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The story of martial arts in the United States is closely connected with the post-Second World War history of the United States’ connections with Asia. Aikido, Judo and Karate, originating in Japan, were learned by American servicemen during the occupation of that country following its defeat in 1945. An Armed Forces Judo Association was established and this martial art was incorporated into air-force training in the 1950s. When Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games in 1964, Japan used this opportunity to establish Judo as an Olympic sport, and now as many as 400,000 Americans engage in Judo. Karate, meanwhile, was introduced to the United States in 1954 by Tsutomu Ohshima, who immigrated in 1954 and established the Southern California Karate Association, which grew into the nationwide organization, Shotokan Karate of America.
Tae Kwon Do, which was recognized as an official Olympic Sport at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney Australia, was brought to the United States from Korea in the mid-1970s by Grandmaster Hyuk Kun Shim, who opened Shim’s Martial Arts Academy in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1976.
Kung Fu and Tai Chi, originating in China, have been affected by the United States’ multiple connections with this nation, in terms of migration, political alliance and hostility and economic trade, as well as the powerful impact of culture emanating from Hong Kong. Kung Fu was popularized in the United States through the career of San Franciscoborn Bruce Lee. It then achieved crossover appeal in white and black communities with the television western series Kung-Fu (ABC, 1972–5), starring the martial-arts novice David Carradine, in a role for which Lee was turned down, and with the acting successes of Chuck Norris (Lee’s adversary in Return of the Dragon, 1972), Jeanne-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Jackie Chan. The status of martial arts in American culture has been further enhanced by very popular and violent video and computer games.
Industry:Culture
The American people and government have enjoyed amicable and supportive relations with the Republic of Ireland, an independent nationstate, and the smaller Northern Ireland, an integral part of the United Kingdom, since Ireland’s division in 1920.
However, relations were strained during the Second World War when the Irish state, then known as Éire, remained neutral. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, was the site of bases for US forces staging for the invasion of western Europe. Since the war, US—Irish relations improved greatly during the Kennedy administration, while US—Northern Irish relations were muted after the return of “the Troubles” in 1969 due to British insistence that they were strictly an internal affair. Since that time, however, the US, through the International Fund for Ireland, has provided capital for economic development in Northern Ireland, and the Clinton administration has played an important role in the peace initiatives of the late 1990s.
The US continues to welcome Irish immigrants, in what is part of the special relationship between the two lands, while Irish Americans, the second-largest group of European ancestry in the US, sustain wide social and cultural ties with families and friends in the “Zold country.” Today Ireland, North and South, has become a favorite location for American corporations (particularly in the fields of services, software and communications) that want access to the European Union, which both Irelands joined in 1973.
Industry:Culture
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, bringing the US and Western Europe into an alliance against the Soviet Union, was established by President Truman in 1949.
Designed to bolster European postwar recovery in the hope that military security would reinforce aid given in the Marshall Plan, the organization also increased American visibility and influence in the region. A product of the growing antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union, and European fears of the latter, the establishment of NATO further escalated Cold War animosities and led the Soviets to create the Warsaw Pact.
The end of the Cold War has transformed NATO. Pushed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, NATO has incorporated a number of former Warsaw Pact nations (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic). It has also altered its relationship with Russia, though Russia still views NATO, backed by the US, as encroaching on its allies and Russian internal affairs. Thus far, NATO has opted to keep the Russians out of the organization, but has endeavored to coordinate policy with its erstwhile foe. Lastly NATO has begun to expand its mission from containment of a particular nation to that of regional policing. In the Balkans, it took the lead in pushing for negotiations between warring groups and in the 1999 military intervention against the Serbs in Kosovo.
During the Clinton administration, a rift between the US and its NATO partners grew.
An increasingly consolidated European Community has tried to limit American leadership, particularly as Americans express their reluctance to commit troops to conflicts that have little strategic importance to the US. In addition, the existence of large US military bases across Europe no longer seems warranted; some have been returned to the host nations. A growing impatience towards the American soldiers and their families near such bases is now evident, especially with scuffles between locals and American soldiers and their families.
Industry:Culture
The major television rating system in the US, used by advertisers and broadcasters to determine the value of advertising time, based on how many people and what demographics say they watch particular shows. The company was founded in 1923 by Arthur C. Nielsen, Sr; in 1936 the “Audimeter” was introduced to track radio listening. It has continued to adapt: the Nielsen Hispanic Television Index appeared in 1991 to track Spanish-language television; Net Ratings were introduced in the 1990s.
The Nielsen broadcast sample includes 5,000 US households. Many critics complain that ratings are inaccurate because of the lack of representation of older people and ethnic minorities and reliance on faulty measures of attention. In 2000, Nielsen admitted it undercounted Spanish speakers in New York City, NY by 300,000 households.
However, even knowing the ratings’ weaknesses, the industry still needs an agreed-upon measure to commodify broadcast audience. This, in turn, leads to further fragmentation of the viewing public as stratified commodities.
Industry:Culture
While librettos, storylines, choreography music and staging have seen enormous changes since the 1940s, Broadway musicals have grown in popularity and scale in the United States and abroad. Nonetheless, the annual Tony Awards for excellence often raise questions about the dominance of familiar works and variety reviews over new forms, audiences and sites for the future.
Following the Second World War, musicals turned from comedic, sexy dance-oriented pieces towards more romantic, complex and lyrical works in the tradition of Jerome Kern’s Showboat (1927). Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Richard Rogers revitalized the genre with Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The Kïng and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959)—bringing on stage such “nonmusical” themes as death, miscegenation, globalization and Nazis. Another team, Frederick Loewe and Allan Jay Lerner, added Brigadoon (1948) and My Fair Lady (1956) to the canon. These golden decades also saw Cole Porter’s urbane wit (Kïss Me Kate, 1948), the urban underworlds of Guys and Dolls (Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, premiered 1950) and Leonard Bernstein’s gang opera West Side Story (1957), with Jerome Robbin’s magnetic choreography.
Broadway’s hegemony was reinforced by starladen Hollywood films of major hits (sometimes showcasing “non-singing” stars). Yet despite traditional hits in the 1960s (Camelot, 1960, which loaned its aura to the Kennedy years; Hello, Dolly!, 1964; Fiddler on the Roof, 1964), composers and producers began to chafe at traditional formats. Shows such as How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961), with satiric, antisentimental tones, paved the way for the dark visions of Nazism and sexuality in Cabaret (1966). Despite challenges to character development and a “songs and scenes” layout, rock music and youthful attitudes came on stage with Hair (1967), Jesus Christ Superstar (1972) and The Wiz (1974), which also marked the increasing recognition of blacks on center stage.
While classic musicals became staples of local theaters and school productions across the US, Broadway musicals in the 1970s and 1980s moved towards more eclectic productions, such as those of darkly toned composer Stephen Sondheim (Company, 1970; Sweeney Todd, 1979; Into the Woods, 1987) and the choreographic vitality of Michael Bennett (A Chorus Line, 1975) and Bob Fosse (Chicago, 1975). English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, with Tim Rice, fostered an alternative “mega-musical” model with lavish, long-running lyrical productions like Cats (1981), The Phantom of the Opera (1987) and Sunset Boulevard (1993). Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1994) and The Lion Kïng (1998) also translated family animated films into long-running Broadway spectacles.
Despite continuing complaints about the prohibitive cost of production and tickets and the presence of stage “elephants,” the genre still allows experimentation and renewal.
This vitality may be seen in the 1996 youthful Rent (Tony and Pulitzer winner), in continuing exploratory revivals of older musicals and in the success of off-Broadway and regional theater productions even more than Broadway itself.
Industry:Culture
Slapstick team of vaudeville and movies (in the 1950s) popular among those amused by hitting, eye gouging and similar antics. The original members were Moe Howard (1897– 1975), Shemp Howard (1900–75) and Larry Fine (1911–75), although various replacements also appeared. Through television reruns and cult status, their fan base remains dedicated to this day.
Industry:Culture
Sweets seemingly have a universal appeal. Yet societies worldwide have also developed styles and brands that set them apart—candied seeds in South Asia, designer chocolates in Europe or salty preserved fruits in China. The multicultural United States has imported all of these while adding its own twists to taffy chocolates and gum. And, while generations of dentists have warned about cavities and generations have confiscated gum, the American sweet tooth sustains a multi-billion dollar industry Halloween is a celebration of sugar as much as ghosts. Candies and companies also tell especially American stories.
Hershey historically the number-one company producing bars, “kisses” and peanutbutter cups, fostered the American democratization of chocolate, although its different taste is strange to European palates (Brenner 1999). By the turn of the century its fivecent bars became widespread. Its rival, Mars, with $16 billion in sales worldwide, began in 1922. Still run by the Mars family it is the nation’s sixth-largest privately held company with brands like M&M, Snickers and Milky Way. Cracker Jack, meanwhile, combined two American favorites—popcorn and sugar—with tiny prizes in every box.
Its sailor logo has also changed over decades, situating the box in American nostalgia.
Fanciful products like Victor Bonono’s Turkish Taffy entered the market after the Second World War sugar rationing, only to disappear as a victim of later corporate consolidation.
Upscale markets have been dominated by imported chocolates and hand-dipped or artisanal products.
Inventiveness and legends also incorporate candies into American folklore. Did you hear the story of a child star killed by pop rocks (small fizzy gum chips)? Marshmallow peeps—marshmallow shaped like chicks or rabbits, covered with colored sugar—have a web-site for fans, including scientific experiments to perform.
Candies are not only national, but also local and domestic. The candy store and penny candies evoke a lost emporium of Main Street in a world of multinationals and franchises that sometimes imitate older local stores. Nonetheless, family recipes for candies and cookies are brought out for parties and holidays, especially Christmas.
Gum also occupies a special niche in American dental records. The corporate giant is Wrigley’s (as in Chicago’s baseball field and tower). Founded in 1891 to distribute other products, Wrigley found the gum he gave away as a premium more successful than soap or baking powder. Juicy Fruit was introduced in 1893; Spearmint in 1894. Wrigley used advertising and premiums to compete and globalize his product. While servicemen came first in the Second World War (hence the image of GIs giving away gum), the company returned to US and world markets in the late 1940s. Eventually sugar-free products and bubblegum were added. Its Doublemint advertisements, with various twins and a catchy jingle, have also become part of American media folklore.
Gum has been touted as a release from stress, an alternative to smoking or food and a form of relaxation, although it is prohibited in schools, churches and other formal settings. With twenty companies and $2 billion in sales annually (300 sticks per person) candy marks a common break in the American day.
Industry:Culture
Westerns, perhaps the most important, recognized and popular genre of Hollywood movies worldwide, are as old as narrative film itself. Many scholars consider The Great Train Robbery (1903) to be the first important narrative film, which coincidentally established cinematic themes that would define westerns to this day: outlaws and lawmen, a train robbery a chase on horseback and a shoot-out, all within a wilderness setting. These motifs, which along with those of cowboys, cattle, Native Americans, cavalry, settlers and covered wagons had been established in American culture since the nineteenth century through the popularity of dime-store novels, wild-west shows and the writings of authors such as James Fennimore Cooper and Bret Hart, sustained the genre through to the era of the Second World War, when more mature and complex themes surfaced.
The era of the classic western feature film was ushered in with Stagecoach (1939), by veteran director John Ford, regarded by many critics and fans as the premier western film-maker in American cinema. Ford’s westerns had an epic quality that, along with an attention to characterization and dialogue, marked most western films throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This was the period of the epic western, filmed on location, which dealt with the broad sweep of American myth and history yet found time to confront the social problems and psychological torments which were the root causes of the conflicts between such groups as ranchers and homesteaders (Shane, 1953), whites and Indians (The Searchers, 1956), lawmen and badmen (High Noon, 1952) and cattlemen and society (Red River, 1948). Many of these films transcended the confines of the western genre to deal with issues relevant to contemporary America, but did so in ways which did not confront the mythical roots of the western itself.
The 1960s brought the anti-hero to westerns in films where protagonists, doomed in a West that could not survive a civilizing America, turned to violence as mercenaries (The Magnificent Seven, 1960), outlaws (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kïd, 1969), or sociopathic killers (The Wild Bunch, 1969). These “end of the frontier” themes paralleled growing American alienation in the 1960s and 1970s, which led western filmmakers and authors to question the accuracy of western history and the role of the West in the origins of American culture. As a result, views of Native Americans, long portrayed as the stereotyped “other” in the Manifest Destiny sagas of the epic western, were revised in such films as Little Big Man (1970) and Dances With Wolves (1990). This grittier approach to the people and events of the filmic West, both Old and New, has been mirrored in the novels of Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane.
Many great directors of western films such as Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann won critical acclaim and fame in other movie genres. Some, like Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher, seemed most at home in the West. This was also true of actors, like John Wayne, whose career was inextricably linked to his celluloid image as a Westerner, and Clint Eastwood, famed over the last four decades for his western film acting and directing.
Industry:Culture
The Internet is presented by the highest government authority as “a global matrix of interconnected computer networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate with each other” that “encompass(es) all such data networks and hundreds of applications” (Clinton and Gore 1997). Its model of a decentralized network, open to all and to all sorts of information, with “smart” receivers (computers) that interact with each other has captured popular as well as technocratic imaginations as the “information super-highway” for a post-industrial service economy. By the late 1990s, some foresaw it absorbing all other forms of communication into a new model, alternative both to the telephone system and to mass media. Others saw it as a new world of capitalism, domain of e-commerce and volatile, com stocks.
The Internet originated in the workaday world of engineers, who conceived and built technologies for sharing scarce and distant computer resources in the 1960s. Beginning with remote access and transfer of electronically stored data, successive additions of electronic mail (1972) and electronic bulletin boards, known as Usenet (1980), spread computer networking from research labs throughout universities, while increases in capacity made it available for less technical, even avocational uses. Non-engineers began creating databases that could be accessed over the Internet from anywhere in the world, and creation of the “user-friendly” World Wide Web in 1990 finally made it accessible to the public. From four computers linked in a demonstration of the software (TCP/IP) that enabled the Internet in 1977 to 200 in 1983, the number of computers linked on the Internet grew to over 6 million in 1995 and continued increasing at 16 percent per month.
In 1991 the National Science Foundation that had sponsored the Internet project lifted restrictions on commercial use, which surpassed education and research uses by 1993.
Business uses and stock investments based on such usages dominated discussion of the Internet by the end of the decade.
Users soon noticed that the Internet obliterates geography and puts potentially peripheral places on a par with what have been centers. Scandinavian and provincial land-grant universities were enthusiastic adopters, and USENET, the software for open discussion of thousands of topics, was invented in Australia, a leader in online libraries.
Visions of “virtual” libraries in cyberspace, and thus of a newly leveled playing field, accessible instantly anywhere in the world, motivated such efforts. At the same time, minor technologies for video conferencing, chat and what amounts to telephone calls via the Internet accelerate pressures to deregulate telephone monopolies and restructure telecommunications around functions (such as delivering a signal or providing content) rather than around enduses, such as watching television, talking on the phone or transmitting data.
Convergence is not uniformly welcomed. If it’s illegal, it’s on the Internet: pornography and political oppositions found controversial outlets, followed by copyright infringement and mail fraud. What had been contained is freed by the Internet principle that all communication and information is equal, and boundaries everywhere are threatened. The US Congress passed a Communications Decency Act in 1995 that the Supreme Court ruled to be an unconstitutional infringement of 1st Amendment rights to free speech in 1997. Threats of piracy and politics spread worldwide: Singapore employs censors, and China declared that the Internet will be “just for business” in that country, while the government newspaper of Iraq denounced the Internet as an “American means to enter every house in the world” and “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and ethics” (Associated Press, February 17, 1997).
Such anxieties mark shifting boundaries and fragmentation of authority in the postmodern world. Generally fears of electronic surveillance have given way to boosterism, led by US government promotion of a national information infrastructure.
Nonetheless, liberal humanists tied to older means of communication share concerns over information free-for-all with parents at home and with authoritarian regimes overseas.
Consumer advocates fear false marketing as well as well-targeted ploys; children and women are often portrayed as particular victims of Internet predators.
What the Internet fosters is a broad creolization and emergence of intermediate communities and mixed discourses that both increase alternatives and make them more public. In this respect, the Internet resembles less the mass media, with which it is often compared, than the print capitalism that brought ethno-linguistic communities into the early modern period. It favors horizontal or what enthusiasts call “virtual” communities of special interests that can be worldwide and almost instantaneously accessible. This is probably a more important impact of the Internet than visions of tele-commuting, cyberselves or wired democracy.
It is easy to overlook how the Internet itself is a cultural product and socially organized, just as anxieties overlook how much it changes in going public. The Internet is actually a collection of technologies that began as work-arounds and embody work habits and values of engineers. E-mail, discussion groups and the World Wide Web fit into an overall communications ecology and enhance the relative power or ability of users to reach others, to form a public, to bypass conventional gate-keepers and, in some cases, establish new publics. Increasingly expectations that it may be the leading edge of economic development, whether or not of a “third wave” or “information age,” are the Internet’s license. This has underpinned competition for control of access providers, as well as competition among businesses on and off the net. New Internet giants like Yahoo, Amazon.com and others are surrounded by service providers, “navigators” and other commercial sites. These are advertising heavily in print and televisual media, producing a continual crossover as well as concerns about changes in local business (and the tax structures based on them).
The Internet’s social structure has evolved from an engineering experiment into government-by-steering committee, while its culture has long since expanded beyond engineering values to those of the marketplace in a larger context set by deregulation and capitalist triumphalism. These values and structures are, in turn, further modified by say sinicization or similar domestication elsewhere as, for instance, exemplified in the overwhelming focus on the self that dominated thinking about the Internet in our society.
In all, the Internet has become a lightning rod and laboratory for the linkage of community to communication in the post-industrial society.
Industry:Culture
This lower Manhattan area is located SOuth of HOuston Street and was in the early 1900s an area of cast-iron factory buildings. In the 1960s and 1970s, after many factory closures, the artists rediscovered the area, using low-rent factories as lofts. An art scene grew up in SoHo and property values increased. In the 1990s, SoHo boasts institutions like the SoHo Guggenheim as well as luxury shops and residences. Although some longtime residents remain, SoHo has become more about the sale and display of art than its production. The stump-compound name of SoHo has also been extended to NoHo (North) and mimicked elsewhere—hence SoBe for South Beach, in Miami, FL.
Industry:Culture
