The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone. Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.

All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America (Pivotal Moments in American History)

Arts & Photography

Altschuler, Glenn C.

Music

Oxford University Press

The birth of rock 'n roll ignited a firestorm of controversy--one critic called it "musical riots put to a switchblade beat"--but if it generated much sound and fury, what, if anything, did it signify? As Glenn Altschuler reveals in All Shook Up, the rise of rock 'n roll--and the outraged reception to it--in fact can tell us a lot about the values of the United States in the 1950s, a decade that saw a great struggle for the control of popular culture. Altschuler shows, in particular, how rock's "switchblade beat" opened up wide fissures in American society along the fault-lines of family, sexuality, and race. For instance, the birth of rock coincided with the Civil Rights movement and brought "race music" into many white homes for the first time. Elvis freely credited blacks with originating the music he sang and some of the great early rockers were African American, most notably, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. In addition, rock celebrated romance and sex, rattled the reticent by pushing sexuality into the public arena, and mocked deferred gratification and the obsession with work of men in gray flannel suits. And it delighted in the separate world of the teenager and deepened the divide between the generations, helping teenagers differentiate themselves from others. Altschuler includes vivid biographical sketches of the great rock 'n rollers, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly--plus their white-bread doppelgangers such as Pat Boone. Rock 'n roll seemed to be everywhere during the decade, exhilarating, influential, and an outrage to those Americans intent on wishing away all forms of dissent and conflict. As vibrant as the music itself, All Shook Up reveals how rock 'n roll challenged and changed American culture and laid the foundation for the social upheaval of the sixties.

A forty-year history of the largest circulated magazine in the United States reveals TV Guide's erratic stances on social issues and chronicles how the publication moved from an industry watchdog to a more commercial, popular format.

Changing Channels: AMERICA IN *TV GUIDE*

Humor & Entertainment

Grossvogel, David

Television

University of Illinois Press

What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an era of intense and widespread political enthusiasm. But rarely have these historians examined popular political engagement directly, or within the broader contexts of day-to-day life. In this bold and in-depth look at Americans and their politics, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin argue for a more complex understanding of the "space" occupied by politics in nineteenth-century American society and culture. Mining such sources as diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels, cartoons, contested-election voter testimony to state legislative committees, and the partisan newspapers of representative American communities ranging from Massachusetts and Georgia to Texas and California, the authors explore a wide range of political actions and attitudes. They consider the enthusiastic commitment celebrated by historians together with various forms of skepticism, conflicted engagement, detachment, and hostility that rarely have been recognized as part of the American political landscape. Rude Republic sets the political parties and their noisy and attractive campaign spectacles, as well as the massive turnout of voters on election day, within the communal social structure and calendar, the local human landscape of farms, roads, and county towns, and the organizational capacities of emerging nineteenth-century institutions. Political action and engagement are set, too, within the tide of events: the construction of the mass-based party system, the gathering crisis over slavery and disunion, and the gradual expansion of government (and of cities) in the post-Civil War era. By placing the question of popular engagement within these broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, the authors bring new understanding to the complex trajectory of American democracy.

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

History

Blumin, Stuart M.

Americas

Princeton University Press

Three novels in one book by Dick Francis. Dead Cert, Nerve and Odds Against

Andrew M. White: Educator, Historian, Diplomat

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

NCROL

In 1843 in Seneca Falls, New York, Rhonda Bement was brought before a disciplinary trial at her church, the First Presbyterian Church, charged with "unchristian and unladylike" behavior. Her transgression was to challenge the authority and integrity of her minister because he had refused to read to the congregation her announcement about abolitionist lectures taking place in the village, and she was eventually excommunicated. The transcript of her trial is the centerpiece of Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District, which presents through the testimonies of the witnesses the tensions between organized religion and the reform movements of abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights that were sweeping the country in this period.The book is divided into three parts. Jan M. Saltzgaber sets the stage in an introductory essay that examines the religious and social ramifications of the Second Great Awakening in the "burned-over" region of New York, analyzing in detail the changing social and economic environment of Seneca Falls and delineating connections between these changes and the currents of revival and reform in the 1830s and 1840s. The fully-annotated text of the trial is then presented in its entirety. In the epilogue, Glenn C. Altschuler uses the trial and evidence from other local churches to reassess the divisive effects of revivalism, stressing local conditions and church practices that acted as centripetal forces that impressed conservatives, moderates, and even "ultraists" with the importance of church unity.

Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District: The Trial of Rhoda Bement

Saltzgaber, Jan M.

Cornell University Press

In their history of Cornell since 1940, Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick examine the institution in the context of the emergence of the modern research university. The book examines Cornell during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, antiapartheid protests, the ups and downs of varsity athletics, the women's movement, the opening of relations with China, and the creation of Cornell NYC Tech. It relates profound, fascinating, and little-known incidents involving the faculty, administration, and student life, connecting them to the "Cornell idea" of freedom and responsibility. The authors had access to all existing papers of the presidents of Cornell, which deeply informs their respectful but unvarnished portrait of the university. Institutions, like individuals, develop narratives about themselves. Cornell constructed its sense of self, of how it was special and different, on the eve of World War II, when America defended democracy from fascist dictatorship. Cornell’s fifth president, Edmund Ezra Day, and Carl Becker, its preeminent historian, discerned what they called a Cornell "soul," a Cornell "character," a Cornell "personality," a Cornell "tradition"―and they called it "freedom." "The Cornell idea" was tested and contested in Cornell’s second seventy-five years. Cornellians used the ideals of freedom and responsibility as weapons for change―and justifications for retaining the status quo; to protect academic freedom―and to rein in radical professors; to end in loco parentis and parietal rules, to preempt panty raids, pornography, and pot parties, and to reintroduce regulations to protect and promote the physical and emotional well-being of students; to add nanofabrication, entrepreneurship, and genomics to the curriculum―and to require language courses, freshmen writing, and physical education. In the name of freedom (and responsibility), black students occupied Willard Straight Hall, the anti–Vietnam War SDS took over the Engineering Library, proponents of divestment from South Africa built campus shantytowns, and Latinos seized Day Hall. In the name of responsibility (and freedom), the university reclaimed them. The history of Cornell since World War II, Altschuler and Kramnick believe, is in large part a set of variations on the narrative of freedom and its partner, responsibility, the obligation to others and to one’s self to do what is right and useful, with a principled commitment to the Cornell community―and to the world outside the Eddy Street gate.

Cornell: A History, 1940–2015

Kramnick, Isaac

In 1843 in Seneca Falls, New York, Rhonda Bement was brought before a disciplinary trial at her church, the First Presbyterian Church, charged with "unchristian and unladylike" behavior. Her transgression was to challenge the authority and integrity of her minister because he had refused to read to the congregation her announcement about abolitionist lectures taking place in the village, and she was eventually excommunicated. The transcript of her trial is the centerpiece of Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District, which presents through the testimonies of the witnesses the tensions between organized religion and the reform movements of abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights that were sweeping the country in this period.
The book is divided into three parts. Jan M. Saltzgaber sets the stage in an introductory essay that examines the religious and social ramifications of the Second Great Awakening in the "burned-over" region of New York, analyzing in detail the changing social and economic environment of Seneca Falls and delineating connections between these changes and the currents of revival and reform in the 1830s and 1840s. The fully-annotated text of the trial is then presented in its entirety. In the epilogue, Glenn C. Altschuler uses the trial and evidence from other local churches to reassess the divisive effects of revivalism, stressing local conditions and church practices that acted as centripetal forces that impressed conservatives, moderates, and even "ultraists" with the importance of church unity.

In this innovative study, Professor Altschuler argues that the origins of the modern liberal state can be found in the responses to important social issues after the Civil War. The questions raised by emancipation and the new role of blacks in American society was a key issue that would be superseded by the concerns over the "new immigration" in the 1880s. Despite many retreats, a new progressive synthesis slowly emerged to challenge nativism and Social Darwinism--a development that ushered in a new era in American social thought.

Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Social Thought, 1865-1919

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Harlan Davidson

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Altschuler, Glenn C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Altschuler, Glenn C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Altschuler, Glenn C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America (Pivotal Moments in American History)

All Shook Up: How Rock 'n' Roll Changed America (Pivotal Moments in American History)

Changing Channels: AMERICA IN TV GUIDE

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

Andrew M. White: Educator, Historian, Diplomat

Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District: The Trial of Rhoda Bement

Cornell: A History, 1940–2015

Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District: The Trial of Rhoda Bement

Race, Ethnicity, and Class in American Social Thought, 1865-1919