With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in American society. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Americans embraced “self-made men” such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star “Buffalo Bill” Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes—crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody’s shows. By the early twentieth century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor’s profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor’s short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiences—from family life to college life—with black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock ‘n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean’s 1971 anthem “American Pie” served as an epitaph for rock’s political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock ‘n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America. LeRoy Ashby is Regents Professor and Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University. He is the author of several books, including Fighting the Odds: The Life of Senator Frank Church and Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. Combines being a remarkably quixotic endeavor with being something of a monumental achievement of scholarship and pure perseverance. --Belles Lettres -- Belles Lettres When regarding this book\u27s comprehensiveness, the richness of its detail, and the strength of its interpretation of the specifics of popular culture, I stand in awe. What an achievement! Majestic! --Benjamin G. Rader, author of Baseball: A History of America\u27s Game This intelligent, energetic book has the ability to appeal to historians and scholars without distancing the general reader. The easy linear narrative is punctuated by songs, comic anecdotes, and rich descriptions that bring each era to life. --Charleston Post and Courier Ashby has given us a fine new book. They say in baseball, \u27it\u27s hard to tell the players without a scorecard.\u27 With Amusement for All will be the new scorecard for anyone interested in the study of popular culture. The book is both comprehensive and smart, a fine combination of surveying the terrain then saying intelligent things about it. Ashby has rendered an invaluable service. --Elliott Gorn, co-author of A Brief History of American Sports American popular culture isn\u27t a distraction from the serious issues of our time. It is inseparable from them. . . . Researches events ranging from Wild West shows to Janet Jackson\u27s wardrobe malfunctions during the 2004 Super Bowl. --Lewiston Tribune No single author has tackled popular culture with so much breadth and depth and managed to strike a balance between the popular and scholarly approaches. Ashby\u27s absorbing and hugely informative study will appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended. --Library Journal (starred review) I know of no other book that provides the same kind of documented, engaging, and lively narrative about American popular culture as With Amusement for All. --Michael Allen, author of Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination It is not taken for granted that Super Bowls and reality talent shows are discussed around water coolers everywhere the morning after they occur. What should be more common is the use of such entertainment supernovas by historians interested in understanding what makes American culture tick. Thanks to Ashby\u27s fascinating book, this task has become substantially easier. --Pacific Northwest Quarterly The author skilfully quotes appropriate anecdotes and gives us fine, brief descriptions of some of the personalities of the day. . . . Well and fluently written and pleasant to read, and offers a good summary of a whole lot of material about popular culture. --Early Popular Visual Culture Without question, the author...has researched and written a masterpiece. The book is a tour de force in its field and has made popular culture--once thought to be a frivolous area for academic study--a serious field of inquiry. --USA Today LeRoy Ashby draws on the substantial volume of historical scholarship on American popular culture produced since the 1970s to present a survey of impressive breadth on two centuries of American amusements. --Journal of American History “You’ll enjoy this fascinating and massively researched volume on how Americans have amused themselves and how it changed the world.” –WTBF Radio In With Amusement for All, one will find a wide variety of entertainment venues - radio, television, music, sports, movies and the internet; from P.T. Barnum\u27s bunkum to Sheldon Cooper\u27s hokum , it is all here, presented in an informative, entertaining narrative. -- The Past in Review -- The Past in Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1017/thumbnail.jp

The LHCb upgrade I

The LHCb upgrade represents a major change of the experiment. The detectors have been almost completely renewed to allow running at an instantaneous luminosity five times larger than that of the previous running periods. Readout of all detectors into an all-software trigger is central to the new design, facilitating the reconstruction of events at the maximum LHC interaction rate, and their selection in real time. The experiment's tracking system has been completely upgraded with a new pixel vertex detector, a silicon tracker upstream of the dipole magnet and three scintillating fibre tracking stations downstream of the magnet. The whole photon detection system of the RICH detectors has been renewed and the readout electronics of the calorimeter and muon systems have been fully overhauled. The first stage of the all-software trigger is implemented on a GPU farm. The output of the trigger provides a combination of totally reconstructed physics objects, such as tracks and vertices, ready for final analysis, and of entire events which need further offline reprocessing. This scheme required a complete revision of the computing model and rewriting of the experiment's software

Search for heavy Majorana neutrinos in e±e± and e±μ± final states via WW scattering in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for heavy Majorana neutrinos in scattering of same-sign W boson pairs in proton–proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV at the LHC is reported. The dataset used corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1, collected with the ATLAS detector during 2015–2018. The search is performed in final states including a same-sign ee or eμ pair and at least two jets with large invariant mass and a large rapidity difference. No significant excess of events with respect to the Standard Model background predictions is observed. The results are interpreted in a benchmark scenario of the Phenomenological Type-I Seesaw model. New constraints are set on the values of the |VeN|2 and |VeN V*μN| parameters for heavy Majorana neutrino masses between 50 GeV and 20 TeV, where VℓN is the matrix element describing the mixing of the heavy Majorana neutrino mass eigenstate with the Standard Model neutrino of flavour ℓ = e, μ. The sensitivity to the Weinberg operator is investigated and constraints on the effective ee and eμ Majorana neutrino masses are reported. The statistical combination of the ee and eμ channels with the previously published μμ channel is performed

Measurements of electroweak W±Z boson pair production in association with two jets in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Measurements of integrated and differential cross-sections for electroweak W±Z production in association with two jets (W±Zjj) in proton-proton collisions are presented. The data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider from 2015 to 2018 at a centre-of-mass energy of √ s = 13 TeV are used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1 . The W±Zjj candidate events are reconstructed using leptonic decay modes of the gauge bosons. Events containing three identified leptons, either electrons or muons, and two jets are selected. Processes involving pure electroweak W±Zjj production at Born level are separated from W±Zjj production involving a strong coupling. The measured integrated fiducial cross-section of electroweak W±Zjj production per lepton flavour is σW Zjj−EW→ℓ ′ νℓℓjj = 0.368 ± 0.037 (stat.) ± 0.059 (syst.) ± 0.003 (lumi.) fb, where ℓ and ℓ ′ are either an electron or a muon. Respective cross-sections of electroweak and strong W±Zjj production are measured separately for events with exactly two jets or with more than two jets, and in three bins of the invariant mass of the two jets. The inclusive W±Zjj production cross-section, without separating electroweak and strong production, is also measured to be σW Zjj→ℓ ′ νℓℓjj = 1.462 ± 0.063 (stat.) ± 0.118 (syst.) ± 0.012 (lumi.) fb, per lepton flavour. The inclusive W±Zjj production cross-section is measured differentially for several kinematic observables. Finally, the measurements are used to constrain anomalous quartic gauge couplings by extracting 95% confidence level intervals on dimension-8 operators

The infrared and Raman spectra of N-alkyl ethylenimines

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Not availabl

Toughness-strength relations in the overaged 7449 Al-Based alloy

This article examines the relationship between plane strain fracture toughness, KIc, the tensile properties, and the microstructure of the overaged 7449 aluminum-plate alloy, and compares them to the 7150 alloy. The 7449 alloy has a higher content of ??/? precipitates; and, the 7150 alloy contains a greater amount of coarse intermetallic particles, as it contains an appreciable amount of coarse S phase (Al2CuMg), which is largely absent in the 7449 alloy. The toughness of the alloys shows an increase on overaging, and the 7449 alloy shows a reasonably linear toughness—yield strength relation on extended overaging. Several mechanisms of failure occur: coarse voiding at intermetallics and a combined intergranular/transgranular shear fracture mode, with the former becoming more important as overaging progresses. Drawbacks of existing models for toughness are discussed, and a new model for plane strain fracture toughness, based on the microstructurally dependent work-hardening factor, KA, introduced in Ashby's theory of work hardening, is developed. This model predicts a linear relation between KIc and K0.85A/?0.35ys, where ?ys is the yield strength, which is consistent with the experimental data

Iloprost suppresses connective tissue growth factor production in fibroblasts and in the skin of scleroderma patients

Patients with scleroderma receiving Iloprost as a treatment for severe Raynaud’s phenomenon report a reduction in skin tightness, suggesting that this drug inhibits skin fibrosis. Connective tissue growth factor (CTGF), a recently described profibrotic cytokine, acts downstream and in concert with TGF-β to stimulate the fibrotic process and is involved in the fibrosis seen in scleroderma. Here we show that Iloprost, acting by elevation of cAMP, blocks the induction of CTGF and the increase in collagen synthesis in fibroblasts exposed to TGF-β. The potency of Iloprost with respect to suppression of CTGF far exceeds that of other prostanoid receptor agonists, suggesting that its effect is mediated by the prostacyclin receptor IP. By sampling dermal interstitial fluid using a suction blister device, we show that CTGF levels are greatly elevated in the dermis of scleroderma patients compared with healthy controls and that Iloprost infusion causes a marked decrease in dermal CTGF levels. These studies suggest that Iloprost could be reducing the level of a key profibrotic cytokine in scleroderma patients and that endogenous production of eicosanoids may limit the fibrotic response to TGF-β