American Culture 6-Pack


Book Description

American culture is all around us. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, and even the music that we listen to shows our unique culture. It is important that we celebrate the mosaic of American culture. Colorful images, supporting text, a glossary, table of contents, and index all work together to help readers better understand the content and be fully engaged from cover to cover. This 6-pack includes 6 copies of this title and a lesson plan.




American Culture Guided Reading 6-Pack


Book Description

American culture is all around us. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, and even the music that we listen to shows our unique culture. It is important that we celebrate the mosaic of American culture. Colorful images, supporting text, a glossary, table of contents, and index all work together to help readers better understand the content and stay fully engaged from cover to cover. This 6-pack includes 6 copies of this title.




Women and Fitness in American Culture


Book Description

This book explores common representations and experiences of American fitness. It takes women's experiences as the center of inquiry toward an understanding of the function of fitness in our lives and in our culture-at-large. Ranging from 1968 to the present, from Jane Fonda to WiiFit, from revolution to institutionalization, from personal to political, and beyond, this book considers a broad range of topics from an interdisciplinary perspective: generations, cultural appropriation, community development, choreography, methodology, healing, and social justice. Drawing on her experience as a cultural theorist, educator and fitness instructor, the author offers critical and creative approaches that reveal the limitations and possibilities of fitness. The book enables readers to think about their own relationship to fitness as well as the more abstract meanings of the term, and suggests the idea that fitness has some potential to transform our worlds--if we're willing to do the work(out).




Exploring African-American Culture Through Crafts


Book Description

From inventors to writers to heroes, African-American history is made up of remarkable people. Step into the world of African-American culture with these fun, easy crafts and connect with people like Harriet Tubman, Ralph Ellison, George Washington Carver, and the Harlem Globetrotters!




Americanness


Book Description

Americanness: Inquiries into the Thought and Culture of the United States analyzes several core themes that connect Americans because of, and despite, their pronounced diversity. The book investigates shared ideas and ideals, such as individualism, mobility, materialism, and future-orientation, that drive an overarching American worldview. Simon J. Bronner begins with ideas of space and time as they formed and changed through the history of the United States, before moving to the emergence of modern American culture. He examines reasons America is characterized as having a "victory culture" that extends to the American legal, military, and business complexes. This victory culture is further analyzed by looking at the country’s relationship with the game of football—a sport that thrives in America but has not caught on in other countries. Finally, the volume probes American consumerism driven by a desire for individual prosperity in a supposedly egalitarian society. Using interdisciplinary approaches drawn from psychology, sociology, ethnology, and history, Bronner seeks explanations for people invoking, and evoking, ideas that they perceive as American. This book would be an invaluable addition to courses on American history, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.




Native American Ceremonies and Celebrations: From Potlatches to Powwows


Book Description

Native American celebrations are packed with symbolic gestures and intriguing details. A kind of party called a potlatch, staged by native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, was marked by guests receiving gifts, not giving them, and were sometimes put on to get back at an enemy. This appealing volume about a high-interest aspect of native cultures highlights several celebrations and ceremonies important to Native Americans across North America. Thought-provoking fact boxes, historical images, and modern-day customs will engage readers of all levels.




Hybrid Fictions


Book Description

Since the 1960s, academics have theorized that literature is on its way to becoming obsolete or, at the very least, has lost part of its power as an influential medium of social and cultural critique. This work argues against that misconception and maintains that contemporary American literature is not only alive and well but has grown in significant ways that reflect changes in American culture during the last twenty years. In addition, this work argues that beginning in the 1980s, a new, allied generation of American writers, born from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, has emerged, whose hybrid fiction blend distinct elements of previous American literary movements and contain divided social, cultural and ethnic allegiances. The author explores psychological, philosophical, ethnic and technological hybridity. The author also argues for the importance of and need for literature in contemporary America and considers its future possibilities in the realms of the Internet and hypertext. David Foster Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Sherman Alexie, William Vollmann, Michele Serros and Dave Eggers are among the writers whose hybrid fictions are discussed.




Encounters with American Culture


Book Description

Peter S. Prescott was one of the most informed and incisive American literary critics to write for the general public. Never content merely to summarize or to pronounce quick judgments, Prescott's reviews are witty and delightful essays to be enjoyed for their own sake as examples of civilized discourse. Whether he is exploring a well-known novelist's outlook and methods, or the peculiar deficiencies of a work of nonfiction, Prescott's grace, elegance, and insights make each piece proof that real criticism need not be pedantic, obscure, or interminably long. The focus in this second volume of Prescott's writings published by Transaction is on both fiction by American authors and on nonfiction reflecting our American unease. He casts an ironic eye on how we in this country think we live now; on what we are saying about ourselves in our fiction, our history, and our biography. Prescott considers some of our century's classic writers: Hemingway and Henry Miller; John Cheever and Thornton Wilder. He offers new insights regarding those who are still at work: Mailer, John Irving, Oates, Updike, Ozick, and Alice Walker. Some authors do not fare well. With his customary flair; Prescott explains why the reputations of Kurt Vonnegut and Barbara Tuchman, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and John Gardner, urgently need deflation. He includes essays on writers and books not generally noticed in collections of criticism: Stephen King, The Joy of Sex, fairy tales, science fiction, thrillers, books on survival and etiquette. Here is a critic with a personal voice and a sense of style. For essays published in this collection, Prescott received the most highly regarded prize in journalism: the rarely presented George Polk Award for Criticism. This is a chronicle of our contemporary American culture as revealed by its books, written with verve, intelligence, wisdom, and wit by a critic who's cruel only when appropriate. Encounters with American Culture is, quite simply, literary journalism at its urbane best.




Handbook of Cross-Cultural Marketing


Book Description

Going global can be risky business if you don't divest yourself of your ethnocentric thinking. You have to take into consideration your new market's language, work schedules, tastes, lifestyle choices, and cultural associations, and this is the book to help you do that! Handbook of Cross-Cultural Marketing shows you how to sensitize your marketing approaches to the cultural norms and taboos of other societies, as well as the importance of demonstrating an interest in and appreciation of different cultures. Designed to assist both American and foreign companies, Handbook of Cross-Cultural Marketing shows you how to increase your chance at success in international markets. It identifies and explains ten important aspects of culture that are essential to cross-cultural marketing to help you understand how underlying cultural beliefs govern the way marketing functions in different societies. It also gives you specific steps for developing cultural adaptation strategies in international marketing. To further your understanding of global marketing and fundamental marketing concepts, this comprehensive book discusses: real life examples of company successes and failures abroad attitudes toward middlemen in underdeveloped countries the advantages of foreign trade shows locating and using representatives, agents, and/or distributors in foreign countries the reception of different American products in different countries potential cultural pitfalls of primary data collecting techniques the role of time in various cultures setting standards for product performance A useful text for students and practitioners alike, Handbook of Cross-Cultural Marketing gives you hands-on strategies and advice for delving into different markets, using techniques that are respectful of individual cultures, and avoiding unnecessary mistakes that can occur if you don't take the initiative to get to know the culture of your new marketplace. Your outlook and beliefs are not the global norm, so read this book to find out how you can be successful with customers who are different from you in terms of motivation, values, beliefs, and outlook.