Prior and during the time Altmans Short Cuts was developed and shaped, Americans experienced over a decade of Republican administration, represented by Reagan and Bush, extreme right wing national policies, and an ill economy. On 9 November 1989 with the fall of Berlin Wall, America and whole world experienced one of the most extreme changes in the history of the twentieth century: the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new post-Cold war era. Hardly anyone could have foreseen the end of communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe during that time. The demise of the Soviet Union left the United States the sole remaining superpower, a position that carried its own risks and problems. With this extreme change of dichotomy between the two world powers, on which was the base of the national and international politics for more than fifty years and also a major coping mechanism for the people by splitting between the Good and Bad, God and Evil, Communism and Democracy, in late 1980s and early 1990s it came to a break down of the known structures which were experienced as very frightening by American people. I wonder if Short Cuts was an attempt by Robert Altman in the early 90s, to comfort all these anxious and helpless people, who were confused, and who couldnt understand why things happen to them, what happened to them and asking themselves why? What did we do wrong? What if this did not happen and that happened? The Robert Altmans Short Cuts and American Society and American Life in the Early Nineties is an attempt to examine all these notions and understand what is about Short Cuts making it to become such a timeless and unique movie.

"Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions"--

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

Traces the history of the United States during the 1990s through such primary sources as memoirs, letters, contemporary journalism, and official documents.

The Trojan Horse in the Tribal Classroom: How Culture Wars are Waged and Won on the Front Lines of Education By: Thomas Alan Tobin All three hundred thirty million of us are immersed in culture wars at every turn. It’s one of the great disadvantages of diversity. One such “warfare” has been hidden from all of us despite the fact that we had to face it almost daily in our formative years. The battleground for this most common cultural conflict is where we all spent at least 40% of our school-years, preparing not just for unforeseen pandemics, such as we’re caught up in now, nor also for dealing with the economic, ecological, and political divisions that currently confront all arenas of American society. Surprisingly it’s our educational system, and especially the classroom, where the frontlines of cultural “warfare” may have kept us constantly struggling for so long. Unwittingly and unwillingly drafted into these social and cultural battles, we’ve been trained to continue this perennial struggle between academic and popular sub-cultures in our schools. The Trojan Horse in the Tribal Classroom reveals the situational factors and functions that have caused education to become an “embattled institution and teaching an embattled profession.” Most importantly it proposes social and cultural solutions to these problems that promise real institution-wide improvement and a completely reconstructed, truly academic classroom culture. One reading of this book will totally revise one’s vision of American education and our memories of thousands of hours of classroom life. -- Dr. Regina Peter, Executive Director NEWMARK Education

Covers trends from 1957 to 1995.

The “unrivaled” history of America’s divided politics, now in a fully updated edition that examines the rise of Trump—and what comes next (New Republic). When it was published in 2015, Andrew Hartman’s history of the culture wars was widely praised for its compelling and even-handed account of how they came to define American politics at the close of the twentieth century. But it also garnered attention for Hartman’s declaration that the culture wars were over—and that the left had won. In the wake of Trump’s rise, driven by an aggressive fanning of those culture war flames, Hartman has brought A War for the Soul of America fully up to date, detailing the ways in which Trump’s success, while undeniable, represents the last gasp of culture war politics—and how the reaction he has elicited can show us early signs of the very different politics to come. “As a guide to the late twentieth-century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled . . . . Incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas . . . . Reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.” —New Republic