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40 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
Culture (analytic definition) |
*All material and symbolic practices of a society, which serve as systems of orientation or interpretation
*culture is organized in discourses |
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American Exceptionalism |
The idea that America is not only different from other states but rather different from all states because it has a specific, perhaps divine mission in world history. In this sense it is unique, exceptional and „the greatest country in the world". |
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American Studies |
A mixture of historical and literary scholarship including questions of urban studies, media studies especially interested in structures of social differentiation: -race -class -gender -ability -age ... |
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Conquest according to Stuart Hall |
An act of taking possession that goes along with the idealization or vilification of the indigenous population through projection and the imposition of European categories and the failure to respect difference |
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City upon a Hill |
John Winthrop used this phrase from the bible to tell his Puritan brethren what he expected of them: to be a shining example of Christianity and perfection for the whole world. Perhaps the origin of American Exceptionalism |
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Predestination/Providence |
Providence is the book of history, in which all events, past or future, are pre-determined by divine will. As a result all human actions, fates, ideas are predestined/foretold |
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American Enlightenment |
*1714-1818 Also called the Age of Reason, period that led up to the American Revolution, characterized by writings from -John Adams -Thomas Jefferson -Thomas Paine -Benjamin Franklin etc. Culminated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the Bill of Rights (“all men are created equal” etc.) |
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Checks and Balances |
The separation of powers (legislative, executive and judiciary) through specific institutions (presidency, Congress, the courts) |
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Federal Style in Architecture |
The Palladian style of architecture (imitations of Greek and Roman architecture) imported from Europe to America by Thomas Jefferson to serve as a symbol for the new republic
it suggests learning, democracy, civilization but also empire, whiteness and elitism. |
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Age of Reform |
Period spanning the end of the Early Republic and the Ante-Bellum era (~1830-1850), in which a variety of reform movements emerged: abolitionism (Grundsatz d. Sklavenbefreiung) temperance, the Sunday School movement, penitentiary reform (=prison & asylum reform) dietary reform etc. |
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Nativism |
Anti-Immigration movement in the 1840s and 1850s (Know Nothing Movement, American Party) that was Anti-Catholic, Anti-Irish and Anti-German. It wanted to reserve America for those born in America. |
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Cult of True Womanhood |
= the cult of domesticity: a new (sentimental) image of women as the angel in the house, characterized by the four cardinal virtues of domesticity purity piety (=Frömmigkeit) submissiveness |
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Tocqueville’s America |
Alexis de Tocqueville, French noblemen, travelled through America in the 1830s. He wrote Democracy in America, in which he described the American character, notably individualism, restlessness, materialism, tyranny of the majority etc. |
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Manifest Destiny |
The idea that it is the divine mission of the United States to overspread the entire American continent because of its “superior” democratic institutions. A form of exceptionalism, beginning of American Imperialism |
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Indian Removal |
Policy of the United States against indigenous nations (e.g. Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Creek), which were evicted in the 1830s to the areas East of the Mississippi. This was a policy of ethnic cleansing, which resulted in thousands of deaths (Trail of Tears, 1830/31) |
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Self-reliance |
The concept, made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that the time has come for individuals and America as a whole to leave behind imitation (of European ideas) and to rely on one’s own, true self. Part of the transcendentalist and romantic discourse of self-improvement. |
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Middle Passage |
The transportation of millions of people from Africa to the Americas on slave ships. Many died during the passage. For the others it remained a traumatic climax and symbol of their deportation. |
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Fugitive Slave Law |
A law according to which fugitive slaves from the South have to be returned by the North. Part of the Compromise of 1850 between North and South, it actually deepened the tensions between North and South and led (among other things) to Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
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Minstrel Show |
Popular entertainment show emerging in the 1830s with skits, variety acts, dancing and music performed by white people in blackface. It made fun of black people and affirmed several stereotypes about African Americans |
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Plessy vs. Ferguson |
Racist Supreme Court decision (from 1896) in which segregation in the South (i.e. Jim Crow laws) were upheld through the formula “separate but equal”. The law was valid until 1954 |
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Indian Appropriation Acts |
Several acts (1851, 71 etc.) according to which members of indigenous nations were moved to reservations in the West. From 1871 on no Indian tribes were recognized as independent nations and indigenous people were treated as individuals and “wards” of the federal government. |
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Turner Thesis |
Frederick Jackson Turner suggested in 1893 that the American character and American democratic sentiment were formed through the frontier between civilization and wilderness. He succeeded to establish the myth of the West and rugged individualist, but his thesis is today largely rejected |
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Realism |
Western movement in the arts (starting in France in the 1850s) as a reaction to Romanticism and Sentimentalism. Realists rejected the demand for morality in the arts and turned with a vengeance to mundane topics such as business, science, technology, the social question and modern problems of life. |
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Gilded Age |
Term coined by Mark Twain for the era of big business in American in the post-bellum time. The Gilded Age was perceived as characterized by materialism, corruption, exploitation and pro-business ideology. |
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Horatio Alger |
Writer of books for boys in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, who invented the rags-to-riches formula. In his books, hard-working and energetic boys, who are also morally good, will rise in society and become “somebody” – myth of the self-made man |
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Naturalism |
A later version of realism (1890s+) which explored the philosophy of determinism and social Darwinism. Terms like the survival of the fittest, natural selection, the struggle for survival and the determination by strong forces/energies (instincts, the environment) apply. |
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Progressivism |
Reform movement at the end of the 19th Century in reaction to the Industrialization and the problems of the Gilded Age. It called for government activities against corruption and social misery (e.g. muckraking journalism) and for more efficiency in all areas of society |
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Modernism |
Name for various cultural movements in the West (Europe, USA, Latin America) which reacted to the sense of social breakdown, alienation, acceleration and automation of modern life. It reacted against the ordered ideas of Victorianism, Realism and tradition. Examples are Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism etc. |
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Armory Show |
Art Exhibition in New York in 1913, which introduced modernist art to America. First American contact with Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, Gaugin etc |
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Harlem Renaissance |
Lively and multifaceted cultural movement centered in Harlem, New York, which produced African-American art (literature, paintings, photography, film, music) characterized by pride and self-assertion, yet haunted by the trope of “primitivism”. |
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Popular Culture |
Popular forms of entertainment, which were exploited by the culture industry since the end of the 19th century (shows, parks, radio, film, newspapers, serial novels etc.). According to Ostendorf they are characterized by a belief in the common man, egalitarianism, liberalism, the moral community and pragmatic problem solving. |
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WPA Photography |
Documentary photography sponsored by the Roosevelt Administration in the New Deal through the Works Progress Administration. Examples are Lange’s Migrant Mother and works by Walter Evans and others |
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Social Realism |
A return to realist techniques within modernist literature in order to explore questions of poverty, history, middle class life etc. Examples are the works of Steinbeck, Lewis and Faulkner |
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Counterculture |
Youth Movement in the 1960s inspired by the civil rights movement, opposing militarism (Vietnam), technocracy, bureaucracy, conformism. It was influenced by philosophy, psychoanalysis and Buddhism. |
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Postmodernism |
International movement in the arts that embraces eclecticism, historical nostalgia, play, paradox, dissonance. Important themes are identity, history, consumer culture, loss of orientation and the disbelief in grand narratives |
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Grand Narratives |
=meta narratives, belief systems which claim to explain the course of history and the necessities of the future in a comprehensive and normative way (Liberalism, Marxism, Christianity, Judaism, the Islam etc.) |
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Gender Performance |
The idea that gender (socially sanctioned masculine or feminine behavior) does not “naturally” follow biological sex, but is in fact a publicly supported or a suppressed performance, which has a normalizing consequence |
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Orientalism |
Imitation or depiction of Middle Eastern, South Asian and East Asian cultures by writers, painters etc. from the West. Very often, the East has served as “the other” and has been essentialized as underdeveloped, barbaric, exotic, wild etc. with a patronizing point of view |
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Hybridity |
The suggestion that on account of various colonialisms and neo-colonialisms (including globalization) cultural identities are not |
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Post/Neo-colonialism |
Theoretical orientation which explores the consequences of colonizations, de-colonizations and (capitalist, neo-liberal) neo-colonizations. These consequences are present in questions of identities (hybridity, nostalgia), observations (orientalism, colonial gaze), migrations (Diasporas, borderlands) and forms of power (subalternity, hegemony, othering) |