scholarly journals Haunted Places in US Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Žikić

What makes a place haunted is the narrative of its ghosts: the curse of the place is expressed through the hauntings of that place by the ghosts of the people who died there. Ghosts are an expression of negative transgression, that is, a violation of social norms and cultural values that leads to the moral destabilization of the community: haunted places are places of tragedy, of deaths caused by violence and negligence. The basic features of haunted places in the US are liminality, the historical experience of what happened there, and the fact that they represent the boundary between the everyday and the impossible. The crossing of the existential boundaries by ghosts is analogous to negative transgression in social behavior. The liminality of ghosts thus corresponds to the liminality of haunted places in spatial, existential, ontological and moral terms. They appear as a kind of propaedeutic device in cultural communication, for the atrocities of their stories address what is good and bad according to the norms of cultural thought, and what is proper and improper in social behavior. Several different types of places are featured in this discussion: private ones, like dwelling places, as well as numerous public places, including a public library, a quarry, a public park, a village lane, a teahouse, the site of one of the best-known battles in United States history, a former correction facility, a beech etc, across the entire country: Atchison, Kansas; New Orleans, Fort Leavenworth and plantations in Louisiana; Peoria, Illinois; Reelsville, Indiana; Little Bighorn, Montana; Washington DC; New York City; the San Francisco Bay area; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portage County, Wisconsin; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Forester, Michigan; Cape May, New Jersey; Tucson, Arizona; Mason, Ohio.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.


Author(s):  
Daniel J. Gore

The Environmental Protection Agency promulgation of “Control of Emissions of Air Pollution from New Marine Compression Ignition Engines at or above 37 kW,” on December 29, 1999, marked the first time federal air pollution regulations were directly applied to marine engines for commercial U.S. ships. Perhaps surprisingly, these regulations are not having as much impact as are individual State Implementation Plans (SIP) for Nitrogen Oxides (NOx) attainment, and local political pressures. These regional plans and pressures are forcing many domestic marine operators and ports to get a quick education on the cause and mitigation of air pollution. Cases in point, include: • The State of Alaska now fines passenger vessels that enter ports with greater than allowable stack gas opacities. One cruise operator has opted to plug into shore power when its vessels are tied up to pier. • In the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach vessel operators have been asked to slow vessel speeds below normal while entering and exiting in a voluntary attempt to reduce NOx emissions. • Environmentalists in the San Francisco Bay Area are applying significant political pressures to ensure proposed new ferry systems emit a minimum of air pollution. • The State of Texas briefly considered stopping all industrial equipment in the Port of Houston for twelve hours per day as a method of decreasing area ozone formation. • Potential NOx emissions generated during imminent channel dredging in the Port of New York and New Jersey is impeding the development of the latest State Implementation Plan. Local pressures are likely to continue to grow, federal regulations are set to become more stringent, and international conventions loom on the horizon. However, as expected in such a competitive industry, concerns are often focused on the bottom line in which cost of operations is a pre-eminent factor. It was in view of these dynamics that the federal Maritime Administration (MARAD) recently launched the Maritime Energy and Clean Emissions Program. This paper introduces the Program, including the background, evolution, and progress of each strategic goal. This paper is intended to be an overview. Attention is paid to the potential transferability and/or development of technologies not previously deployed in the U.S. marine environment. Any of the specific projects described could become the basis for a separate technical paper.


Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Zarsadiaz

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.


2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjan van Dijk

In December 2004, Google Inc. announced its plans to digitize millions of books from prestigious libraries such as Harvard, Stanford, and the New York Public Library. Most of the books are in the public domain and will be available for free on the Internet. The Google initiative is one among many, including the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, and Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of these programs offer free access to good-quality digital materials. Another common feature is that they are heavily funded.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chelsea Condren

Children’s librarians and drag queens have more in common than our shared love of glitter.When Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) approached the Early Literacy Department at the New York Public Library (NYPL) to ask us about facilitating their programs in our branches, we were eager to get started. Conceived of by Michelle Tea and Radar Productions in San Francisco, DQSH now operates out of Los Angeles, New York, and New Jersey, inspires events around the world, and can be found at DragQueenStoryHour.org.


Author(s):  
Jessa Lingel

This chapter describes craigslist's transformation from an e-mail list to a massively popular online marketplace. It starts with the role of the San Francisco Bay Area in the development of craigslist's purpose and ideology. During this early phase of the tech industry, democratic values of openness and access held sway, values that have shaped craigslist's look and feel ever since. Using interviews and textual analysis of craigslist's public-facing blog, the chapter describes the site's basic features and rules, as well as the company's values and policies. The goal here is to explain how the San Francisco tech scene shaped craigslist's ideas about online publics and politics.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Benveniste

The early history of psychoanalysis in San Francisco begins in 1918 and ends in 1953. During those 35 years the San Francisco Bay Area witnessed the awakening of interest in psychoanalysis, the arrival of the European émigré analysts and the emergence of individuals and groups engaging in extraordinarily creative work and doing so in an ecumenical spirit and with a social commitment.This article provides an overview of this illustrious history and the people who participated in it.


1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 253-255
Author(s):  
Charles Stevens

I ought to point out first that my own practice is primarily corporate practice dealing with international business between Japan and the United States. Contract drafting is probably what I do most of, that and contract negotiations. In my field, many of the negotiations are not polite; they involve role playing on both sides and often extreme misunderstandings on both sides. I think, in addition to a good law background, the most important element in practice, especially in relations between Asia and the United States, is knowledge of an Asian language and a cultural familiarity with the countries where you specialize. To be able to communicate with your own client, and to be able to communicate for your client with the Japanese company across the table, knowledge of the language is absolutely essential. Also, I think my type of practice—that is practice with Asia—illustrates something that has happened in American law practice during the last ten years. The causes are primarily the revolution in transportation and something called the telex machine. Before 1960 it was impossible to get to Tokyo from New York in less than 26 hours. Now I go almost every month; it takes 16 hours. If you are representing Japanese clients in the United States it is necessary, I think, to meet the people in the Tokyo home office. Japanese abide greatly by this type of personal contact. It also helps to eliminate misunderstanding between a lawyer and his client. More and more lawyers, especially out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington are traveling around the world with their practices following them. If you have support services in various cities, there is usually no problem. You can travel, especially if your secretary and the people you work with out of the office from which you originate can handle the minor problems that come up. The telex machine has become extremely important. This is partly because of the time lag. Japan is almost exactly twelve hours opposite from the United States. My clients’ legal departments can handle minor negotiations and telex questions to me or ask me to draft particular positions. By getting background by telex, I can do this on an overnight basis so that in effect their legal department works 24 hours a day. This has the added benefit that sometimes the Japanese clients are able to disguise from the opposing American side the fact that they are using a large New York law firm.


Author(s):  
Eric Nay

The Bay Area Figurative Movement, also commonly referred to as the Bay Area Figurative School, was an art movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It was made up of a group of artists working in the San Francisco Bay Area who, in a move away from the New York School mode of abstraction, abandoned painting in the established style of Abstract Expressionism. These West Coast artists focused predominantly on the human body as their subject matter and eschewed Abstract Expressionism’s rejection of representation. The artists’ concentration on figurative work ultimately lent the group its name, although its subject matter included landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes as well. The Bay Area artists shared mutual interests and evolved a shared stylistic vocabulary. They received significant critical recognition, and helped redefine figurative art following Abstract Expressionism through a uniquely regional interpretation of modernist painting. The evolution of the Bay Area Figurative Movement was also culturally associated with the rise of beat culture in San Francisco, West Coast jazz, and reactions to World War II. It remains highly contested whether the Bay Area Figurative Movement was a deliberate and rebellious break with Abstract Expressionism or simply a cyclical return to the human figure as subject matter.


Author(s):  
James Gifford

Robert Duncan was an American poet, dramatist, and critic central to the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain College. He was born Edward Howard Duncan Jr., renamed Robert Edward Symmes by his Theosophist adoptive parents. He published as Robert Symmes in his early works and finally combined his names to form Robert Duncan in 1941 after his military discharge. After seven years in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York, Duncan returned to California in 1945 and remained in the Bay Area until his death in 1988 of kidney disease.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document