Author: Michael J. McDonald Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572331648 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
One of the most notable agencies of the New Deal era, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created with a warrant to plan for the socioeconomic improvement of "forgotten" Americans. The construction of the Norris Dam, it was thought, would benefit the region socially as well as economically. This book analyzes and assesses TVA's social experiment in modernization at the grassroots level, using population removal in the Norris Basin as a test case.
Author: William Bruce Wheeler Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572333703 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
This is a study of TVA management of Tellico Dam. Part of the ambitious New Deal project to bring modernity to Appalachia, TVA planning was far-reaching, often far-sighted, but also controversial, involving mass migration of people from their ancestral homes and threats to species, like the snail darter.
Author: Kate Sampsell-Willmann Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 9781604733686 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
This is the first full-length examination of Lewis H. Hine (1874-1940), the intellectual and aesthetic father of social documentary photography. Kate Sampsell-Willmann assesses Hine's output through the lens of his photographs, his political and philosophical ideologies, and his social and aesthetic commitments to the dignity of labor and workers. Using Hine's images, published articles, and private correspondence, Lewis Hine as Social Critic places the artist within the context of the Progressive Era and its associated movements and periodicals, such as the Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, the Chicago School of Social Work, and Rex Tugwell's American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement. This intellectual history, heavily illustrated with HIne's photography, compares his career and concerns with other prominent photographers of the day--Jacob Riis, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through detailed analysis of how Hine's images and texts intersected with concepts of urban history and social democracy, this volume reestablishes the artist's intellectual preeminence in the development of American photography as socially conscious art.
Author: Barry A. Vann Publisher: Prometheus Books ISBN: 1616146028 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
As long as the human species has existed, men and women have had to contend with the unpredictable forces of nature. Geographer Barry A. Vann brings a unique perspective to this age-old struggle in this illuminating overview of human population shifts and their precarious relationship with climate change and geography. Vann takes us on a journey along the migration routes of the earliest modern humans and tells why our ancestors chose to settle down in places that can be best described as natural utopias. In the religiously oriented worldview of ancient peoples, such places took on a sacred aura of divine favor. Similarly, destructive events such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes were interpreted as expressions of divine wrath. Vann shows how the ancient texts of the Bible and the Qur’an offer glimpses of past climates that were distinctly different from the climate of our time. He also discusses the rise of technology as a means of controlling the threatening features of the natural world. Though technology has enabled humanity to cope with hostile climates, it has also created a false sense of security. Vann notes that population clusters are increasing in dangerous areas and that no technology can protect vulnerable groups from major-category hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes. Finally, he considers our current anxieties regarding global warming, pointing out that this focus has obscured a good deal of historical and geological evidence for a return of another ice age. The Forces of Nature offers a challenging perspective on the precarious balance between fragile human communities and their often-threatening environments.
Author: Jane S. Becker Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 080786031X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most prominent "folk revivals--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity. Becker uses this craft revival as a way of exploring the construction of the cultural categories "folk" and "tradition." She also addresses the consequences such labels have had on the people to whom they have been assigned. Though the revival of domestic arts in the Southern Appalachians reflected an attempt to aid the people of an impoverished region, she says, as well as a desire to recapture an important part of the nation's folk heritage, in reality the new craft production owed less to tradition than to middle-class tastes and consumer culture--forces that obscured the techniques used by mountain laborers and the conditions in which they worked.
Author: Melissa Walker Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 9780801869242 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 724
Book Description
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians In the years after World War I, Southern farm women found their world changing. A postwar plunge in farm prices stretched into a twenty-year agricultural depression and New Deal programs eventually transformed the economy. Many families left their land to make way for larger commercial farms. New industries and the intervention of big government in once insular communities marked a turning point in the struggle of upcountry women—forcing new choices and the redefinition of traditional ways of life. Melissa Walker's All We Knew Was to Farm draws on interviews, archives, and family and government records to reconstruct the conflict between rural women and bewildering and unsettling change. Some women adapted by becoming partners in farm operations, adopting the roles of consumers and homemakers, taking off-farm jobs, or leaving the land. The material lives of rural upcountry women improved dramatically by midcentury—yet in becoming middle class, Walker concludes, the women found their experiences both broadened and circumscribed.
Author: Walter L. Creese Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572332546 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
Traditionally, the TVA has been viewed as a unique response to special circumstances, largely lacking in historical precedents. Countering this assumption, Creese reveals the varied political, social, architectural, and technical currents that directly shaped the TVA vision, which he calls the largest, most optimistic, most skillful, planning project ever undertaken. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Carroll Van West Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press ISBN: 9781572331082 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
The indelible stamp of the New Deal can be seen across American in the public works projects that modernized the country even as they provided employment during the Great Depression. Tennessee, in particular, benefited from the surge in federal construction. The New Deal not only left the state with many public buildings and schools that are still in active use, but is conservation and reclamation efforts also changed the lives of Tennesseans for generations to come. In Tennessee's New Deal Landscape, Caroll Van West examines over 250 historic sites created from 1933 to 1942: courthouses, post offices, community buildings, schools, and museums, along with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Cherokee National Forest, and the dams and reservoirs of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He describes the significant and impact of each project and provides maps to guide readers to the sites described. West discusses architectural styles that are often difficult to identity, and his lively narrative points out some of the paradoxes of New Deal projects-such as the proliferation of leisure parks during the nation's darkest hours. In highlighting these projects, he shows that Tennessee owes much not only to TVA but also to many other agencies and individuals who left their mark on the landscape through roads, levees, and reforested hillsides as well as buildings. An invaluable resource for travelers as well as scholars, this book reveals a legacy of historic treasures that are well worth preserving. The Author: Carroll Van West is projects manager for the Center of Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University. The author of Tennessee's Historic Landscapes, he most recently edited the volumes Tennessee History: The Land, the People, and the Culture and the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. He is also senior editor of the Tennessee Historic Quarterly.
Author: Thomas S. Langston Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351513850 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 367
Book Description
Ideologues and Presidents argues that ideologues have been gaining influence in the modern presidency. There were plenty of ideologues in the New Deal, but they worked at cross purposes and could not count on the backing of the cagey pragmatist in the Oval Office. Three decades later, the Johnson White House systematically sought the help of hundreds of liberals in drawing up blueprints for policy changes. But when it came time to implement their plans, Lyndon Johnson's White House proved to have scant interest in ideological purity.By the time of the Reagan Revolution, the organizations that supported ideological assaults on government had never been stronger. The result was a level of ideological influence unmatched until the George W. Bush presidency. In Bush's administration, not only did anti-statists and social conservatives take up positions of influence throughout the government, but the president famously pursued an elective war that had been promoted for a decade by a networked band of ideologues.In the Barack Obama presidency, although progressive liberals have found their way into niches within the executive branch, the real ideological action continues to be Stage Right. How did American presidential politics come to be so entangled with ideology and ideologues? Ideologues and Presidents helps us move toward an answer to this vital question.
Author: John M. Coggeshall Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469670267 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
What is the "something in these hills" that ties mountain families to family land in the southern Appalachians? This ethnographic examination challenges contemporary theory and explores two interrelated themes: the duality of the southern Appalachians as both a menacing and majestic landscape and the emotional relationship to family land characteristic of long-term residents of these mountains. To most outsiders, the area conjures images of a beautiful yet dangerous place, typified by the movie Deliverance. To long-term residents, these mountains have a fundamental emotional hold so powerful that many mourn the sale or loss of family land as if it were a deceased relative. How can the same geographical space be both? Using a carefully crafted cultural lens, John M. Coggeshall explains how family land anthropomorphizes, metaphorically becoming another member of kin groups. He establishes that this emotional sense of place existed prior to recent land losses, contrary to some contemporary scholars. Utilizing the voices and perspectives of long-term residents, the book provides readers with a more fundamental understanding of the "something in these hills" that holds people in place.
Author: Michael J. McDonald
Author: William Bruce Wheeler
Author: Kate Sampsell-Willmann
Author: Barry A. Vann
Author: Jane S. Becker
Author: Melissa Walker
Author: Walter L. Creese
Author: Carroll Van West
Author: Thomas S. Langston
Author: John M. Coggeshall