The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective. Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today. Beginning with a discussion of Barnum's early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum's increasingly "respectable" aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women's rights and class issues in Barnum's management of these concerts. Barnum's American Museum and the "moral dramas" presented in its theater are examined, as well as the later circuses. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the on-going struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.
In Old and New New Englanders, Bluford Adams provides a reenvisioning of New England’s history and regional identity by exploring the ways the arrival of waves of immigrants from Europe and Canada transformed what it meant to be a New Englander during the Gilded Age. Adams’s intervention challenges a number of long-standing conceptions of New England, offering a detailed and complex portrayal of the relations between New England’s Yankees and immigrants that goes beyond nativism and assimilation. In focusing on immigration in this period, Adams provides a fresh view on New England’s regional identity, moving forward from Pilgrims, Puritans, and their descendants and emphasizing the role immigrants played in shaping the region’s various meanings. Furthermore, many researchers have overlooked the newcomers’ relationship to the regional identities they found here. Adams argues immigrants took their ties to New England seriously. Although they often disagreed about the nature of those ties, many immigrant leaders believed identification with New England would benefit their peoples in their struggles both in the United States and back in their ancestral lands. Drawing on and contributing to work in immigration history, as well as American, gender, ethnic, and New England studies, this book is broadly concerned with the history of identity construction in the United States while its primary focus is the relationship between regional categories of identity and those based on race and ethnicity. With its interdisciplinary methodology, original research, and diverse chapter topics, the book targets both specialist and nonspecialist readers.
The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective. Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today. Beginning with a discussion of Barnum's early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum's increasingly "respectable" aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women's rights and class issues in Barnum's management of these concerts. Barnum's American Museum and the "moral dramas" presented in its theater are examined, as well as the later circuses. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the on-going struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.
It is written in clear English, without equations, and with plenty of charts to ground one’s understanding in the real world … The authors make a compelling case that economists need to take their simplifying assumptions more seriously, to embrace statistical techniques that can track dynamic markets with time-varying parameters, and to always be aware of the importance of shifts in the underlying context.'Global Commodities Applied Research DigestEconomics Gone Astray is a collection of essays on critical topics in macroeconomics that frame the issues in terms of clearly stated assumptions, highlighting the errors often made by professional economists, and allowing readers to better analyze market behavior and the economic consequences of policy decisions.The book differs from textbook economics, as it tackles sophisticated topics without using mathematics or technical jargon. This makes the book highly accessible to all types of readers, from investors and investment professionals, to professors and their students.The book's style integrates a large quantity of clearly drawn charts which help anchor the readers' perceptions of the topics being examined, from inflation to taxes, to demographics.
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