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In the United States this is almost exclusively a women’s sport that spread through women’s colleges in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states during the early twentieth century in spite of its vigorous aspects—believed inappropriate for young women. Since becoming an Olympic sport for women in 1980, it has spread beyond its “Seven Sisters” image. In the 1990s, heated debates also have erupted, especially in high schools, about boys playing field hockey on girls’ teams. Such debates may intensify as immigrants arrive from areas such as South Asia, where field hockey has been popular among schoolboys and men.
Industry:Culture
In the US, about one-third of women are victims of domestic violence—violence between intimate partners occurs regardless of race, ethnicity socioeconomic status, age, or sexual orientation—during their adult life. Annually some 4 million women are victims of serious assault. In 1993, approximately 1,300 women were murdered by intimate partners.
Domestic violence stories appear daily in newpapers; they are recurring items in television news reports, and are common themes of crime dramas and movies. Hence, when O.J. Simpson, an ex-football star, stood accused of murdering his wife, the fully televised trial became a media spectacle, gripping the nation for nine months.
The battered women’s movement of the 1970s raised public awareness; activists established hotlines, shelters, counseling groups for victims and treatment programs for batterers, and struggled to get police and courts to take domestic violence seriously.
“Why doesn’t she just leave?” Victims feel shame and embarrassment and may hide the abuse or blame themselves. Batterers gain control through physical force, threats, manipulation and isolation; victims may eventually feel powerless to escape. In fact, leaving a batterer can be dangerous for victims—when batterers feel they have lost power and control, they may become desperate, violent, even homicidal. Lack of resources and social support poses additional barriers. Despite obstacles, most domestic violence victims ultimately escape abusive relationships, often driven by concern for their children.
Industry:Culture
In the US, the Olympics have been the most obvious site for the intersection of sports and nationalism. Until recently, therefore, the major compensation that could be derived from being an Olympian, given the strictures associated with maintaining status as an amateur, came from the visibility afforded those who represented their country preferably with distinction. When most Americans played football and baseball, games which had only a limited international dimension, sporting outlets for nationalist and patriotic fervor were confined to the Olympics. Television commentators were acutely aware of this and their coverage of the Olympics focused fundamentally on highlighting American successes. Moreover, nationalist intensity associated with the Olympics was exacerbated by Cold-War rivalries. Americans as the leader of the “Free World” competed with East Germany and the Soviet Union, the communist powerhouses.
African American track stars, boxers and college basketball players were able, at least in small measure, to reap the benefits of favorable attitudes deriving from their goldmedal winning performances. Many of the athletes also celebrated their “Americanness,” often taking victory laps or in some way wrapping themselves in the American flag.
Other black athletes, especially at the 1968 Mexico and 1972 Munich Olympics, used the platform to make statements of protest against racial policies in the United States.
Many of the memorable moments in Olympic sports, then, have been those that could be framed in reference to nationalism. The Soviet Union’s disputed victory at the 1972 Munich Olympics against a highly favored American basketball team (the game being decided on a very controversial last-second play) was cause for dismay. Eight years later, at the winter games in Lake Placid, New York, during the Iran hostage crisis, the success of the US hockey team’s college players against the Soviet “machine” gave rise to widespread euphoria. In gymnastics, the five-medal performance of Mary Lou Retton at the 1984 Los Angeles games (clad in new flag-motif leotards) made her the darling of games tainted by a Soviet boycott.
This identification between nationalism and the Olympics has diminished somewhat in recent years. In part this is due to the end of Cold-War rivalries, but it is also a result of the growing professionalism of the Olympics. The athletes no longer need to maintain amateur status and so no longer pin all their hopes on their Olympic performances.
Moreover, some of the competitiveness has been undermined by the inclusion of professionals in recent games. Instead of a team of American basketball players drawn from the NCAA, the US now fields “dream teams” that pull in stars exclusively from the NBA. The winner of the gold medal is now a foregone conclusion and many of the games in which the United States plays end up being humiliating for the other team. In other Olympic sports, nationalist sentiment is on the rise. This is particularly so for women’s soccer, where Americans dominate but maintain strong rivalries with countries like Brazil and China, and patriotic feelings feed on the other major arena of sporting nationalism—soccer’s world cups.
Industry:Culture
In this 1978 case, the Supreme Court invalidated a fixed affirmative-action quota system used at the medical school of the University of California at Davis. The suit was brought by Allan Bakke, a white applicant rejected while non-white applicants with lower test scores and grades were admitted. The Court held that the school’s setaside procedure, guaranteeing admission places to people from various minority groups, contravened federal anti-discrimination law. The five-to-four decision still permitted race to be used as a remedy for past discrimination when it is one of many factors for admission.
Industry:Culture
Industrial and commercial center on the Ohio River, Cincinnati has long been characterized as a bastion of conservative Republican culture, with strong German, Irish and Catholic institutions, as well as a Protestant elite epitomized in the Republican Taft family. This conservatism, however, has been challenged by the city’s universities and artists, including a famous debate over the obscenity of a 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center. Cincinnati also hosts strong professional sports traditions, including football’s Bengals and baseball’s Reds, whose owner, Marge Schott, was censored for racist remarks. Hence the city of 345,818 people (metro 1,948,264), despite its placid, home-town image, entails continual complexities and contradictions—indeed, shock talk-show host Jerry Springer was once its mayor.
Industry:Culture
Influenced by the work of early nineteenth-century Swiss theorist Pestalozzi, who emphasized moral education, humane pedagogical methods, different processes for different stages of learning, and connecting learning to the real world, the word kindergarten—“child garden”—was coined by German educator Freidrich Froebel.
Froebel believed that children needed to unite their spirits and their reason and be guided by an entity other than the family towards goodness.
Kindergartens arrived in America between 1848 and 1860, were incorporated into the school system in St. Louis by 1876, and subsequently emerged as the formal context in which children make the transition from home to school. This transition can be particularly difficult for children whose backgrounds, values and practices differ from the middle-class, Anglican values and practices which inform schools. In an attempt to ease this transition, Head Start was created under Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. A program of child development for four- and five-year-olds from low-income homes, it targets children in what some educational psychologists call the critical period in human development, and it focuses on mental and physical health, welfare, recreation and remediation, as well as on intellectual development. Starting in 1965, Head Start has had high enrollment, and research indicates that the program succeeds in acculturating children to the culture of schooling.
The development of kindergartens has been characterized by a combination of attempting to structure children’s entry into formal schooling and striving to address social inequities. In the late 1960s, the work of Swiss psychologist Piaget and Italian physician and educator Montessori influenced the development of kindergartens as places for children to discover and learn at their own pace. The conflict between behaviorist models and more child-centered approaches to education has yielded various models of kindergartens, but they are generally conceptualized, and often mandated, as necessary to the initiation of children into formal schooling.
Industry:Culture
Informal meal arrangement among friends or colleagues in which each contributes a dish, generally within prescribed American food categories like appetizer, main dish or casserole, salad, dessert, etc. The host/hostess provides the basic materials and setting— in one variation, however, participants move from house to house, course by course. As larger collective events, potlucks can be used to promote social relations in schools, workplaces or churches as well as to raise money for community events. While emphasizing solidarity they also permit competition in quality and display among participants. To “just take potluck”—essentially whatever is left—suggests drawbacks of the arrangement.
Industry:Culture
Initially a writer who gained some prominence for his contributions to literary magazines, Garrison Keillor gained wider notice during the 1980s for the homespun view of Midwestern farm life he presented in his weekly public radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. First broadcast in Minneapolis and later relocated to New York City, NY, the variety show’s assortment of American music acts and comedy sketches is built around Keillor’s centerpiece monologue, “The News from Lake Wobegon.” Keillor’s portrayal of this fictional Minnesota farming town draws from remembrances of his own childhood, and draws listeners by its loving depiction and gentle tweaking of Scandinavian American values and folk ways.
Industry:Culture
Inspired by the efforts of French psychologist Alfred Binet, who in 1904 designed a measure to determine students at risk of failure in school so that those students could receive remedial attention, there emerged what came to be known as intelligence tests which yielded a number defined as a person’s intelligence quotient or IQ. This and related tests were developed using the population of enlisted men during the First World War, and this group of white, middle-class males came to be the “norm” to which all other individuals and groups were compared.
Mental measurement and scientifically grounded assessment tools were part of a general movement at the beginning of the twentieth century to develop a “science of education,” which reflected the obsession of schools and culture with the efficiency of production at that time. As schools became like factories, and under pressure from a taxpaying public (whose money supports public education), school administrators needed clean, fast, relatively inexpensive and accurate ways of measuring their schools’ products. The Educational Testing Service, founded in 1947 with the support of the Carnegie Foundation, emerged as (and has remained) the primary regulator of students’ access to learning at all levels and to professional opportunities beyond school through their production and control of standardized tests. These include the SATS (Scholastic Aptitude Tests), LCATS (law), MCATS (medicine) and GREs (graduate school).
Standardized tests are mass-produced, primarily multiple-choice, criterion-referenced tests administered to students individually and en masse under highly regulated (timed, directed, monitored) conditions as early as preschool and regularly (as often as several times a year) subsequently. These tests are intended to measure students’ aptitude and achievement, and they are used to compare and sort individuals and groups of students within and across classes, grade levels and schools.
In recent years, there has been substantial debate about the efficacy and fairness of standardized tests. Advocates argue that what American education lacks is rigor, high standards of excellence and effective measures for holding schools and students accountable. Because they judge all students according to the same criteria, standardized tests appear to offer “scientific” data upon which to make educational decisions, and thus they are thought by some to be objective and fair.
Critics argue that the tests are biased in terms of race, class, gender and other forms of diversity and that they offer an unfair advantage to those students whose home and community experiences most closely parallel the middle class, Anglo-American values generally emphasized in public schools which were established as the norm over eighty years ago through the first IQ tests. Furthermore, critics argue that standardized tests reinforce meritocratic competitiveness, fear of failure, curricular influence and manipulation by those who create the tests, over-emphasis on results and a trivialization of knowledge in their emphasis of facts (as opposed to critical thinking).
The basic disagreement is that proponents of standardized tests argue that the scores reflect students’ intelligence and potential, and critics argue that the tests reflect the biases of those who design them and serve to reinforce the inequities inherent in the status quo.
Industry:Culture
Instituted by President Johnson in 1966 as an urban campaign within the War on Poverty, the Model-Cities program sought to coordinate fed-eral, state and local authorities in social reform of slum-housing, poverty disease, dependency and crime.
Model Ccities soon faced challenges to its scale within cities and about how many cities could claim its scarce funds. By 1974 a more anti-urban Nixon presidency could point to its lack of accomplishments and shift funding to block grants. Nonetheless, individual programs and community leaders arising from them attest to the ideal, if not the realization of this program.
Industry:Culture
