In the groove: American rock criticism, 1966-1978

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2017.Rock and roll music was a national youth obsession for a dozen years before the first rock critics began writing seriously about the form. Rock was dismissed by adult cultural authorities as empty, degraded, and even dangerous. However, to its fans, rock was an important form of personal expression, a source of group identity, and a mode of political discourse. Rock critics understood its cultural and political power. In their work, they explained its importance to the American public. In 1966, the first rock critic, Richard Goldstein, began writing about rock and roll in a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Pop Eye.” In it, he asserted that rock and roll was an art that deserved the same recognition and protections afforded to other art forms. By 1967, The New Yorker hired Ellen Willis to write about rock in a regular column called “Rock, Etc.” She brought an intellectual sophistication to the genre that would resound long after her career as a rock critic ended. Later in 1967, Rolling Stone debuted; it would become the most visible and influential source of rock criticism for the next fifty years. Editor Jann Wenner’s tastes and approach would affect the way rock was perceived in his own time and for decades after. Finally, in 1968, Lester Bangs debuted onto the scene, writing artful reviews for publications like Creem and Rolling Stone, explaining the changes that were taking place as rock music splintered into subgenres like punk and heavy metal. The quality of these rock critics’ thought and the influence of their writing makes rock criticism an important and under-studied branch of Sixties literature. Each of the rock critics addressed in this dissertation explained to the public what rock music meant and why it mattered. By placing rock in its social, political, and cultural context, they demonstrated that it was far from the empty form cultural authorities thought it was. Their work permanently changed perceptions of popular music, proving that it was substantial enough to stand up to the same kind of critical treatment as other art forms

"Tell the whole White world”: crime, violence, and Black men in early migration New York City, 1890-1917

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2014Through analysis of criminality, defensive and offensive violence and black migration from the South to the North between 1890 and 1917 this dissertation seeks to understand how black migrant men participated in the nadir of race relations. By exploring the lives of black men who travelled to New York City and discussing the continuities and disparities they faced in the North and South, I argue that African Americans were not only victims of intensifying racial discrimination and violence, but also defined the period with their own counteractions. As their expectations for better jobs, housing, and protection from public racial violence were shattered in the North, some black men met these challenges with vice, violence and lawlessness. Combining my analysis of the nadir with the exigencies of migration I have reassigned meaning to illegality and violence as cogent reactions. I also give much of my attention to the Progressive and civic discourse about black men and criminality at the turn of the twentieth century and the belief that their presence in vice districts like Manhattan’s Tenderloin would corrupt and endanger white New Yorkers. Considering these discussions, and the investigations and legislation they produced, I assert that reformers’ efforts to segregate public spaces isolated black men into narrowly defined black districts and forced them to withdraw to a large extent. My work has three principal purposes: first to employ Progressive discourse and investigations, scholarly works, trial transcripts, and court documents in order to insert crime among black men into current historical discussions about black struggles against profound racial circumscription during the nadir in the North. Next, it emphasizes the influence of Southern roots in shaping the lives of black male migrants, and in defining the response of white New Yorkers to a black population influx. Lastly, it combines these two in order to discuss changes in ideas of white and black masculinity and a contest between the two at the turn of the century. With this analysis I conclude that white New Yorkers utilized perceptions of black migrant men as criminal and dangerous to justify racial separation in public spaces, lopsided investigations, and brutal violence on city streets. However, illegality and defensive and offensive violence figured into the response of some black men for whom civic procedures seemed inadequate

Commerce and culture in the career of the permanent innovative press : New Directions, Grove Press, and George Braziller Inc.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2009.New Directions, Grove Press, and George Braziller Inc. were exemplary members of the permanent innovative press in the years between 1945 and 1975. Positioned between the small presses and the large corporate houses, the permanent innovative press balanced its cultural mission with the demands that the institutional form of the for-profit business placed on the cultural producer. The publishers and editors of these companies were self-conscious about the conflict between commerical and cultural values. They attempted to dedicate themselves to cultural values, as they understood them, while also reaching expanding book markets with new commercial techniques. They promoted cosmopolitanism, artistic innovation, the elevation of modernist art, and the popularization of academic scholarship through their work in reprint and paperback publishing, book clubs, journals and anthologies, translation, and book series

Religion and insanity in America from colonial times to 1900

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2013.This dissertation is a historical study of "religious insanity," a concept that was common in both popular and medical opinion in England and America from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Religious insanity was based on the assumption that certain religious beliefs and practices, when carried to emotional extremes, could produce attacks of insanity in individuals who were already predisposed to mental illness by temperament, heredity, or childhood upbringing. The concept endured for more than two hundred years, in part because it was associated with the political and sectarian conflicts in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in part because certain tenets of Christian theology formed the theoretical foundation of psychological medicine for much of the nineteenth century. In Great Britain the Anglican establishment used the concept as a polemical tactic to discredit and repress religious nonconformity. In America it was used by opponents of experiential religion to discredit the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakening and other unconventional religious movements such as Millerism and spiritualism. The concept of religious insanity fell into disuse in the latter half of the nineteenth century because of liberalizing trends in Protestant theology, changes in the purpose and conduct of religious revivals, and the secularization of psychological medicine. This study makes extensive use of the annual reports of nineteenth-century American asylums and the patient medical records of asylums in New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, in order to examine the perspectives of asylum physicians and of patients whose insanity was attributed to religious causes. It also examines the role of chaplains in asylums, the use of religious worship as an element of therapy, and the extent to which asylum physicians provided religious counseling to patients. Finally, it presents statistical tables derived from asylum reports in order to examine patterns in religious insanity admissions throughout the nineteenth century

Billy Graham, American evangelicalism, and the Cold War clash of messianic visions, 1945-1962

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2012.This study examines the Cold War ideology of Billy Graham and other prominent representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals and their attempt to implement their messianic vision within the United States and promote it abroad from 1945 through 1962. While it focuses on the evangelical Protestant notions at the core of Cold War American messianism--the notion that the American way of life was ideal and that Communism posed a grave threat to it, the study also considers the nature and strength of Soviet messianism. In July 1945, evangelicals declared ideological cold war against world communism and began planning a spiritual invasion of Europe to restore Christianity and stop communism there. Billy Graham was among the young ministers sent to Europe, and he built upon his experience there to emerge as a major spokesman of American messianism. The popularity of Graham's anticommunism, a regular feature in his sermons, helped propel him to national fame. By 1950 his message was reaching much of the nation in a weekly radio broadcast, and by 1952 he was serving as a spiritual advisor to presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower. As president, Eisenhower worked with Graham to orchestrate Cold War civil religion, which drew much of its animus from Soviet Communism. Graham was an important national leader in the ideological war against communism. His desire to create a big tent of American Christianity led to ideological moderation during the late 1950s, but he continued to preach his messianic vision for the United States. Meanwhile, Soviet messianism underwent major changes during the early Cold War that, because of their own ideological assumptions, most Americans missed. Billy Graham drew from American mythology to construct a compelling messianic vision for the future of mankind that met the hopes and fears of Americans in such balance that it became something of an official Cold War ideology throughout the 1950s. However inaccurate American conceptions of Soviet messianism were, Graham's imagery resonated with the public and its policymakers, and helped keep America's messianic vision for the future of mankind robust into the early 1960s, even as Soviet messianism flagged