economic tides, where they will reduce, where they will not.  The spending data are not yet in, despite the trend pieces and poll data.  But without change in the root causes of spending on children -- the risks and fear of difference, the paramount importance of commodities in determining normalcy, and thus belonging -- parents may be reserving the New Frugality for themselves while for their children resorting to some of the Old Consumerism.

The 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

Steve Waksman is Associate Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. In January 2009, UC Press published his latest book, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. For more information on the author and his book, please read his blog, The Metal/Punk Continuum. In the interview below, he talks about music and the special, 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

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1) What is the meaning of the anniversary?

The anniversary is an occasion to look back on the connection between rock music and the counterculture of the 1960s.  In part, it’s an opportunity to recall a lot of great music and musicians, some of whom are no longer with us anymore, such as Jimi Hendrix, and some of whom are still very much with us, such as Carlos Santana and Neil Young.  But it’s also an opportunity to think about the ways in which rock music, or any form of music, can create a sense of collective purpose.  To what extent did the roughly half a million people who attended Woodstock share a common social or political vision?  To what extent was their connection grounded in something more than rock music itself?  These are questions about which it’s easy to be either nostalgic (“We were all one, man!”) or cynical (“Just a bunch of hippies getting high and listening to rock!”).  The real answer to those questions, though, is not a simple one, and it’s something to take seriously, because it has a lot to tell us about how music shapes our values and maybe makes it possible for us to relate to each other in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.

2) What was the significance of Woodstock?

The late cultural critic Ellen Willis described Woodstock as the culmination of a dream of mass freedom that had arisen in the years after World War II and was connected to rock and roll.  Mass freedom meant that people believed they could best achieve their fullest freedom in the context of a group, rather than isolated, as individuals.  At Woodstock, it was precisely the coming together of so many thousands of young people that gave the event its power, and that power was at once symbolic and real.  People there felt a sense of connection, and felt that the connection was tied to something bigger than the fact that there was a big rock festival going on.  It was tied to youth, above all, but it was tied to a particular image of youth as a part of the population who could transform the existing cultural and political order, could potentially create the basis for a culture in which peace was valued over war, in which pleasure was valued over productivity, and in which rules and conventions were not to be followed if they were found to be corrupt.

At the same time, Woodstock also showed, in a less utopian vein, that one could gather enormous crowds of young people together at once and not have a catastrophe follow.  This was an important lesson for the music industry, which at the end of the 1960s was still trying to figure out how best to capitalize on the enormous audience that existed for rock.  After Woodstock, rock concerts grew larger and larger in size; there was less need for festivals after a certain point, because concerts were routinely happening in arenas and stadiums that held thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people.  So Woodstock also contributed to the further incorporation of rock into the profit-making structures of the music industry.

3) What happened to rock music in the years that followed?

Well, most immediately, about four months after Woodstock came Altamont, the large festival outside San Francisco organized by the Rolling Stones, which was marked by some bad vibes due to the presence of a row of Hell’s Angels in front of the stage, and culminated in the widely publicized death of a young black man, Meredith Hunter.  Altamont made the achievement of Woodstock seem to many a fluke, and made crowds of young people seem dangerous again.  The shift from festivals to arena and stadium concerts that occurred in the 1970s was in many ways driven by concerns over crowd control as much as by concerns over profit.  It’s easier to maintain order in a space that’s enclosed and has clear boundaries around it, where people sit in rows.

More broadly, rock’s connection to its young audience changed.  This was partly because some of rock’s audience was no longer so young; people who had come of age through the countercultural years of the late 1960s were now entering their twenties and were looking for music that was still rock but that was more “mature.”  Meanwhile, younger fans were looking for something they could call their own, and so a generation gap of sorts began to emerge within rock rather than between rock and other styles of popular music.  This is where new genres like heavy metal and punk come into play, as forms of rock that are still very much concerned with the relationship between rock and youth, and that try to reimagine what kinds of communal or collective identity rock might create in the wake of the sixties counterculture.  That, in effect, is what my new book, This Ain’t the Summer of Love, is about.

UC Press Podcast Featuring Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter

We are pleased to announce that Episode 16 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In this episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter as they talks about modern day slavery, in their newest book, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at our podcast page.

Listen to an interview with Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter, authors of The Slave Next Door.

Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond

Anny Bakalian is Associate Director and Mehdi Bozorgmehr is Co-Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Bozorgmehr is also Associate Professor of Sociology at the City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Their latest endeavor, was writing Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond, which was published by UC Press in January 2009. Their blog entry below, talks about their inspirations for the book.

By: Anny Bakalian and Mehdi Bozorgmehr

Almost immediately after September 11th, we began receiving calls asking us about the backlash against Middle Eastern communities. We were both troubled by the violence being committed, even against people whose origins weren’t remotely similar to those of the hijackers. The government loudly proclaimed that violence against Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans would not be tolerated. However, for the communities affected, the actions of the government and fellow Americans spoke louder than words.  Unfortunately, many men from these communities were deported, detained without charges, and required to register with authorities. Profiling was widespread and “flying while Muslim” became a liability.

About a week after the attacks, there was a request from the National Science Foundation for research proposals regarding any aspect of 9/11.  We applied within a week, and 24 hours later we received a grant. As anyone who has ever applied for any sort of funding knows, that sort of fast turnaround is unheard of.

After considering our options, we decided the best way to study the backlash would be to talk with the leaders of community organizations, many of whom had become representatives of their populations in the local and national media. We interviewed 75 leaders across the country.  While we had set out to study a backlash, something that has sadly happened at various times in our nation’s history, we began to find that the targeted communities were responding in unprecedented ways. 

Instead of hiding from public attention, organizations representing Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans mobilized to demonstrate their commitment to the United States while defending their rights. They distanced themselves from the terrorists and condemned their actions. They educated the public about the Middle East and the Muslim faith through the media, books and pamphlets, and presentations in churches, synagogues and colleges. They actively involved their constituents in voter-registration, know-your-rights forums, and civic and political integration activities.

Our book tells a story, part of which we didn’t initially expect to be writing. In addition to the backlash committed by both the U.S. government and ordinary citizens, we found ourselves also telling a story of resistance on the part of Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans. In comparison to the treatment of the Germans during WWI and the Japanese during WWII, the post-9/11 backlash was tempered. We believe that the existence of Civil Rights laws and advocates were critical to this outcome. The lesson we wish to draw from our work is that Civil Rights Laws must not be compromised but strengthened to prevent profiling and scapegoating in the future.

UC Press Podcasts Featuring, Jeri Quinzio and Allison J. Pugh

We are pleased to announce that Episodes 11 and 12 of the UC Press podcast series are now available. In February's episodes, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews a sociologist and a food writer.

Jeri Quinzio talks about the history of ice cream in her newest book, Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making. Allison J. Pugh discusses parenting and consumer culture in her book, Longing and Beloning: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture.

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store.  You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at our podcast page.

Listen to an interview with Jeri Quinzio, author of Of Sugar and Snow.

Listen to an interview with Allison J. Pugh, author of Longing and Belonging.