Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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eter Gunn, Perry Mason, Hill Street Blues, Mission Impossible

and

Hawaii Five-O

ecame audible icons of popular culture. These instrumental pieces brought viewers back

to the screen with their recognizable and infinitely catchy music (interspersed with the

ingles and anthems of advertisements).

With

Dawson’s Creek

and other 1990s teenoriented shows, the music industry and

television have found new overlaps. Soundtracks that feature pop tunes heard on the

shows are available in record stores and advertised on the show. These compilation

albums market both shows and artists. The role of the soundtrack—and particularly

montaged scenes without dialog with the latest “hit” playing—has become key as music

videos and teen dramas converge.

EDWARD MILLER

Muskie, Edmund Sixtus

b. 1915; d. 1996

Liberal

Democratic

member of

Congress

(1946–51),

governor

(1955–9) and first

elected Democratic senator from Maine (1959–80). Muskie ran unsuccessfully for vice-

president with Hubert

Humphrey

on the 1968 Democratic ticket. He lost his bid for the

residential nomination in 1972, in part because of perceptions that he cried when

newspapers

attacked his

family

. Lincolnesque in profile, Muskie was concerned by both

social and environmental issues. He left the Senate in 1980 to serve briefly as Jimmy

Carter’s Secretary of State

GARY McDONOGH

Muslims

Islam

mutual funds

banks and banking; stocks and bonds

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 776

Muzak, Inc

Corporation that pioneered the use of background music to encourage efficiency in the

workplace (and later to create a soothing atmosphere in stores). In the early 1920s,

General Squier merged “music” with his favorite “high-tech” company Kodak, to name

his new company which first supplied music for elevators. This music, characterized by

re-recordings of popular hits at soothing volumes, using strings in muted tones, barely

noticeable at one moment and omnipresent at another, came to be known as muzak.

Ironically Muzak’s articulation of background music has influenced avant-garde rock

artist Brian Eno and Ambient music.

EDWARD MILLER

NAACP

Established in 1911 by

white

and

African American

civil-rights activists, the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People led the assault on

segregation

in the

South

The Crisis

(founded 1911), edited by W.E.B.

Du Bois,

was for many years the

most widely read journal among

African Americans

. The legal defense fund, led by

Charles Hamilton Houston, a Howard University Law School professor, began the effort

to overturn the 1896

Supreme Court

decision

of Plessy

Ferguson,

which had

established the practice of “separate but equal.” Houston’s protégé, Thurgood

Marshall,

won the landmark victory against segregation, the 1954

Brown

Board of Education

decision, which asserted that separate is “inherently unequal.”

Often viewed as biased towards elite and northern blacks, the work of E.D.Nixon, a

union organizer and local leader in the NAACP, and Rosa

Parks,

secretary of an NAACP

chapter, in bringing about the Montgomery bus boycott highlights the strong grassroots

element of the organization.

ROBERT GREGG

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Nabokov, Vladimir

b. 1899; d. 1977

Nabokov combined formidable literary talent, an incisive intellect and a cosmopolitan

familiarity with Western culture to produce some of the most influential fiction of the

twentieth century. Born in Russia, he left the country with the rest of his family following

the Bolshevik triumph and for the next several decades lived a peripatetic existence,

living for periods in England, France and Germany. He arrived in the United States in

1940 and spent the next twenty years there, much of it at Cornell University as a

Professor of Literature, where one of his students was a young Thomas

Pynchon

. While

in America, Nabokov wrote what many consider to be his greatest work,

Lolita

(1955). A

fictional account of a cultured, self-absorbed professor who falls in love with and then

seduces his twelve-year-old step-daughter, the book’s frank treatment of controversial

sexual material caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in the 1950s, and

still makes some critics and readers uneasy. Initially the author could not find an

American publisher for it.

Lolita

was finally published by a French press, Olympia.

Encountering Nabokov’s assured, flowing prose is somewhat akin to watching a

skilled artist use a scalpel to sketch a scene into soft rock. His writing features a rare

conjunction of lyrical gifts and a disciplined commitment to economy of style. In both his

fictional writing and his critical essays he displayed a strong aversion to didactic or

moralistic messages. While bracing, he can seem almost too hard and unsentimental at

oints. It is somehow appropriate that the other great love of his life, besides literature,

was the collecting of butterflies.

Further reading

Rampton, D. (1993)

Vladimir Nabokov,

New York: St. Martin’s Press.

MARK BREWIN

Nader, Ralph

b. 1934

Citizen advocate against corporate America. Nader came to national attention with

Unsafe at Any Speed

(1965) which blamed

automobile

casualties on design rather than

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drivers and spurred federal safety legislation. Later campaigns by this austere

Ivy League

lawyer and his “Nader’s Raiders” have focused on food safety water pollution,

environmental poisons and other issues of corporate negligence. Public Citizen (founded

1971) has inspired nationwide PIRGs (public-interest research groups), while the Center

for the Study of Responsive Law maintains an active schedule of

lobbying

and

information. Nader appeared on the presidential ballot for the Green Party in 1996 and

2000. Yet his chief work remains creating and informing the citizen

consumer,

thereby

reforming the nation.

GARY McDONOGH

NAFTA (North American Free Trade

Agreement)

trade and trade agreements; Mexico, relations with

NASCAR

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing was founded in 1948 in Daytona,

Florida,

to promote the products of the major automakers, first Ford and Chevrolet, and

later Pontiac/ General Motors. NASCAR quickly expanded from Florida through the

Midwest

California

in the early 1950s, the nature of the sport changing dramatically

as speeds increased from an average of just over 100 mph in 1957 to current speeds o

200 mph. In addition, dirty driving (spinning other cars on the track or bumping them

from behind) has become common, increasing the popularity of the sport, and making

crashes frequent occurrences. Dale Earnhardt, one of the leading drivers in the 1990s, has

been notorious for his expertise in dirty driving.

The Winston Cup is the most important prize given to the driver who has the best

record in the season’s races. While some very popular drivers have surfaced in recent

years, none has triumphed like Richard Petty in the 1970s, when he won the Winston Cup

on seven occasions.

NASCAR has generally been dominated by white males from the Southern states, like

Virginia and the Carolinas. Its fan-

ase is both national and large, especially with the

Daytona 500 being shown annually by the television

networks

(NASCAR is one of the

few sports that always profits the networks), but it too is largely white

(African

Americans

have seldom participated, Wendell Scott being the exception in 1963).

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ROBERT GREGG

Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee

ashville, the state capital, and Memphis, on the Mississippi River, show deep roots in

the

South

in transition to a

Sunbelt

future. Metropolitan Nashville, home of Vanderbilt

University and the Hollywood of

country music

(Grand Ol’ Opry Opryland), grew

nearly 18 percent in the 1990s to 1,156,225. Memphis, identified with

Elvis Presley

and

blues,

reached 1,093,427. Memphis remains perhaps more deeply divided by issues o

race

and

class

. In addition to Graceland, it also houses the

motel

/memorial where Martin

Luther

King,

Jr. was assassinated. Both cities have sought major-league teams and other

indicators of national recognition while trying not to sacrifice local cultures.

GARY McDONOGH

National Aeronautics and Space

Administration (NASA)

NASA was created by the US

Congress

in 1958 to provide a coordinated governmental

effort into flight within and outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Answering President

Kennedy’s

call to put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA achieved that

goal when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on

July 20, 1969. NASA continues manned and unmanned

space

exploration, operates the

Hubble Space Telescope and coordinates the construction of the International Space

Station. Good

Hollywood

films on NASA include

The Right Stuff

(1983)

and Apollo

(1996).

MELINDA SCHWENK

National Audubon Society (NAS)

The NAS traces its roots to the 1880s, when it began as an organization to promote the

rotection and appreciation of birds. Although the NAS began expanding its activities

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 780

into broader environmental concerns during the 1970s and 1980s, it remains identified

rimarily with the naturalist and bird artist John James Audubon. Hence, NAS is

considered a non-threatening wildlife advocate, supported by weekend birders and

moderate environmentalists who enjoy taking walks through NAS sanctuaries. Though

nationally known, its controversial stances are few and far between.

BRAD ROGERS

National Collegiate Athletic Association

(NCAA)

Founded in 1906, the National Collegiate Athletic Association spent its first years as a

weak organization in the shadow of the American Athletics Union (AAU), which

controlled most of amateur athletics and dominated the American Olympic Committee.

By the 1950s, however, this changed; college athletics became increasingly commercial

and

colleges and universities

turned to the NCAA both to secure revenues from

television

and to control the labor market (to stop bidding wars between colleges for

layers and to keep students in line). As in other areas of American sport, college sports

ecame centrally administered, the main intention being the pursuit of profit for the

owners (the colleges) largely at the expense of the students. While the NCAA has

managed to keep up the rhetoric of serving the interests of the “student athlete,” it is

difficult to see how this has happened over the years, and the recent initiative of star

layers making their way to the majors without pursuing a college degree suggests that

many of them agree.

Prior to the Second World War, colleges had allowed the NCAA to supervise

tournaments, but the policing of the sports was left to themselves. These self-imposed

restraints were found to be inadequate, so in 1940 a new constitution was accepted

allowing for the expulsion of colleges by a two-thirds vote of member schools. The

CAA did not use this new power, however, at a time when the pressure to field winning

teams was becoming intense and when violations of NCAA rules were common. A

“sanity code” was adopted in 1948 permitting allocation of jobs and scholarships to

athletes, but these were based solely on financial need. This was found to be unworkable,

however, and from 1952 full scholarships were based only on athletic ability.

In 1951 a college

basketball

scandal was unearthed, considered the biggest scandal

ever in American sport. The New York District Attorney’s office accused thirty-three

players from seven colleges of “point shaving”—keeping the margin of points between

teams within a range called for by gamblers in return for cash payments. In 1953 the

NCAA reported that Michigan State, the nation’s top college

football

team, operated a

slush fund from which football players were paid handsomely These revelations

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increased the demand for a stronger NCAA, which would actually suspend or expel

recalcitrant colleges.

Television further enhanced the NCAA’s authority. First, colleges needed the NCAA

to negotiate with

networks

to ensure that television did not take away the large crowds

commonly attending football games. Later, the colleges wanted the NCAA to negotiate

lucrative financial packages with the networks, a process successfully capped in 1994 by

CBS’ agreement to pay $1.745 billion to cover basketball’s Final Four until 2002.

Since the 1950s, the NCAA has enforced a detailed code of regulations written and

voted on by members of colleges and universities. It has assisted members of schools in

complying with these regulations, administered more than seventy annual championships

for both men and women,

roduced collegiate rules of play for twelve sports and

compiled and distributed statistics in football and basketball, as well as publishing a

weekly newspaper. It has divided colleges into different divisions, setting rules for

student athletes in each of those divisions, and, in quite intrusive ways, has governed all

college-level sport.

In effect, the NCAA has governed over the establishment of farm systems for the

major leagues, especially the NBA and NFL. Apprentice athletes bring millions of dollars

to their colleges without receiving any payment beyond scholarships, instead playing for

the opportunity to be selected as one of the yearly draft picks (achieved by only a small

ercentage). The Heisman Trophy winner, the best player in college football, is assured

of being a first-round draft pick and of receiving a very handsome salary from the team

that selects him; so are the best ten to fifteen basketball players. With stakes so high and

the demands on the body so extreme in some college sports, as

The Program

(1993)

showed, many student athletes engage in widespread use of

steroids

and accomplish little

academically. With scholarships tied to sports eligibility these apprentices tend not to

graduate from their colleges, and those who do not make the majors end up with little to

show for their labor on behalf of their colleges.

In January 1983, the NCAA adopted Proposition 48 to counteract this problem, placing

the blame for the failure of the student athlete on the athletes themselves and their lack o

reparation for college rather than on the practices of college sports programs. The

roposition required incoming student athletes attending a Division I school to have a

minimum 2.0 high-school grade-

oint average in a core curriculum of eleven courses and

a minimum score of 700 (later raised to 820 out of a possible 1,600) on the Scholastic

Aptitude Test (SAT) in order to compete as a freshman. In its first year in effect, 1986,

the proposition prevented almost 700 incoming freshmen from participating in their

respective sports.

This proposition has been widely criticized, especially by Georgetown coach, John

Thompson, and former Celtics great Bill Russell, who believe that it cuts of

opportunities to

African Americans

in particular. Harry Edwards has noted the racial

bias of SATs, but he (supported early on by Arthur

Ashe

) has backed the proposition,

seeing it as a first step to rectify a problem that has seen large numbers of black athletes

fail in college. The fact that only 31 percent of

African American

male athletes admitted

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 782

to college in 1977 had graduated six years later, and that at Memphis State University no

black basketball player earned a degree between 1973 and 1985, required some response.

One of the responses of players who could not meet the new requirements was

spending a year at a junior college before transferring to a Division I school. Increasingly

though, potential athletes have recognized the limited benefits they will receive from

attending colleges. This tendency came to a head in the controversial basketball draft o

1996. Of the fifty-eight men registered for the draft that year, thirty-six were

underclassmen (not graduated from college). Allen Iverson decided to leave Georgetown

after only two years, while Kobe Bryant and Jermaine O’

eal (the latter not meeting the

Proposition 48 minimum requirements) opted to skip college altogether. A few players

had followed this path before (Moses Malone, Daryl Dawkins and Shawn Kemp being

the most successful), but players were generally discouraged from taking this route into

the NBA, many commentators and officials arguing that they needed more maturity

(though the threat to the quality of the NCAA basketball product is also a factor). The

success of Iverson at the Philadelphia 76’ers and Bryant at the LA Lakers represents a

considerable threat to the long-term viability of the NCAA farm system.

Further reading

Rader, B. (1999)

American Sports,

Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.

ROBERT GREGG

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

foundations

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

foundations

National Film Registry

The National Film Preservation Act of 1988 was passed in recognition of the

monumental quality of American films in their original or restored versions amid

roblems from emerging techniques to alter films (colorization) and evidence of the

decay of film stocks and archives preserving older silent films and experimental stocks.

Entries A-Z 783

The Act established the National Film Preservation Board which manages the National

Film Registry. Twenty-five “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” films are

chosen each year to be included in the registry It now encompasses 250 films that define

a diverse American canon across genres, eras and styles. In 1996 the National Film

Preservation Foundation was founded to further the work of preserving orphan films

(films that have no owners). The updated list may be viewed at

http://lcweb.loc.gov/film/titles.html.

CINDY WONG

National Guard

army; Vietnam War; Kent State shootings

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

The world’s premier mental-health research organization, NIMH seeks to improve the

treatment, diagnosis and prevention of mental disorders that affect millions of adults,

children

and adolescents. It also serves as an informational and educational clearing-

house, communicating information about the brain, mental health and related research to

the public, scientists, news media and healthcare providers. NIMH is part of the National

Institutes of Health (NIH), the American government’s principal biomedical and

behavioral-research agency which in turn falls under the jurisdiction of the US

Department of Health and Human Services.

NIMH supports both internal and external research on mental disorders, neuroscience

and behavior. It funds external research through grants or contracts awarded both

nationally and inter- nationally to scientists from universities or research facilities.

Scientists in the field initiate most of these studies, examining issues such as

schizophrenia,

depression,

anxiety and eating disorders,

Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS

and

the delivery, financing, quality and costs of mental-health services. NIMH also identifies

gaps in research and solicits applications from scientists to conduct needed studies.

NIMH’s own large internal research program supports basic and clinical studies in

areas that include

genetics,

psycho-immunology and brain imaging. Its internal program

trains scientists from around the world, helping to meet research shortages in basic brain

research, clinical studies on mental and behavioral disorders, as well as the organizational

and financial aspects of mentalhealth services. NIMH also actively works to increase

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 784

hiring of women and minority researchers and clinicians.

COURTNEY BENNETT

National League

baseball

National Organization for Women (NOW)

The world’s largest feminist organization; the nation’s foremost women’s advocacy

group. Founded in 1966 by twenty-eight women, including Betty

Friedan

and

African

American

feminist and Episcopalian minister Pauli Murray, it was originally conceived

as a corollary to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

(NAACP). NOW’s statement of purpose was “to take action to bring women into full

participation in the mainstream of American society” NOW’s five specific priorities

became the passing of an

Equal Rights Amendment

to the US Constitution, opposing

racism, advocating for

abortion

and reproductive rights, supporting

lesbian and gay

rights and ending

violence

against women.

MARY-CHRISTINE SUNGAILA, ESQ.

National Public Radio (NPR)

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting established National Public Radio in 1970. It

provides quality news and cultural programming to local public-

radio

stations. Its first

program (April 19, 1971) featured the United States Senate’s deliberations on the

Vietnam War

. That same year,

All Things Considered

had its debut, but its morning

counterpart

Morning Edition

waited until 1979 to appear. Financial troubles have plagued

NPR, despite the popularity of the

jazz,

plays, concerts and

classical music

featured in

its programming. With financial restructuring, the majority of NPR’s income comes from

member station fees and dues and only 4 percent from government sources.

GAIL HENSON

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