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Comedy resists definition. Some have argued that it is an adaptive strategy providing relief from the tragic or the mundane through laughter. To elicit this laughter, comedy assumes many forms. Types of comedy include slapstick, farce, black comedy wordplay burlesque, satire, vaudeville, situation comedy on television, stand-up comedy clowning, mime, etc. However, some material considered “comedy” may not necessarily induce laughter. Comedy may simply refer to a presentation that focuses on the lighter side of life. In general, the term “comedy” has certain genre connotations, while the term “humor” refers to a comic quality causing amusement, such as dry humor, or buffoonery. Because of cultural assumptions regarding the nature and function of comedy many members of marginalized groups (with respect to race, class, ethnicity or religion) have made their way into the entertainment industry through comedy while the world of serious drama has been harder to penetrate. Women, however, have experienced more difficulty being taken “seriously” as comedians.
Since the end of the Second World War, one of the most important developments in American comedy has been the advent of the situation comedy on television. This form of comedy emerged from a long history of comedy in America—characterized by vaudeville, film comedy (including the silent film comedy of such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd), radio comedy stand-up comedy and variety television shows. Since the introduction of the VCR, video rentals, and cable television in the late 1970s, there has been much crossover between these various comedic venues.
Many of the American comedians who started out with stand-up routines in comedy clubs and then moved on to film and/or television careers have become quite successful.
(Consider the careers of Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Ellen DeGeneres, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Jerry Seinfeld—to name just a few.) Prior to this route, many American comedians started out in vaudeville (George Burns and Gracie Allen, for example, who went on to begin one of the first television situation comedies, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, which ran from 1950–8). Comedian Bob Hope also developed a genre of television specials based on his shows for American troops abroad, rebroadcast on holidays.
Still, there are comedians who are known primarily for certain types of comedy.
Analysts have divided comedians into various types, including social commentators, politicos, observationalists, fringe players, wiseguys, etc. Other notable American comedians of the postwar era include (in addition to those mentioned above): Lily Tomlin, Eddie Murphy, Jackie Gleason, Jim Carrey Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Walter Matthau, Margaret Cho, Jack Benny Billy Crystal, Goldie Hawn, Jim Belushi, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, Jane Curtin, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, David Letterman, Sandra Bernhard, Flip Wilson, Jay Leno, Bill Murray John Leguziamo, Mary Tyler Moore, Spalding Gray Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Cheech and Chong, Roseanne, Steve Martin, Marilyn Monroe, Gene Wilder, Dan Ackroyd, Redd Foxx and Henny Youngman.
Industry:Culture
Comfort food evades precise definitions and descriptions. Described by one restaurant critic as “satisfying stick-to-your-ribs fare” that echoes “simpler times,” and is “informal and ample;” others define it as food with lots of sugar, or more than fifty grams of fat.
Some focus on comfort food’s emotional and curative qualities, claiming that it evokes memories, eases emotional discomfort, alleviates boredom, or soothes upset stomachs.
Definitely not for the calorie-conscious, comfortfood menus might include meatloaf, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits and gravy rice pudding, milkshakes, tuna casserole, grilled cheese, or peanut butter and banana sandwiches on squishy white bread (or congee or miso soup for other ethnic food traditions).
Industry:Culture
Comic strips as serially published, episodic stories with consistent characters appeared in the US newspapers in the late nineteenth century drawing on European traditions of stories, caricature and publication. Comic books as separate publications with independent sales and narrative first drew on established strips. In the 1930s, they became a new genre with different audiences, themes and cultural issues. Despite overlapping form, content and readership, their histories have been differentiated in intriguing ways.
The first American comic strip, the Yellow Kïd, appeared in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal on October 18, 1996. Longer stories developed with strips like the Katzenjammer Kïds and Happy Hooligan, often taking outsiders and tricksters as their long-running heroes. These comics often incorporated ethnic, racial and class stereotypes in slapstick situations that depended on the interplay of word and picture.
Weekday comics followed in the 1900s, and Hearst added the full comics page to his newspapers in 1912, although the page included only four strips. The number of strips offered by competing newspapers grew over the next decades; distribution was soon controlled by syndicates like Hearst’s King Features or the Newspaper Enterprise Association.
Comic strips appeal to a general audience. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today carry none, although the International Herald Tribune makes a selection available to expatriates. In other newspapers, daily funnies and Sunday color sections have grown in pages to become family reading rituals.
The range of comics in contemporary newspapers still covers many themes worked out in early decades—domestic vignettes, adventures, humor with children and animals.
Many strips treat family and office, like the long-running Blondie, Dennis the Menace or Family Circus. Smart pets and children also convey philosophical commentaries in decades of the remarkably creative ensemble of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts; Snoopy earned global popularity. Later, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes evoked the imaginary world of a child and his tiger. Prince Valient and the Phantom seek exotic adventure.
Beetle Bailey offers comedy in an army that never fights, while Dick Tracy has battled generations of bizarre criminals. At the end of the twentieth century some once-popular genres and strips have faded, including soap operas (Mary Worth) and adventure (Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon). Nonetheless, all these narratives convey the idea of material the whole family can read.
One of the areas of greatest change in the postwar era is replacement of ethnic, racial and gender stereotypes that constituted humor in early comics. Many comics still represent white worlds and heterosexual families. Yet Cathy explores the employment, family and dilemmas of a single working woman, while Dilbert has become a symbol of office politics, with clippings taped to cubicles across the nation. Even Blondie, icon of domesticity took a job in the 1990s. Minority characters have appeared in Peanuts and other strips; in the 1990s, newspapers added focused African American stories in strips like Jump Cut and Boondocks.
Other timely specializations include political satire (Al Capp in Pogo, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, Berke Breathed’s strips) and basic surrealism (Gary Larson). These cartoonists target issues and politicians (Doonesbury on gay weddings, media and tobacco, as well as the presidency) for educated, adult readers. Hence, some newspapers have censored strips or moved them to the editorial pages (see editorial cartoons).
Comic books If comic strips began with children and immigrants, comic books began with superheroes. Booklets of reprinted comic strips had appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century but separate stories emerged in the mid-1930s. Detective Comics offered singletheme issues in 1937. In June 1938, Action Comics introduced Superman; within three years, the Man of Steel was selling 1,250,000 copies per month and had crossed over to comic strips as well. The Phantom, Captain Marvel, Batman, Captain America and others followed, with comics booming during the Second World War at home and among GIs, as illustrated heroes fought Nazis and Japanese. These comics also established a format for a mass cultural myth of the dual-identity superhero in the golden age of comics.
Superheroes diminished in popularity after the war, replaced by crime and horror comics sold at drug stores, news-stands and other outlets to children and adolescents.
These new consumers bought 180 million copies a year by 1941, alarming parents and educators who began a crusade against the lax morality violence and other dangers of comics that would last for decades and foreshadow later debates over music and television, movies and video games. Alternatives were created including Classic Comics/Classics Illustrated, whose illustrated versions of world literature became crib sheets as well as portals to culture.
After Estes Kefauver’s Senate investigations and academic studies of deleterious impact, publishers themselves created the first substantive Comics Code in 1954. This created conditions for the revival of the sexless superhero and anodyne comics, including Disney and Archie. By the mid-1950s, nonetheless, superheroes old and new (including the Flash, Fantastic Four and others from Marvel Comics) offered the complex stories and aesthetic styles of comics’ “second” golden age.
As Ariel Dorfman has pointed out, all of these texts tend to distill fundamental Amercan myths into child-palatable forms. “Truth, justice and the American way” in Superman intersected with capitalism, derogatory stereotypes of foreigners and intellectuals and sexless ducks and mice in Disney. These messages, moreover, were consumed by children outside the US even while US parents discouraged comics.
The 1960s saw many changes in comic books, including increasing crossover to television and film. Contents also changed—inspired by social ferment around them, artists and writers incorporated drugs, war and racism into the comic world in the 1970s, although this phase proved short-lived. Instead, new relevance came from underground comics like those of Robert Crumb. Later, more adult stories, like Darkman, which offer narrative and visual experiments as well as sexual and violent plots, would underpin the serious comics of the end of the century. At the same time, collectors have sought the innocence of earlier comics as first editions of Superman and other relics of the golden age skyrocketed in price beyond the reach of children.
Comics no longer sell primarily to the child in the drugstore, but to older adolescent males or young adults. Moreover, these people are buying specialty store items, sometimes in plastic bags to preserve their collectible value or in brown paper to avert them from other eyes. In this development, while comic strips have reflected the changing family,comic books have followed the aging and concerns of the baby boom, while creating new experiences in Generation X. They also inspire movies like Batman, Superman and X-Men (2000).
Industry:Culture
Commercial fishing in the United States, as worldwide, has been affected by environmental degradation. The main source of this degradation since the 1970s has been over-fishing by fleets of vessels competing in a very lucrative market. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, American fishing vessels caught 9.5 billion pounds of fish and shellfish in 1991, worth about $3.3 billion. This was double the amount of fish caught in 1970. Generally American fishermen have caught Alaskan pollock, menhaden, salmon, crab and cod, with Alaska dominating the industry followed by the Texas/Gulf and Chesapeake regions. American consumers’ constant demand for shrimp, however, has led to a large fisheries trade deficit.
The reduced harvests that have resulted from the depletion of numerous fish species have only exacerbated the problem in the short term as increased prices for fish have made competition more intense. In the long term, livelihoods are threatened and whole fishing towns have been hit by widespread unemployment. In addition, the need both to reduce costs (sometimes in the area of safety procedures) and to locate harvests at a greater distance from the shore has made work—for those who are able to find it—more dangerous. In many instances, the vulnerability of old fishing populations has enabled new immigrants to establish their own fishing vessels, though the continued deterioration of the harvests makes this only a short-term replacement.
Attempts to control the amount harvested have had significant consequences in international relations and in relations among social groups within the United States. The Japanese have often resisted American attempts to limit the amount of their catches, leading to friction between the two nations. Within the United States, American Indian fishing rights have been established by treaties and so cannot be challenged or altered according to environmental exigencies. For example, whaling remains legal for American Indian tribes on the west coast, while for other fishermen there are strict prohibitions in place. However, the traditional whaling methods used by American Indians limit the number of whales that they can catch.
Meanwhile, angling is the second most popular recreation in the United States behind swimming. An estimated 50 million Americans participate in the sport, 69 percent of them men. The sport is controlled by the states, which set the rules and regulations and give licenses to anglers to fish. Thirty-four million such licenses were given in 1994. But, before assuming that widespread eradication of fishing populations is occurring in the streams and ponds of the United States, it should be remembered that it is estimated that 90 percent of the fish are caught by only 10 percent of the anglers. This suggests that most anglers have little clue about what they are doing, are quite possibly motivated by other things about the recreation besides the catch alone (a suntan and a snooze) and perhaps would not enjoy it much if they caught fish too frequently.
Environmental issues also affect fishing significantly. During much of the twentieth century rivers around the country were so polluted as a result of untreated industrial waste flowing into them that they were almost completely bereft of fish. With the intervention of the Environmental Protection Agency and the growing concern over the environment as a political issue, many states have taken initiatives to clean up rivers and other waterways. Many such bodies of water are now seeing the reappearance of fish populations that have not been seen for decades.
In addition to pollution, global warming and long hot summers in many parts of the US have altered the conditions for anglers. In many ponds, streams and rivers dead fish have been found in the middle of each summer floating on top of algae. Dry weather and heat contribute to the growth of such algae, which then consume the oxygen in the water and cause the fish to suffocate. Where this is not the case, the warm water leads fish like carp and striped bass to head for cooler, fast-moving streams that are more difficult for the angler to master, or for deeper spots in lakes and streams where they are beyond the reach of the anglers’ lures. In other words, the fish can adapt to the changing weather better than the anglers, who are increasingly left with little more than a cancerous sunburn on the embankment.
Industry:Culture
Commissioned in 1967 by US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, the “Pentagon Papers” comprise a 3,000-page history of the US in Indochina from the Second World War through May 1968. They document sabotage and terrorism against North Vietnam beginning in 1954 and the coup that overthrew South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. The New York Times published articles based upon the Papers in 1971.
The indictment of Daniel Ellsberg, a former government employee, for espionage, theft and conspiracy followed, though all charges were later dropped. The “Pentagon Papers” confirmed the suspicions of many Americans who opposed the Vietnam War that US involvement owed a good deal to government secrecy. In tandem with Watergate, the Papers eroded faith in government credibility.
Industry:Culture
Commonly distilled into images of an island paradise of sun, surf and hula, the Hawai’ian archipelago in fact consists of 132 islands, atolls and reefs (6,470 square miles), which constitute, according to many travel magazines, the world’s favorite tropical-island destination. Only seven of its largest islands provide residence to the 50th state’s 1.2 million citizens, agriculture, industry and tourists. This geologic system represents a complexity and diversity that is only challenged by the unique culture that inhabits it.
This “authentic” Hawai’ian culture was first established by the ancient Hawai’ians— “people of old”—and developed through the cultural contributions of each successive ethnic group to acculturate in Hawai’i. Nonetheless, it is often eclipsed by the manufactured cultural images that are advertised and subsequently produced in order to maintain the 6 million plus tourists who visit annually.
It is important that the “authentic” culture actually includes multiple components. The first is the native Hawai’ian cultural component and an indigenous population originating in AD400–500 from the islands of Marquesas and Tahiti. Later components arise from the cultural amalgam developed from immigrants of many ethnic origins that date from the late eighteenth century onwards. Although these components differ significantly in their relative ages, their contemporary interactions are virtually inseparable due to the cultural fusion developed through the past 220 years of intense acculturation. Hence, some argue that since there is no single dominant group, all Hawai’ians are minorities.
This ideology permeates the state’s cultural atmosphere.
The first settlers arrived in Hawai’i around AD 400 from Marquesas. Instigated by unknown factors, these early Polynesians followed the land-faring birds they saw flying far from their own shores in the hopes of finding a suitable new home. Five hundred to six hundred years later, mass migration from Tahiti brought complicated religious and class systems into Hawai’i’s cultural realm. These settlers used a stellar navigational system focused on the North Star, or Hokulea, to transport people, animals and plants between Tahiti and Havaiki—the mythical homeland of the gods that later became Hawai’i. To bring order to a newly developing society these Hawai’ians instituted the rigid kapu system that dictated behavior in each facet of life. This system was guided by a complex hierarchy of gods, ancestral spirits, kahuna (priests), and ah’i (chiefs). Their culture was rich with me/e (song), oh (chant) and hula. (In ancient times, the hula had spiritual significance and was danced only by men—a far cry from its current tourist sensuality) At the time of Captain Cook’s “discovery” of Hawai’i in 1778, the Hawai’ian population had grown to 300,000 or more. Within the next seventy years, previously unknown diseases (smallpox, venereal diseases, measles, etc.) brought by sailors decreased the Hawai’ian population to only 50,000. During the same period, the foreign population increased, causing foreign governments to assert their influence in matters pertaining to land and political power. First, the British influenced the establishment of a monarchy Then, Russians and French tried to influence the developing political structure to support their expansionist tendencies. Finally the Americans, primarily through early missionary efforts, influenced the course of Hawai’ian history that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and annexation.
By the 1870s, the sugar industry grew to dominate the economy Its ever-increasing labor demand caused the importation of labor from around the world. These laborers came as indentured servants or in similar bonded conditions. They came mostly from the East (Japan, Okinawa, China, The Philippines), but also from European countries, including Germany Norway Spain and Portugal (Azores and Madeira Islands). Their absorption into mainstream society varied according to differing cultural practices regarding intermarriage and the strength of community ties with their countries of origin.
However, as the laborers became aware of the hardships of contract labor and the possibilities off the plantation, many sought to leave the industry once their contracts were fulfilled. In response to the growing discontent among these laborers, the Republic of Hawai’i in 1890 passed legislation under which Asians, particularly Chinese, who left agricultural work had to return to their country of origin. While some did so voluntarily most preferred to continue reaping the relatively higher economic benefits in Hawai’i.
Hence, this stipulation froze the contract laborers’ situation and led to increased intermarriage or the importation of spouses, mainly brides, from “home.” The Hawai’ian monarchy which started with Kamehameha I in the eighteenth century constituted Hawai’i’s government until its illegal overthrow in 1893. This government developed through the ancient governance of ali’i and Kamehameha I’s forceful consolidation of the chiefdoms of Kauai and Ni’ihau, Maui’ Hawai’i, Oahu, Molokai and Lanai. However, with the increase in the number of “outsiders,” conflicting beliefs regarding cultural practices were introduced. Such practices were adamantly denounced by the influential missionary presence and countered by cultural revitalists such as Lunalilo (Hawai’i’s last king). In 1900 Hawai’i became a US territory In the twentieth century early migrants were joined by immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Puerto Rico and other Polynesian communities, as well as by more Caucasians (by boat) from the US mainland.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into the Second World War. The war led to an increased Caucasian American population due to the expanding military presence on Oahu. This, in turn, became a watershed for tourist and Sunbelt development, a Hawai’ian dream for both mainlanders and foreigners (especially Japanese) who visit every year. With the increasing speed and availability of air travel, Hawai’i was ever more incorporated into the US, becoming a state in 1959.
Tourism has far surpassed the declining agricultural foundations of an older island, yet has raised conflicts about land use, respect for traditions, environmental planning— Hawai’i’s volcanoes, valleys and waters are important resources in themselves and shelter countless unique species—and authenticity. Guided by active state recruitment, which, since the 1980s, has looked beyond the main island to development of Maui and other destinations, tourism has prompted mainland and foreign investment but has also made the island vulnerable to economic downturns like the Asian economic crisis.
Hawai’i’s contemporary culture is thus complicated by mass-media renditions of “tourist island,” whether Betty Grable’s Song of the Island (1942), Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii (1961), the long-running television series Hawaii Five-0 (CBS, 1968–80), or the incessant commodification of tourist promotions. The conflict of imagery and local complexity proves especially visible in urban centers like Honolulu (365,272) or tourist clusters such as Kailua-Kona. Nonetheless, the cultural contributions of multiple ethnic groups, accumulated during the past 220 years, continue to define distinctive histories, religions, arts, foods, clothing, etc.—a mix that comprises contemporary Hawai’ian culture and perhaps a vision of a more truly global and multicultural US.
Industry:Culture
Commonly referred to as rollerblading after the company created in 1980 by two hockey players in Minnesota who, wanting to train in the off-season, converted an in-line skate to meet their needs. With refinements like a braking device and new materials to make the boot lighter, they created a skate that could be used by professional athletes and recreational skaters alike. By the late 1990s more than thirty manufacturers created skates for a worldwide market; in the United States alone, there are more than 29 million skaters and roughly a quarter of all households own in-line skates, making this the fastest growing sport of the 1990s. In-line skating also spawned its own professional sport, roller hockey.
Industry:Culture
Communism has occupied quite diverse and conflicting positions in modern American culture. In the 1930s, during the years of the non-sectarian Popular Front against fascism in the world Communist movement, the Communist Party in the United States contributed to the development of powerful organizing campaigns in favor of Social Security racial equality and industrial unionism. In the early years of the Great Depression, a number of prominent writers and intellectuals, including Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, wrote favorably about communism, the American Communist movement and the Soviet Union. However, the Communist Party itself remained committed to a Leninist “militantminority” methodology of social change, and usually adhered in public to the “line” of Soviet foreign policy In the years just before the Second World War, the development of powerful moral critiques of Stalinism seriously began to complicate many intellectuals’ interest in and enthusiasm for the “Soviet Experiment.” Partly as a consequence of its close association with Soviet communism, American communism has been both favored and abhorred by advocates of economic equality the welfare state and labor unionism. Both the friends and enemies of civil rights and civil liberties have invoked anti-communism. Especially at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the American Communist Party was ritually denounced by members of the educational, religious, political and cultural establishments, and communists or anyone associated with communism as an indigenous social movement were often persecuted or denied employment. However, few American elites believed that the American Communist Party was ever a real threat to the security of American institutions. Instead, communism and communists often came to represent the racial, ethnic and even gendered “other” in the midst of conflicts over what constituted “Americanism” in American political discourse.
Following the Second World War, conservative politicians were able to connect communism with New Deal liberalism in the popular imagination by exploiting populist undercurrents of resentment against state intervention and “social experimentation.” The conviction of Alger Hiss, a former mid-level official in the Roosevelt administration, for perjury in a spy case (1950) allowed Republicans to associate the New Deal with the disloyalty or incompetence of liberal policy elites. Following the conviction and subsequent executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for atomic spying (1950–3), communism was linked more firmly than ever in the popular imagination with subversion, even though there is little evidence that either Hiss or the Rosenbergs seriously compromised American security. Large majorities of Americans came to believe that the Communist Party in the US should be outlawed and that communists should not be allowed to teach.
In the 1970s and 1980s, communism retained elements of its racial, class, ethnic and treasonous identifications for many Americans, and American politicians continued to more-or-less successfully portray world communism as America’s most dangerous external enemy. Following the end of the Cold War and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, some astute critics even claimed to detect a loss of American national purpose.
Industry:Culture
Community has a longstanding positive, albeit nebulous, value reiterated in American social sciences as well as political rhetoric. “Community groups,” “community boards” and “faith community” all underscore civic virtues of cooperation, unity and citizenship in contrast to potentially divisive images of clubs, neighborhoods, or religious sects.
Community service is an increasingly common requirement for high-school and college students in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while “community” appears in analyses and politics as an alternative to politics and government—a real America.
While community has thus entered the sacrosanct mythology of mom and apple pie for many Americans, these usages also betray certain negative aspects that demand attention.
First, community may easily be used in an exclusionary fashion. Preserving “community,” for example, sounds better than resisting integration or newcomers.
Appeal to “community standards” also has a long career in censorship of American art and literature, from Joyce’s Ulysses to the nudes of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Second, community can also be an imposition on others. To speak of the “black” or “Asian American” community (avoiding race) or “gay and lesbian” community implies a unity of action and experience, much less volition that does not reflect the lives or politics of individuals and groups that constitute these segments of American society While Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community arising through shared media can provide insights into American nationhood as well as Southeast Asia, we must always watch who does the imagining.
Finally community can be used in ways that are patently false. Sales brochures refer to suburbs and walled developments as residential or gated communities, despite the alienation that often characterizes them.
Nonetheless, the stress on building shared interests and dialogues—“community video/ television” or “community activism”—underscores the creative processes of American society and change, at times in opposition to inherited structures or government/corporate control. In the decline of government safety nets in health, education and welfare, “community service” also forces many Americans to confront the dualization of contemporary society and its consequences.
Industry:Culture
Community-based organizations have been a distinctive feature of American democratic life since the founding of the Republic, one that Alexis de Tocqueville praised as evidencing Americans’ unique ability for what he called, “the art of association.” Such organizations have been thought of as integral to American civic life, knitting together an ethnically diverse population through mediating between localities and neighborhoods and the more formal institutions of government. In contemporary usage, the term “community organizing” very often refers to a form of community-based action, which, like labor union movements, relies primarily on the use of confrontational tactics.
Although collective action certainly existed in urban neighborhoods prior to the development of this model, community organizing in the US today remains most closely associated with the figure of Saul Alinsky (1909–72). Alinsky developed his model of direct action based on his experiences as a labor union organizer with the Council of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In contrast to community development work undertaken in many other national contexts, which usually relies primarily on governmental sources for funding and which tends to emphasize service delivery Alinsky called for community organizations to raise their own funds and to remain politically autonomous.
His legacy lives on in many neighborhoods around the United States, although very few of the organizations existing today were actually founded by either Alinsky or his direct “heirs.” The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based in New York City, NY, continues to train organizers according to Alinsky’s model. In any case, despite a variety of organizational structures and a multiplicity of different kinds of tactics and philosophies, Alinsky remains a seminal figure.
Over the past twenty years, there has been such an outpouring of works on the Citizen Action movement in the United States that it would be impossible to include mention of them all here. The best sources for an overview of the nature and role of both Alinskystyle neighborhood organizations and many other types of grassroots movements as well are books by H.C. Boyte. See: Boyte, H.C. (1989) CommonWealth: A Return to Citizen Politics, New York: The Free Press; Boyte, H.C. (1984) Community is Possible: Repairing America’s Roots, New York: Harper and Row; Boyte, H.C. (1980) The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; Boyte, H.C. and Kari, N. (1996) Building America, Philadelphia: Temple University Press; and Evans, S. and Boyte, H.C. (1986) Free Spaces: The Source of Democratic Change in America, New York: Harper & Row.
Industry:Culture
