Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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whether insightful or commercial, promise to be a staple of mass media for generations to

come.

ee also:

music, popular

Further reading

Angus, D. and Mirel, J. (1999)

The Failed Promise of the American High School, 1890–

1995,

New York: Teacher’s College.

McQuillan, P. (1998)

Educational Opportunity in an Urban American High School,

Albany: SUNY.

Phelan, R, Davidson, A. and Hanh, C. (1998)

Adolescent’s Worlds,

New York: Teacher’s

College.

Wood, G. (1998)

A Time to Learn,

New York: Dutton.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

high-school sports

High-school sports command enormous attention in American society In many cases,

school athletics dictate the morale of an entire community. With the public’s mounting

distrust of major professional and

college

sports, high schools are, to many the last

bastion of the unadulterated competitive spirit.

Several probing cultural studies, nonetheless, illuminate the world of high-school

athletics. The documentary

Hoop Dreams

(1994) follows two promising young

basketball

players and their NBA aspirations. For some

inner-city

African American

males, basketball seems to represent the road out of poverty But, as the film poignantly

illustrates, those who are talented and lucky enough to receive scholarships to college are

few. The number able to

make a living

playing the sport they love is minuscule.

H.G.Bissinger’s

Friday Nïght Lights

(1991), by contrast, chronicles the 1988

football

season of the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa,

Texas,

where every Friday night

community

members cheer the team with religious zeal. Bissinger’s study shows how

the outcome of each game has an impact seemingly disproportionate to its importance:

coaches face “For Sale” signs placed on their lawns following a loss against a rival. This

devotion was only exacerbated, Bissinger suggests, by the 1980s collapse of the oil

industry in Texas. A similar view pervades

All the Right Moυes

(1983), which spotlighted

a fictional Pennsylvania high-school football program. Here, a heartbreaking loss to a

rival also spawns unreasonable, disturbing reactions from fans, players and coaches.

Clearly enormous external pressure weighs on certain high-school athletes.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 536

But not all high-school athletes receive this attention. Until recently the opposite was

true for girls. This trend is slowly changing, due to legal requirements of

Title IX

at the

college level and the popularity of college and professional leagues, including women’s

soccer,

vitalized by the 1998 World Cup. Other programs—gymnastics, martial arts,

even wrestling—are eclipsed by the major sports—football, basketball and

baseball

Some alternatives are nonetheless associated with affluence.

Golf

and certain racquet

sports have a long tradition of upper-class participation; such games require expensive

equipment and/or unusual venues, and

private (or prep) schools

have more resources.

Nevertheless, some teams are also found at public schools. Lacrosse, squash and crew

(rowing)

are associated with white upper-middle class institutions. Swimming has also

emerged at schools with special facilities.

Regardless of class, students who participate in high-school athletics are often

characterized as “jocks,” a largely negative term suggesting limited intelligence (in spite

of presidential candidate Bill Bradley’s coining of “intellectual jock” to describe

himself). The attention paid to the student athletes often makes them popular and may

give them what some see as excessive power over the lives of others in the school. This,

in turn, has led to resentment, painfully evident in Colorado’s Columbine High School

shootings, where student killers targeted several athletic stars. For all its faults, though,

highschool sport is one of America’s most cherished institutions, and participation in

athletic programs continues to be encouraged by parents and administrators alike.

JAMES DAVID

highways

One of the most ubiquitous and generic features of the contemporary American

landscape, highways are also key symbols of contemporary American culture and a social

institution in their own right. Together with cheap fuel and mass ownership o

automobiles,

highways facilitated the transformation of dense, central

cities

into

sprawling metropolitan regions and allowed for decentralization of residential,

commercial and industrial functions amongst a diffuse network of

suburbs and edge

cities

Although imagined in Europe, the idea of paved, grade-separated, limited-access

thoroughfare for the exclusive, high-speed use of

trucks

and automobiles was first

realized in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. Prior to

the 1920s, the network of paved inter-urban thoroughfares was virtually non-existent. By

the Second World War, the United States was linked by an extensive network o

“national roads,” financed by an excise tax on gasoline. Highway construction received

even greater support after the war. State and federal governments subsidized the

construction of multi-lane highways to relieve urban traffic congestion and to link the

Entries A-Z 537

growing suburban frontier with central cities. In 1956 under President Dwight

Eisenhower the Interstate Highway Act committed the federal government to paying 90

percent of the cost for the construction of 42,000 miles of high-speed multilane highways

linking major urban centers. Of greater scale and capacity than their pre-war

predecessors, these thoroughfares became known as “expressways.”

Expressways radically restructured the built environment. In virtually every major

American city these new highways ran through and/or completely demolished poor

minority

neighborhoods

. Together with

urban renewal,

highway construction displaced

millions of Americans in the late 1950s and 1960s, and helped spur disinvestment in

urban

real estate

. Although designed to facilitate the commutating of suburban residents

to urban centers during the 1970s and 1980s, highways helped to siphon off factories,

shopping

malls

and office space to the suburban fringes of metropolitan areas. By the late

1980s, the perimeter or beltway highways that had been originally designed to redirect

through traffic around central cities had emerged as America’s new

Main Street

. Yet,

despite the continual augmentation of highway capacity traffic volume and congestion

expanded to fill, and exceed, the available space.

The energy crisis of the 1970s did little to reduce highway use. Indeed, in the twenty-

five years following the oil embargo of 1973–4, highway congestion, suburban sprawl

and pollution reached new levels. Despite various control devices, auto emissions

remained the nation’s leading cause of air pollution. Environmental legislation such as

the Clean Air Act would seemingly require alternatives to the unlimited low-density

vision of growth of the previous six decades, yet little consensus emerged on how to

wean the United States from its unwholesome addiction to automobile use and highway

construction. Instead, they are part of American culture—from James Dean to

laderunner

—as well as a threat to American life.

ee also:

road movies

Further reading

Lackey, K. (1997)

Roadframes: The American Highway Narrative.,

Lincoln: University

of Nebraska.

Rose, M. (1990)

Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989,

Knoxville:

University of Tennessee.

CHARLES RUTHEISER

Hill, Anita

b. 1956

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 538

Law professor. In 1991 Hill sparked a national debate on

sexual harassment

in the

workplace when she leveled harassment charges against then-

Supreme Court

nominee

Clarence

Thomas

at his Senate confirmation hearing. Hill testified that Thomas,

reviously her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexually

harassed her on the job. Thomas denied the charges. Hill’s testimony televised

nationwide, transformed the confirmation process into a national educational program on

sexual harassment and reinvigorated American

feminism

. The all-male Senate

committee’s questioning of Hill and confirmation of Thomas raised questions about their

sensitivity to women’s concerns and helped elect more women to public office.

MARY-CHRISTINE SUNGAILA, ESQ.

hillbilly

rednecks

Hindus

Hinduism first emerged in India as a complex constellation of religious systems. There is

a long and checkered history of the spread of Hinduism outside India centuries before the

emergence of the political nation as we know it today In 1893 Swami Vivekananda

delivered a lecture about Hinduism at the first World Parliament of Religions in

Chicago,

. In more modern times, the growth of the Indian diaspora around the world led to a

simultaneous spread of Hinduism outside India, most visibly as a set of cultural practices.

In the new millenium, one can conceivably study most of the world’s major

religions

in any of the metropolitan centers of the United States. The number of Asian Indians, a

majority of them Hindus, in the United States has grown steadily since the Immigration

and Naturalization Act of 1965, and stands at about 1 million today Hindu immigrants

and their religious institutions struggled against considerable racial prejudice and

discrimination before they began to be accepted as an integral part of American society.

Outside its land of origin, Hinduism has undergone several transformations unique to

the diasporic condition of its practitioners, both in terms of ritual practices as well as in

the role it plays in fostering and reinforcing community solidarity. As Raymond Brady

Williams suggests, emigration involves a “crisis of epistemology” that focuses people’s

attention on their traditions or narrative in order to establish a “known world” (Williams

1988). One way in which Hindu immigrant groups in different parts of the world attempt

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to resolve this crisis is by building temples and maintaining indigenous social and

cultural activities in the new society Hundreds of Hindu temples and religious centers

now dot the American landscape, enriching its multicultural milieu.

Many Indian immigrants indicate that they are more religiously active in the United

States than in India. As distinctive identity markers religions, in particular, are mobilized

and re-energized in the process of negotiating their identities in the new cultural

environment. Hinduism, which was not an organized religion until the late nineteenth

century in India, was considered to be more a philosophy and a way of life. Practice o

Hinduism did not require visiting temples on a regular basis; rather, worshipping at home

shrines was more important. However, in the United States, Hinduism quickly assumed a

formal structure as fairly affluent, professional Indian immigrants, concerned about the

socialization of their American Indian

children,

started establishing temples. Hindu

temples in the United States are not only places of worship, but also serve as broader

cultural centers that function as surrogate extended families to the community Large

Hindu temples like the ones in

Pittsburgh, PA, Houston, TX

and Chicago, IL are

traditional in their architectural style and aim to replicate rituals in as “authentic”

manner as possible. As in its country of origin, Hinduism in the US takes various ethnic

and sectarian forms, displaying enormous diversity in its iconographic representations

and ritual practices. Apart from temples, there are quasi-religious groups that congregate

to propagate the teachings of various gurus and religious leaders. Newsletters, brochures

and other ethnic

mass media,

along with rapidly proliferating web-sites on the

Internet,

aid in promoting horizontal communication among the believers.

While religion, in general, has helped community solidarity in a positive way, since the

early 1980s Hinduism in the diaspora, as in the home country has become increasingly

oliticized. The World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) has established branches

all over the world and supports religious nationalist forces in India. They hold summer

camps in various parts of the US to socialize second-generation

American Indians

from

a very young age, and the Hindu Students’ Councils attempt to further that process on

college

campuses

. Many progressive Indians in the diaspora have organized themselves

to challenge this pernicious process to destroy the secular ethos of the modern Indian

nation. The struggle between these forces within the diasporic community represents an

intense contestation over issues of identity.

Further reading

Rayaprol, A. (1997)

Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora,

Delhi:

Oxford University Press.

Williams, R.B. (1988)

Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in

the American Tapestry,

Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

APARNA RAYAPROL

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 540

hippies

Countercultural visionaries who have become consummate symbols of the 1960s.

Abjuring business and

suburban

conformity hippies envisioned alternatives that

included

freedom,

shared possessions, experimentation in drugs, sexuality and lifestyles

and a return to

nature

. While some have maintained this commitment, for others—and

for media representations of the 1960s—hippies have been reduced to flowing colorful

clothes, psychedelia and exotic symbolism and memories of a drug culture, undercutting

the ideas of political and economic reform that also underpinned “tuning in, turning on

and dropping out.”

GARY McDONOGH

Hispanics

Term used for people with ancestry in Spain or

Latin America

. Sometimes used (as in

the census) to avoid classifications of race or ethnicity although clarifications of these

issues or national origin may be appended. A similar category is Hispanic surname,

which avoids all these issues in a singular category (evoking problems in mixed

marriages as well as for Asians, Italians, Germans and others who have come through

Latin America

to the US).

ee also:

Latinos; Chicanos/as; Puerto Ricans

GARY McDONOGH

Hiss, Alger

McCarthyism; Nixon, Richard M.

historic preservation

Entries A-Z 541

The movement to save historic structures is commonly dated as beginning in 1966, with

the passing of the National Historic Preservation Act, which gave new powers to the

ational Park Service to administer and encourage preservation programs in every state.

The political impetus for this act was the 1963 demolition of one of

New York

City’s

finest works of

architecture,

Pennsylvania Station, as well as more generally from a

rejection of

urban-renewal

policies of the post-Second World War era.

In fact, the practice of preserving historic buildings and landscapes, as well as art and

artifacts, dates back to the mid-nineteenth century at least, with the fight to save Mount

Vernon, and encompasses activities far beyond the purview of the federal government.

While the National Trust for Historic Preservation, chartered in 1949, remains the

rimary national advocacy organization (though as of 1998, without federal financial

support), preservation is a predominantly local movement. It is based around private local

efforts to save and rehabilitate historic structures, encourage private rehabilitation and

promote public interpretation of historic resources.

Preservation, due largely to its traditional constituency of local, mainly female, well-

off reformers, remains an elite undertaking (as in

Rockefeller’s

stewardship of colonial

Williams-burg). As such, the scope of preservationists’ efforts remains narrow:

architectural distinction as opposed to social or cultural significance continues to be the

prime criteria for “listing” structures on local historic resources lists and the National

influence, what is considered worth saving has broadened tremendously. State

preservation offices, smalltown historical societies and historical

museums

now routinely

seek—at least in limited ways—to preserve and interpret the physical places of

African

Americans,

women and other minority groups.

Further reading

Hosmer, C. (1981)

Preservation Comes of Age,

Charlottesville, VA: University Press of

Virginia.

Lee, A. (ed.) (1992)

Past Meets Future,

Washington, DC: Preservation Press.

MAX PAGE

history

The history profession in America has changed dramatically in the past half century. The

GI Bill

after the Second World War brought about rapid growth in American higher

education, including history programs. In the 1950s, the dominant interpretation o

American history was the consensus school, which emphasized the homogeneity and lack

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 542

of conflict in American culture and history at least partly in reaction to the previous

Progressive historians, who portrayed

class,

political and regional conflict as the

motivating force in American history. Daniel Boorstin, Louis Hartz and Richard

Hofstadter were among the best-known and most influential historians working in the

consensus tradition.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of a profound historiographical upheaval that is still

underway today This revolutionary “paradigm shift” had several components. Perhaps

the most visible and controversial development was the emergence of a New Left school

of history Influenced by a growing sense of the problems and inequalities of American

society particularly in reaction to the

Vietnam War

and the

Civil Rights movement,

ew Left historians criticized the consensus school for an overly complacent and

congratulatory view of America’s past, and instead emphasized the elements o

exploitation, imperialism and racism in America’s past. New Left history produced

revisionist accounts of the

Cold War,

slavery and abolitionism, emphasized the

pervasiveness of radical events and individuals in America’s past, and often tried to write

“history from the bottom up,” focusing on lower-class or previously “inarticulate”

elements of society. William Appleman Williams and Eugene Genovese were among the

most influential New Left historians.

Related to New Left history was a profound and long-lasting development, the

emergence of a “new social history” The most important accomplishment of social

historians was to expand the focus of the discipline beyond an emphasis on

white,

middle-/

upper-class

males to a more inclusive perspective. The growth of women’s and

African American

history was just the tip of the iceberg. Social historians examined an

almost endless array of previously ignored subgroups of American society including

Native Americans,

Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans,

European ethnic groups,

workers, the poor, the elderly

children,

adolescents, gays and bisexuals, and so on.

Following the example of the influential French Annales school of historiography

American historians also focused more attention on private behavior and everyday life,

producing studies of topics from

marriage

and

family

life to the climate and

environment, and nearly everything in between.

American historians have been caught up in “culture-wars” controversies between the

left and right in recent years, including a bitter conflict over a planned 1995 Hiroshima

memorial exhibition at the

Smithsonian Institution

. Historians have pondered the

significance of

postmodern

theory for their discipline, and worried about growing

specialization and loss of coherence. A chronically depressed and depressing job market

has marred an otherwise unprecedentedly vibrant, challenging, innovative era in

American historiography.

Further reading

Foner, E. (ed.) (1990)

The New American History,

Philadelphia: Temple University

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Kammen, M. (ed.) (1980)

The Past Before Us,

Ithaca: Cornell University.

Novick, P. (1988)

That Noble Dream,

New York: Cambridge University.

KENT BLASER

Hitchcock, Alfred

b. 1899; d. 1980

British-born director whose fifty-three films successfully straddled the worlds of art

house and boxoffice yield. His first

Hollywood

production,

Rebecca

(1940), won the

1940 Academy Award for Best Picture. Hitchcock is famed for the control he exercised

over all aspects of the film-making process, his amazing visual acumen and the haunting

pervasiveness of his images in the collective unconscious.

Rear Window

(1954),

Psycho

(1960),

Vertigo

(1958) and

The Birds

(1963) indelibly altered American experiences o

neighbors, showering and household pets, filling everyday America with shadows and

ambiguity. His characters, similarly are perpetually poised between the mendacity o

order and the truth of chaos, where guilt and innocence, obsession and deliverance,

nightmare and vision are forever flip sides of the same human coin.

MARIAELENA BARTESAGHI

Hmong

Southeast Asians

HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations)

Managed-care programs, entailing the integration of insurance and care providers with

fixed rates for services (and sometimes pharmaceuticals) as well as health incentives

(physical fitness

programs, etc.) came to dominate American

healthcare

in the late

twentieth century. While praised for controlling costs and sometimes rationalizing care,

they have also been criticized for their drive to keep expenses at a minimum and their

corporate remodeling of the relationship and autonomy of doctors,

nurses

and patients.

GARY McDONOGH

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 544

hockey, ice

Sport developed in

Canada

during the nineteenth century The name of its most

prestigious prize, the Stanley Cup, derives from the governor-general who donated the

owl to the hockey league. Hockey spread below the border in the early twentieth

century; the National Hockey League, built primarily around Canadian teams, was

formed in 1917. Interest in the United States grew with the bringing of franchises to

Boston, MA,

New York

City,

Chicago, IL, Detroit and

Pittsburgh,

and then in the

1970s to

Philadelphia, PA

and Hartford among other cities.

Since 1980, the sport’s base has shifted to the United States, a development

symbolized in the trading of Wayne Gretzky, “the Great One,” from the Edmonton Oilers

to the

Los Angeles, CA

Kings in 1988. Two years later the NHL created its first

expansion team in

Florida

. Once dominated by Canadian teams, at the end of the 1996–7

season the NHL had twenty-six teams, only six of which were in Canada.

Part of this growth in the US has been owing to the sport’s profitability (until recent

fears that it may have overextended itself). As in other sports, hockey teams are owned

by corporate giants such as

Disney

and by major

mass media

and cable companies.

These teams hold cities to ransom, bargaining for new leases on their arenas or for more

funding from taxpayer dollars, threatening to move if their demands are not met. They are

able to do so because city

mayors

and

governors

are constantly battling to win

expansion teams or attract a team willing to relocate. Hockey, associated with white

suburbanites who flock to the city for every game, brings in revenue. The game has never

attempted to appeal to

inner-city

populations. There have been almost no

African

Americans

in the league, and there are very few black and minority fans in the bleachers.

Another significant development of recent years has been the internationalization o

NHL players. The game had long been an

Olympic

sport and northern European teams

did very well (the Olympics were one reason for hockey’s hold in colleges, since until the

1990s American Olympians were generally drawn from college ranks). Some of these

athletes, beginning with the Swedes in the 1970s, came to the United States drawn by the

high salaries. With the end of the

Cold War,

a large number of Russians and Czechs

made use of their new freedom to emigrate. During the 1995–6 season, of the 640 players

in the league, 389 were Canadian, only 108 were American, while there were 42

Russians, 34 Swedes and 26 Czechs.

This has resulted in a change in the way the game is played. The Canadian game was

noted for its extremely physical aspect, Gretzky’s agility and grace being the exception.

Players wear padding and helmets, not only to protect themselves from the inevitable

contact (particularly since the game is played with a stick, and the hard rubber puck can

travel at high speeds), but also because the game is marked by brawling, believed to

Entries A-Z 545