Space and the American Imagination

Space and the American Imagination PDF Author: Howard E. McCurdy
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801898684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
People dreamed of cosmic exploration—winged spaceships and lunar voyages; space stations and robot astronauts—long before it actually happened. Space and the American Imagination traces the emergence of space travel in the popular mind, its expression in science fiction, and its influence on national space programs. Space exploration dramatically illustrates the power of imagination. Howard E. McCurdy shows how that power inspired people to attempt what they once deemed impossible. In a mere half-century since the launch of the first Earth-orbiting satellite in 1957, humans achieved much of what they had once only read about in the fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and the nonfiction of Willy Ley. Reaching these goals, however, required broad-based support, and McCurdy examines how advocates employed familiar metaphors to excite interest (promising, for example, that space exploration would recreate the American frontier experience) and prepare the public for daring missions into space. When unexpected realities and harsh obstacles threatened their progress, the space community intensified efforts to make their wildest dreams come true. This lively and important work remains relevant given contemporary questions about future plans at NASA. Fully revised and updated since its original publication in 1997, Space and the American Imagination includes a reworked introduction and conclusion and new chapters on robotics and space commerce.

Space and the American Imagination

Space and the American Imagination PDF Author: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781722750831
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Book Description
The introduction will set out the principal theme of the book: that the rise of the U.S. space program was due to a concerted effort by science writers, engineers, industrialists, and civic and political leaders to create a popular culture of space exploration based on important elements of American social life (such as frontier mythology, fears about the cold war, and the rise of the consumer culture). Much of the disillusionment with the NASA space program which set in during the third decade of space flight can be traced to a widening gap between popular expectations and the reality of space exploration. Mccurdy, Howard E. Unspecified Center...

How Outer Space Made America

How Outer Space Made America PDF Author: Daniel Sage
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317120795
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
In this innovatory book Daniel Sage analyses how and why American space exploration reproduced and transformed American cultural and political imaginations by appealing to, and to an extent organizing, the transcendence of spatial and temporal frontiers. In so doing, he traces the development of a seductive, and powerful, yet complex and unstable American geographical imagination: the ’transcendental state’. Historical and indeed contemporary space exploration is, despite some recent notable exceptions, worthy of more attention across the social sciences and humanities. While largely engaging with the historical development of space exploration, it shows how contemporary cultural and social, and indeed geographical, research themes, including national identity, critical geopolitics, gender, technocracy, trauma and memory, can be informed by the study of space exploration.

Heaven in the American Imagination

Heaven in the American Imagination PDF Author: Gary Scott Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199830703
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.

The Zuni and the American Imagination

The Zuni and the American Imagination PDF Author: Eliza McFeely
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466894105
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
A bold new study of the Zuni, of the first anthropologists who studied them, and of the effect of Zuni on America's sense of itself The Zuni society existed for centuries before there was a United States, and it still exists in its desert pueblo in what is now New Mexico. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists-among the first in this new discipline-came to Zuni to study it and, they believed, to salvage what they could of its tangible culture before it was destroyed, which they were sure would happen. Matilda Stevenson, Frank Hamilton Cushing, and Stewart Culin were the three most important of these early students of Zuni, and although modern anthropologists often disparage and ignore their work-sometimes for good, sometimes for poor reasons-these pioneers gave us an idea of the power and significance of Zuni life that has endured into our time. They did not expect the Zuni themselves to endure, but they have, and the complex relation between the Zuni as they were and are and the Zuni as imagined by these three Easterners is at the heart of Eliza McFeely's important new book. Stevenson, Cushing, and Culin are themselves remarkable subjects, not just as anthropology's earliest pioneers but as striking personalities in their own right, and McFeely gives ample consideration, in her colorful and absorbing study, to each of them. For different reasons, all three found professional and psychological satisfaction in leaving the East for the West, in submerging themselves in an alien and little-known world, and in bringing back to the nation's new museums and exhibit halls literally thousands of Zuni artifacts. Their doctrines about social development, their notions of "salvage anthropology," their cultural biases and predispositions are now regarded with considerable skepticism, but nonetheless their work imprinted Zuni on the American imagination in ways we have yet to measure. It is the great merit of McFeely's fascinating work that she puts their intellectual and personal adventures into a just and measured perspective; she enlightens us about America, about Zuni, and about how we understand each other.

Animation and the American Imagination

Animation and the American Imagination PDF Author: Gordon B. Arnold
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440833605
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Providing a detailed historical overview of animated film and television in the United States over more than a century, this book examines animation within the U.S. film and television industry as well as in the broader sociocultural context. From the early 1900s onwards, animated cartoons have always had a wide, enthusiastic audience. Not only did viewers delight in seeing drawn images come to life, tell fantastic stories, and depict impossible gags, but animation artists also relished working in a visual art form largely free from the constraints of the real world. This book takes a fresh look at the big picture of U.S. animation, both on and behind the screen. It reveals a range of fascinating animated cartoons and the colorful personalities, technological innovations, cultural influences and political agendas, and shifting audience expectations that shaped not only what appeared on screen but also how audiences reacted to thousands of productions. Animation and the American Imagination: A Brief History presents a concise, unified picture that brings together divergent strands of the story so readers can make sense of the flow of animation history in the United States. The book emphasizes the overall shape of animation history by identifying how key developments emerged from what came before and from the culture at large. It covers the major persons and studios of the various eras; identifies important social factors, including the Great Depression, World War II, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the struggles for civil rights and women's rights; addresses the critical role of technological and aesthetic changes; and discusses major works of animation and the responses to them.

War Stars

War Stars PDF Author: Howard Bruce Franklin
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558496514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by "weapons of mass destruction," real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon -- guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals -- has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

Italy in the American Imagination

Italy in the American Imagination PDF Author: Ian J. Bickerton
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303136421X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
It is almost impossible to imagine the United States without making reference to Italy. There is scarcely any aspect of American culture untouched by Italy—its history, art, architecture, fashion, film, music, the mafia, or even more viscerally its food. Italy occupies a space of near mythical proportion in the American imagination. When many Americans think of, or dream about and imagine, the good life, how and where they would like to live, they think most often of Italy; the beauty, the life-style, the romance, the excitement and sense of adventure that Italy offers. By looking at the fluid and multi-dimensional imaginative interactions Americans have with Italian culture and society, this comprehensive and robust volume offers a new and novel way of exploring the influence of Italy upon the United States. University of New South Wales historian Ian James Bickerton argues that if we wish to understand the United States, and how Americans define themselves and their nation, it is vital to examine how they imagine themselves, and he demonstrates that throughout U.S. history one of the most powerful stimulants shaping the imaginary world of Americans has been Italy.
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