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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
While the reputation and power of the US as a high-tech industrial and post-industrial power permeates imagery and actions at home and abroad, the US economy has long had firm foundations in agricultural production for domestic and foreign sales. Agricultural exports totaled more than $60 billion annually in the late 1990s, while the export of knowledge and technology also reinforces the global status of American agribusiness.
While agriculture is linked ideologically to the family farm and rural life or small-town values, since the Second World War, production has been dominated by corporations characterized by larger landholdings and supply networks, industrial and scientific management techniques, vertical integration, global ties and government support. In 1992, only 2.4 percent of American farms produced more than $500,000 in sales, but this accounted for 46 percent of all farm sales. Associated with these industrial farms and ranches are corporate suppliers, research institutions (commercial, government and state universities) and lobbyists.
Corporate agribusiness responsible to stock-holders has created tight controls within American production in which a handful of businesses can control beef production or Cargill, Continental and Archer Daniels Midland control three-quarters of grain exchanged globally. These companies, in turn, become powerful voices in policy-making in the US, through lobbying and party contributions. The links of production and distribution in large conglomerates also limit markets and possibilities for independent farmers and, in turn, for consumers. Chicken production, for example, has been reshaped through assembly-line controls dominated by mega-companies that render chickens immobile while they are stuffed with special foods, supplements and even pink contact lenses (that help unstressed growth). In this context, free-range or organic chickens emerge as elite alternatives of production and taste.
Such huge and concentrated farming creates conditions for environmental problems beyond their reliance on chemical fertilizers, insecticides and, controversially genetically engineered crops. More that two-thirds of all hogs, for example, come from farms of more than 1,000 heads. This concentration became disastrous as 1999 floods in North Carolina spilled their wastes into the state water system.
Agribusiness has been a source of debate concerning government subsidies and favoritism, environmental issues and, in the late 1990s, the long-term health effects of genetically engineered crops (which make producers dependent on companies each year for new seeds). Yet this industry also supplies the US and the world with abundance and choice at low prices that challenge simple questions of quality versus quantity or monopoly versus artesanal farm production. In both regards, agriculture and agribusiness, while constantly changing, promise to remain at the center of US economics, politics and lifestyles for generations to come.
Industry:Culture
Telecommunications refers to communication that involves and surmounts distance. In addition to telephony, the term includes electronic communication via media such as radio, telegraph, television, computer (coupled with a modem connecting it to the Internet), facsimile machines and newer forms of telephony such as cellular or digital telephones.
Information that is telecommunicated can be cast out in the form of voice, symbols, pictures, digital data, or some combination of these. A telecommunications system includes a transmitter, a receiver and a channel of communication—air, water, cable, satellite, telephone wire, broadband technologies. As the economy becomes increasingly post-industrial, in the so-called information economy, the speed and efficiency of transfer of messages becomes a crucial objective in the running of institutions and the profitability of electronic exchange. Telecommunications is thus a huge business nationally and globally, with geopolitical ramifications.
Although the telephone is not the sole instrument for telecommunications, it has become the predominant form. It is the cornerstone of modern two-way communication.
The telephone is accessorized by the answering machine or voice-mail systems so that increasingly it is more difficult to speak with another live person on the phone, while at the same time it is rare to get a busy signal or unanswered phone. Alternate forms of message exchange, such as electronic mail or e-mail, that use telephone lines but send written text from a computer have become increasingly popular for both business and non-business purposes.
With the dawn of new technologies, the familiar telephone is undergoing a monumental transformation, in which it is becoming an intelligent, multimedia center. As newer forms of telecommuting emerge, the phone becomes a companion: the modem is a medium between computers and telephone lines transforming digital data into analog information; video conferencing too requires the use of the telephone. No doubt, in its new, advanced form, the telephone will facilitate interactions between and among people, machines, content, financial transactions, shopping, entertainment and games. Thus, it is essential that the telephone and other networked terminals like the fax machine, cellular phone, and personal and business computers are easy for the user and profitable for manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer. With the advance of computer technology, increasingly people’s activities on the computer and telephone can be traced, raising concerns on issues of privacy and big-brother surveillance.
With the Communications Act of 1934 and the legislation that set up the FCC, telecommunications was established as a regulated and official industry although the telephone and the telegraph had long been part of the American technological landscape.
One objective of this Act was to create an affordable, universal telephone service for the American people. As a result, AT&T was chosen to monopolize the industry (RCA/NBS continued its dominance of radio). Under the protection of the federal government, it became the dominant telephone company (“Ma Bell”) and still exerts a tremendous influence even after the government broke up the monopoly in 1984 (creating “Baby Bells”). The trend was reversed in the 1990s, when AT&T bought big cable operators, like Media One, and multi-national mergers of telecommunication firms were common.
Investors in the twenty-first century bet that telecommunications will assert its role in the exchange of information and commerce.
Industry:Culture
Washington, DC, the capital of the United States, has become increasingly central to American culture in the postwar period as the federal government has grown in size and power. Once almost universally described as a “sleepy Southern” town, Washington, DC was often viewed dismissively well into the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy, for example, quipped that the city was the worst of all worlds, a city of “Northern charm and Southern efficiency” But, by the 1990s, Washington, DC boomed: the population of its metropolitan area had quadrupled to more than 4 million since the 1950s (although the city itself had been losing population since 1950). It had incontestably become one of the nation’s leading media centers (especially for political journalism and commentary) and became a headquarters for corporate associations (which increasingly needed to lobby the government). Its monuments and museums, such as those of the Smithsonian Institution, had become cultural icons and meccas for domestic and international tourists. Its universities had gained in stature and prominence (in part because of access to the media) and its arts community expanded: the Kennedy Center strove—largely unsuccessfully—to be a national center for the performing arts. The city and suburban population became more diverse as an expanding government attracted workers from more parts of the nation and as refugees—Vietnamese, Central American, Ethiopian— and immigrants began to move to the area. Even its economic base became more diverse as biotechnology firms formed near the National Institutes of Health in the Maryland suburbs and as the Internet spawned high-technology industry in its Virginia suburbs.
By the 1990s, Washington, DC and its inhabitants were more likely to be resented than dismissed—a resentment often expressed through the contemptuous phrase “inside the Beltway.” The phrase, popularized by Reagan conservatives in the early 1980s, suggests that Washingtonians—particularly politicians, federal employees and lobbyists—are cut off from the “real world” and have no sense of the problems faced by and the values cherished by, the rest of the nation. (The Beltway is the interstate highway loop, I-495, which, since the 1960s, has circled the city. The metropolitan population is indeed statistically wealthier and better educated than the national average.) But official Washington, DC has been only part of the city’s public face and private existence. The city’s tortured history of race relations has also been part of its reputation and its contribution to postwar culture. The population of Washington, DC proper had long been overwhelmingly minority and African Americans accounted for about twothirds of the city’s population in 1990. While Washington, DC had begun officially desegregating in the 1950s—before other Southern cities—its residential and social patterns as well as its politics continued to be racially polarized through the 1990s.
Washington, DC was a center of local black civil-rights activism throughout the 1960s, as well as host to such central civil-rights events as the 1963 March on Washington.
Racial tensions boiled over in 1968 when two days of rioting followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. As many as 20,000 Washingtonians participated in the riots, which led President Lyndon Johnson to call out federal troops, who occupied the city for a week. The riots killed twelve people, caused about $15 million in damage, led many businesses and residents to quit the city and left blocks of the city in ruins, some of which were still evident at the end of the 1990s.
Race relations hit another low in 1990 when Washington Mayor Marion Barry was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a drug bust. While Barry was a controversial figure even in the black community many of his supporters viewed the bust as a concerted attack against a black with political power. Barry’s arrest brought increased national attention to the city’s drug problem, which had led the city to have the highest murder rate per capita in the country in the late 1980s.
Barry’s arrest also set back the cause of “home rule.” For most of its history Washington, DC had been governed by Congress, increasing racial tensions as white members of Congress oversaw a largely black populace. Washington, DC was unable to cast electoral votes until the ratification of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution in 1961. In 1974 Congress granted limited “home rule,” allowing Washingtonians to elect a mayor. Barry’s arrest killed any immediate chances that “home-rule” powers would be expanded.
Racial conflict—the aspect of local Washington, DC most apparent to the nation as a whole—was only part of the story of black Washington, DC though. While Washington, DC had long had a thriving black middle class, black prosperity expanded after the 1960s as desegregation and affirmative action enabled blacks to benefit from the expanding number of government and private jobs. However, the black middle class often moved out of the city especially to Maryland’s once rural Prince Georges County which became a predominantly black suburb.
Industry:Culture
Term used for people with ancestry in Spain or Latin America. Sometimes used (as in the census) to avoid classifications of race or ethnicity although clarifications of these issues or national origin may be appended. A similar category is Hispanic surname, which avoids all these issues in a singular category (evoking problems in mixed marriages as well as for Asians, Italians, Germans and others who have come through Latin America to the US).
Industry:Culture
Term popularized by Richard Linklater’s 1991 film about “twenty-somethings” in Austin, TX, the term underscores the diminished expectations of Generation X. This is evident in underdeveloped careers and questions about family and society yet is coupled with an ability to consume media and other commodities. Many have questioned this broad generalization as well as its localization of issues in a group of people rather than their social, economic and cultural context.
Industry:Culture
The stern edifices and high security control of penal enclosure seem, in many ways, antithetical to the promises of any American dream of freedom, opportunity and even new beginnings. Yet, a staggering investment of more than $36 billion annually in the construction of prisons and the care of prisoners and the sheer human “storage” of nearly 2 million men and women in jail suggests prisons nonetheless have become central features of early twenty-first century American culture. Indeed, rates of imprisonment in the US are higher than any country except Russia and far exceed rates that preceded the Second World War. This has stimulated intense debates over the nature of crime and control (including capital punishment and its efficacy or juvenile justice and gangs), divisions of race and class that are reified by this system and the meaning and rights of prisoners within American life. At the same time, prisons have also become businesses, whether as private investments, outsourced by governments or as vital components of the economies of depressed localities competing for new construction and jobs.
American prisons have emerged from a variety of jurisdictions and philosophies.
Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, for example, incorporated Quaker reflection and individual solitude into a panoptic model. Other prisons represented the needs of small towns and burgeoning industrial states as well as military and federal security.
Some names became legendary in history as well as mass media—Sing Sing, Leavenworth, Alcatraz, Attica.
Such mass imprisonment has not been shown to have a clear causal relationship with reduced crime. Yet, prisons also reflect attitudes about crime, especially given demographic and ideological shifts in American cities and society since the 1960s. Rules imposed for the drug wars—“three strikes and you’re out”—have resulted in mandatory sentences for the accumulation of minor offenses that have clogged prisons. Critics have argued that minor possession and sales offenses focused on crack have also fallen especially hard on minority populations. African American males in major cities face high probabilities of arrest and imprisonment that scar generations—between 1986 and 1995, the number of African Americans convicted of drug offenses rose 811 percent.
Here, we must also worry that prisons reproduce crime—60 percent of those released will be back in three years.
Prisoners have also constituted an awkward category in American society—deprived of rights for voting, gun ownership, etc. even after release, depending on state laws.
Federal decisions in the 1970s increased rights of education, legal counsel and activities for prisoners and forced reform of outmoded, overcrowded and unsanitary jails. Supreme Court decisions at the end of the twentieth century allowed states to curtail these rights.
Moreover, as prisons become private corporations, efficiency and cost-effectiveness replace rights.
Many in America realize that prisons do not work to curtail crime, which has declined in conjunction with economic growth. Yet, as a decentered system embodying competing political, social and cultural interests, it is not clear if prisons can be readily changed to participate in rather than reject the American dream.
Industry:Culture
The most popular of a series of “role-playing” games first released widely in the mid-1970s, Dungeons and Dragons is particularly appealing to teenage boys who seek an outlet for their creativity as well as a means of escape from the travails of adolescence.
Moderated by a “Dungeon Master” with access to the game’s detailed rules and reference books, Dungeons and Dragons creates a portrayal of middle Earth populated by warriors and wizards, in which players play the parts of heroes of their own imaginings. The complexity of the game and its level of realism sometimes inspires players to act out their parts, and leads to accounts, some themselves more hysterical than authentic, of young people who have become entranced by the game.
Industry:Culture
The Southwest region includes New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah, southern Nevada, and the adjoining parts of Colorado, Texas and California, mingling Native Americans, Hispanics and waves of European American immigration. Although the Southwest, more than many other US regions, connotes a coherent regional style in architecture, food and other aesthetics, the meanings of the Southwest have varied over time. From an early association with the “primitive” West of “wild Indians,” to the tranquil vacation destination of the 1950s, to its current association with the border and retirement communities, the Southwest remains a touchstone for what is essentially American.
The romance of the early Southwest attracted nineteenth-century collectors of antiquities and pot-hunters alike, whose influence remains clear today in the development of Native American crafts industries. The status of Native Americans as subjects of a colonizing state was clear in the early ethnological and archaeological explorations among the pueblo dwellers funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the concessions given to mining companies such as Peabody Coal, despite the fact that the reservations of the Navajos, Hopis and Zunis are sovereign territories. Early visitors also established discourses of the region, talking about both Native Americans and the colors and forms of deserts and mountains.
In the postwar years, the desert Southwest grew as a destination for American families on vacation, lured by the Grand Canyon and the last reminders of the frontier, evident in abandoned mines, ghost towns and places like Tombstone, Arizona. Roadside attractions like the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo (Texas) and trading posts, natural phenomena like the Petrified Forest and historical sites such as Los Alamos (New Mexico), Santa Fe, the alleged UFO landing site at Rosewell (New Mexico), Native American reservations and missions from San Antonio (Texas) to the California coast all pulled in tourists. Like the road movie, the family driving vacation along western highways, including Route 66, has produced enduring images of the neon-lit motor courts and the station wagon as symbols of American freedom, family values and leisure.
The monumental landscape of the Southwest also figured significantly in the romantic imagination of North Americans in literature and film. The red rocks of Monument Valley evident in John Ford westerns such as The Seekers (1956) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), suggested not only the desolation and wildness that was the American West, but the epic proportion of human struggles there. This evocation of the West as a lonely place in which to hide, where freedom and danger were mixed, remains a theme in more recent films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kïd (1969) and Thelma and Louise (1991); the quest also underpinned television’s 1960s series Route 66. The landscapes and intersecting peoples of the desert Southwest also have inspired popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Hillerman and Leslie Marmon Silko.
As the industrial Northeast declined, the Southwest grew into the Sunbelt, attracting an influx of rich white North Americans to planned retirement communities like Sun City and poor South and Central Americans to its transient-based service economy Early predictions of a massive movement of people from the Rustbelt to the burgeoning Southwest have not been entirely borne out, although Phoenix, the largest city in the region, proved popular as a vacation and conference site. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the Southwest also became a mecca for those seeking an alternative lifestyle.
Inspired by writers such as Carlos Castañeda, young whites moved to Tucson and northern New Mexico. The New Age movement is the heir to this earlier migration; mystical places like Sedona, Arizona continue to draw those interested in harmonic convergences and holistic healing.
The contemporary Southwest is also organized by the border, which produced a mixed population including white retirees, ranchers, entrepreneurs, transient white laborers, Mexican cross-border workers, Native Americans, a Chicano underclass and a Mexican American middle class, among others. Pockets of Hispanics, descendants of the original Spanish land grantees, can also be found. African Americans remain under-represented.
This hybridity is clear in the development of the distinctive Southwestern architecture, cuisine and culture: Southwest style.
The architecture of the Southwest, for example, spans Navajo hogans and Hopi pueblos, retirement cities and condo complexes. The architectural style that characterizes the region, often referred to as Santa Fe style, is based on traditional single-story adobe houses with saguaro cactus rib-ceilings. Modern home construction now produces pink, orange and pastel versions of these houses all over the Southwest. The frequent inclusion of ornamental ladders reminiscent of those found in pueblos indicates increasing commodification, while the saguaro cactus is now an iconic design element. Art and architecture have become kitsch in the Southwest, where Navajo turquoise jewelry vies with painted wooden coyotes wearing kerchiefs and howling at the moon. The artistic richness of Georgia O’Keefe is now overlaid with the prolific paintings of Amado Peña, known for his prints of Native American and Latina women depicted with pottery and/or children. Native American crafts have also been subjected to the mass marketing and production which have degraded local artisanal values while simultaneously producing a Southwestern “look” across the US.
Food in the Southwest shows the influence of cross-border traffic and a longstanding hybrid cuisine of Native American and Latino traditions. Tex-Mex refers to the spicy blending of border foods that has led to chili with beans and meat, the use of guacamole and sour cream and the success of Taco Bell as a franchise. Navajo tacos, made with Navajo fry bread rather than tortillas, also show the creative mixing of ingredients and cooking styles found in the Southwest. What is generically referred to as “Mexican food” includes many variations, from Tex-Mex to the Sonoroan home-style cooking with its carne asada and salsa verde. The national ubiquity of salsa attests to the widespread appeal of the hybrid cooking coming out of the Southwest.
The turbulence produced by the border is clear not only in aesthetic hybridity but in regional politics. The Southwest often has been characterized by the conservative, libertarian politics of white politicians like Barry Goldwater, who exemplified the western individualist’s rejection of federal government intervention. Yet, issues of ethnicity historical memory bilingualism and illegal immigration (captured in John Sayles’ Lone Star, 1995) have worked to consolidate a more liberal, Latino political consciousness. A radical political tradition associated with the Tucson-based Earth First! was inspired by the radical environmentalism of Edward Abbey in his Desert Solitaire (1968). Environmental politics also focus on water—the Southwest has been particularly shaped by disputes over saline water in the Colorado River system, treaty obligations to Mexico and largescale water projects like the Hoover Dam and Lake Powell. The relevance of these border politics to the rest of the country is clear in the controversy surrounding NAFTA.
Industry:Culture
Term originally popularized in Britain in the mid-1960s and 1970s, when working-class neighborhoods in London began to be renovated to provide new sources of housing for middle and upper-class residents, thereby displacing or threatening to displace long-term, lower-income households. As property values in particularly thriving urban centers like London, New York City, NY, Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA continue to rise, gentrification has become more common as inner-city neighborhoods are reclaimed for higher-income occupants. The term and phenom-enon itdenotes became particularly pronounced in the 1980s and 1990s in the US and in Europe, as strategies to revitalize aging urban centers were implemented in cities now characterized by post-industrial economies based on a burgeoning service sector and geared towards attracting suburban and out-of-town tourists. Increasingly industrial buildings and older types of housing are being rehabilitated to appeal primarily to young, urban professionals, forcing workingclass and poor families out of neighborhoods that have become newly desirable due to their housing stock or their proximity to downtown. In Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. (1988), anthropologist Brett Williams provides an ethnographic perspective on neighborhood change; Neil Smith’s The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996) discusses gentrification as an integral feature of late capitalism and the turn towards neoliberal social policies.
Gentrification has also spawned a number of urban social movements in which residents have banded together to attempt to resist being displaced from their communities.
Industry:Culture
While the Nobel prizes were established by Alfred Nobel’s will in 1896 to honor outstanding invention, literary work or “work for fraternity among nations,” like the Olympics, they have also taken on implications of national competition and prestige in a century of laureates. While the United States has dominated in sciences since the Second World War, the Nobel prizes as a whole offer an interesting representation of global recognition of American prowess and position; in the last prize established— economics—the US has averaged one laureate per year since the award’s creation in 1969. Within the United States, moreover, the laureates also participate in institutional competition among elite colleges: for example, the economics prize has consistently recognized professors at the University of Chicago, Harvard, MIT and Yale. Moreover, laureates have sometimes banded together to exercise their authority: fortyfour laureates sought a speedy end to Vietnam in 1970, while seventy laureates at work in California in 1974 protested the inroads of scientific creationism in schools.
Prior to the Second World War, nonetheless, acknowledgement of Americans and Americanbased researchers proved scant. United States citizens won their earliest recognition as peace laureates, recognizing efforts of mediation and global organization by US presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, 1906; Woodrow Wilson, 1919) and Secretaries of State (Elihu Root, 1912; Frank Kellogg, 1929). As America became a global power stage, officials were honored less frequently, although the Nobel committee recognized three further Secretaries of State: Cordell Hull (1945) for work in the UN; George Marshall (1953) for plans to rebuild postwar Europe (1953); and Henry Kissinger (1973) for negotiation of Vietnam peace agreements—an award some Americans found distasteful. Instead, the modern Nobel Peace Prize has recognized American women and minorities who have stood outside the construction of foreign policy including the African Americans Ralph Bunche (1950) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964), peace activists Jane Addams (1931) and Emily Balch (1946); and Jody Williams (1998), who has organized a global campaign against landmines. Other Peace awards recognized chemistry laureate/activist Linus Pauling (1962) and immigrant Elie Wiesel (1986) for his documentation of the Holocaust.
In literature, American recognition came more slowly Novelist Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate in 1930, followed by playwright Eugene O’Neill (1936) and novelist Pearl Buck (1938). After the war, émigré T.S. Elliot received the prize in 1948, followed by Southern novelist William Faulkner (1949). Thereafter, prizes have shifted from archtypically white male American authors—Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962) and Saul Bellow (1976)—to more diverse voices, including Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), émigré poet Joseph Brodsky (1987) and African American novelist Toni Morrison (1993).
In sciences and medicine, as Harriet Zuckerman notes in her Scientific Elite (1977), the evolution of American recognition has been more dramatic. Prior to the Second World War, more than 25 percent of all laureates were German; Americans received no prizes in medicine and physiology until 1933. Between 1945 and 1976, however, more than half of all laureates were American-based, although this included a sizeable immigrant population as well as American-born researchers. Since Zuckerman’s study, the intensity of investment in sciences has tended to substantiate continuing American domination of scientific categories: more than half of all chemistry awards in the 1990s, for example, went to scholars working in the US, although their origins ranged from Mexico to Egypt to Hungary; physics shows a similar pattern. In addition, many of those considered highly eligible have American affiliations each year.
This research hegemony is also contested among schools who publicize laureates among their faculty alumni and passing researchers. Thus, Harvard, MIT, Yale, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology the Rockefeller University and the California State system reaffirm their superiority as research institutions (and their possibility of producing further laureates). Yet, laureates have also been associated with CUNY, Washington University and the University of Houston.
This recognition can also be read in terms of changing interests as well as investments and power. In this sense, a more regular pace of Americans in literature or peace prizes represents America participating in global systems as partner and interlocutor, while scientific awards represent an American agenda and the wealth of the American century.
Industry:Culture
