Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

and provides aesthetic/historical touches to squares,

parks,

cemeteries

and

gardens

While generally planned as monuments to shared history beliefs and sentiments, public

art can also prove divisive. Civil-War monuments to the Confederate dead in the

South

have become controversial since the

civil-rights

era. A proposal to add a statue of

tennis

great Arthur

Ashe

to Richmond’s all-white Monument Avenue brought protests from

oth conservative whites and the Ashe family Political memorials in urban statuary or

renamings also rekindle controversies and enmities. Overall, an inherited bias towards

white males in memorialization (and choice of artists) also reifies divisions of rights to

history that have been challenged since the 1960s.

The presence and meaning of public art in the early twenty-first century is also linked

to special programs for public support of the arts, primarily for art initiatives established

y cities and states nationwide (ranging from 0.5 to 2 percent) since the 1970s. The

National Endowment for the Arts also has sponsored public-arts programs. These

initiatives have forced and cajoled government projects as well as private developers to

set aside moneys to pose new works in new public spaces, whether administrative offices,

entrance plazas, hospitals or airports. Again, this has not been without controversy—

Richard Serra’s abstract curve

Tilted Arc,

in front of the Federal Plaza in New York, was

removed in 1989 after complaints about its impact on the space.

Public art also has become associated with urban regeneration and revitalization. But

some have argued that while its presence may be public, even the possibilities o

interpretation of postmodern forms create stratification in appreciation and responses to

the work. Surveillance and campaigns against vandalism also betray multiple visions o

monuments and spaces around them within complex urban fabrics. Arts in “controlled”

public spaces, moreover, point out that

malls

and other public forums have private

owners and rules of access and use. Urban murals, while widespread in programs for

neighborhood

beautification, also have been decried as markers of urban decay that

simultaneously mask and call attention to abandonment. If art is the mirror of the soul,

public art reflects both visions and divisions of American community.

Further reading

Miles, M. (1997)

Art Space and the City,

New York and London: Routledge.

GARY McDONOGH

public health

Public health is a set of techniques by which communities can uniquely complement

individual efforts to maintain health. Although much of public health practice is carried

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 916

out by local health departments at the municipal, county and state level, lately large

employers, some managed-care groups (HMOs) and some civic organizations have begun

to perform public-health functions. Historically public-health efforts were focused

rimarily on efforts to control contagious diseases. The basic operations still persist as

governments maintain standards for environmental safety and sanitation. Regional health

departments maintain diseasereporting systems to permit early control of communicable

disease outbreaks. Part of communicable disease control has also involved subsidizing

ersonal health services such as immunization, treatment and preventive counseling for

otentially contagious community members who are uninsured or not inclined to

overcome other social obstacles to care that remain despite insurance. Access to care

remains a large problem for the American healthcare system. Many local health

departments find that the traditional public health functions can be overwhelmed by the

demand for personal health services.

The causes of

death

and disease have changed in the last hundred years. In 1895 the

rincipal causes of death were tuberculosis and pneumonia. In 1995 the primary causes o

death were heart disease, stroke and

cancer,

while injuries remain the leading cause o

remature death. Perhaps more fundamentally the cultural construction of disease has

shifted as epidemiological investigations repeatedly implicate personal and social

ehaviors as modifiable risk factors for disease. The frontier of public health threats now

includes

violence,

unintentional injury substance use,

tobacco,

unsafe sex, dietary fat and

community disempowerment. These factors move the locus of action away from the

iomedical concerns of clinical medicine, and require interventional skills quite unlike

those historically stressed by

medical schools

. The medical community drifts piecemeal

towards developing behavioral skills that do not resemble the technical aspects of clinical

intervention in which it excels. Conflict between medical culture and public-health

culture has been slow to resolve.

Because public-health techniques now include social marketing, media techniques and

information

campaigns, employers and insurers with a natural interest in the health o

their populations have begun to engage in public-health practice. Public and private

sectors will continue to show a greater confluence of interest and practice in public

health.

A natural dilemma arises for public health as it addresses behavioral determinants o

disease. There is conflict between eliminating risky behavior (abstinence) and making

risky behavior safer (protection). Public-health workers tend to think in practical terms

and often consider both goals compatible means to the end of disease reduction. To its

chagrin, the public-health community has frequently found the puritan strains o

American culture vigorous enough to squelch or temper the battle cry, “Don’t indulge!

But…if you do, do it safely.”

Further reading

Entries A-Z 917

Institute of Medicine (1988)

The Future of Public Health,

Washington, DC: National

Academy Press.

Winslow, C.E.A. (1923)

The Evolution and Significance of the Modern Public Health

Campaign,

New Haven: Yale University Press.

DAVID BISHAI

public housing

US public housing was never the major source of housing for the poor that it was in many

European societies. Even at its height in the postwar period, fewer than 5 percent o

Americans lived in federally funded subsidized housing projects. The “the projects”—

carries associations of ghettoizavery term popularly used to refer to such housing—tion

and social pathology, and is often used to stand for the presumed failures of liberalism as

manifested in federal anti-poverty programs.

Nonetheless, in the 1930s, public housing was conceived with high hopes that it would

e a stepping stone to independent private homeownership for the majority of its tenants.

The story of its failure is also the story of urban social policy more broadly which was

utilized in the service of protecting private investment and was shaped in concert with the

market interests of

real-estate

agents and developers. Moreover, most federal housing

policies tended to favor programs that encouraged private home-ownership, like low-

interest guaranteed mortgages.

The first public housing projects, located in cities such as

Atlanta, GA, New Yor

City, NY and

Chicago, IL

were low-rise constructions from which the poorest and those

believed to be socially “deviant,” like single mothers, were initially barred. In the post-

Second World War era, with an increase in land values in inner cities and a massive

northern

migration

of blacks, public housing design moved towards the construction o

high-rise “superblocks.” These seemed costefficient and politically expedient for the

maintenance of racially segregated

neighborhoods

. Even then, however, the design o

high-rise public housing was accompanied by a spirit of utopian optimism, influenced by

such modernist architects and urban planners as Le Corbusier, who believed that high-

rise buildings, designed by professional planners and managed by a state conceptualized

as benign and rational, were the prototypical homes of the future. Such futuristic ideals

quickly soured in developments like Robert Taylor Homes in south Chicago which, from

the beginning, were poorly maintained and lacked such amenities as communal facilities

and safe play spaces for children. They were used by city governments as places where

the poorest

African Americans

could be “contained,” isolated from

white

working-class

and

middle-class

neighborhoods. Unlike the earliest years of public housing, any

retense of screening tenants fell by the wayside and it quickly became the housing o

last resort now sheltering mostly single mothers and their children living on benefits.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 918

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in

St. Louis, MO

came to represent the failure o

modernist high-rise public housing. Built in the mid-1950s, it was demolished a mere

twenty years later after being deemed an ungovernable tangle of pathology In his

ethnographic study of life in Pruitt-Igoe, sociologist Lee Rainwater referred to it as “

federally built and supported slum.”

In 1965 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) was established as

part of President Johnson’s

War on Poverty

and took over public housing. Federal

housing programs moved away from supporting new construction to emphasizing

subsidized rents for the poor in buildings managed by private landlords (for example,

Section 8 certificates). In 1989, when Jack Kemp was appointed HUD secretary by then-

President George

Bush,

many city housing authorities had fallen into receivership or had

come close to bankruptcy overwhelmed by inadequate funding from the federal

government for maintenance and repair of their aging public-housing projects. Kemp

encouraged the expansion of Tenant (or Resident) Management Organizations, the oldest

of which dated back to the mid-1970s, to take over the operation of their projects from

government agencies deemed incompetent and overly bureaucratic. While a few Tenant

Management Organizations became nationally known for the improvements they were

able to make in their communities and for their charismatic leaders, this model proved

very difficult to put into practice on a large scale. Few of these organizations were

actually able to become completely independent of their local housing authorities. In the

late 1990s, several of even the most famous tenant-management projects, including

Bromley-Heath in

Boston

and Cochran Gardens in St. Louis, were removed from tenant

control and returned to being managed by their local housing authorities amidst charges

of financial improprieties and claims that the tenantmanagement board failed to enforce

new strict HUD regulations regarding tenant conduct.

In 1993, HOPE VI was adopted by HUD for the rehabilitation of public housing.

HOPE VI provides some federal funding for capital improvements and encourages city

housing authorities to renovate their developments using a combination of public and

rivate sources. Properties rehabilitated under the HOPE VI program are also required to

maintain a balance of low-income, working-class and even middle-class tenants.

Although several housing developments are currently undergoing substantive

remodeling, it is unclear what the future of these mixed-income communities will be.

Further reading

aparstek, A., Dooley D., Smith, R. and The Urban Institute/Aspen Systems Corporation

(1997)

Community Building in Public Housing: Ties that Bind People and Their

Communities,

Washington, DC: Civic Practices Network.

Rainwater, L. (1971)

Behind Ghetto Walls,

Chicago: Atherton-Aldine.

Varady, D., Preiser, W.F.E. and Russell, F. (eds) (1998)

New Directions in Urban Public

Housing,

Rutgers: Center for Urban Policy Research.

SUSAN BRIN HYATT

Entries A-Z 919

public intellectuals

intellectuals/culture wars

Public Radio International (PRI)

Public Radio International, founded in 1983 as American Public Radio, acquires,

develops, funds and distributes programming from a variety of station-

ased, independent

and international producers. It was founded to provide more diversity in programming

sources. Together with

NPR

and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it began

AMERICA ONE, a 24-hour English language audio channel headquartered in Munich.

PRI features programming in four general areas:

news

and information;

comedy

and

variety;

classical music

and contemporary music. Programming includes

St. Paul Sunday

orning, A Prairie Home Companion, Whad’Ya Know?

and

The World,

a collaborative

1-hour weekday with the BBC.

GAIL HENSON

public relations

Public-relations professionals do not simply help their clients to communicate with the

public, they also create news—many of the news stories that one reads and watches come

from materials provided by PR firms. For example, women’s smoking stopped being a

taboo when Edward Bernays, hired by American Tobacco Company asked his women

friends to smoke during an Easter parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue (1929). This

image of women smoking in public appeared in

newspapers,

and Bernays, a nephew o

Freud, used psychology to build the image of an emancipated woman as one who

smoked. Public relations is not simply a press-wing for different big corporations,

governments and non-

rofit organizations; its professionals exert the power of persuasion

y gauging cultural trends and representing them to the public in a way that is beneficial

to its clients, thus affecting social policies and the cultural landscape.

PR professionals are recruited not only from young people who have specialized

degrees, but are also former journalists and retired politicians who know the system o

the press, the government and their relationship with the public. These firms specialize in

issue and crisis management. Hence, when Cyanide-tainted Tylenol was found in 1982,

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 920

resulting in seven deaths, its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson spent millions to rebuild

its image; by promoting itself as a socially responsible company, PR helped it

successfully overcome this crisis.

In contemporary America, more than $10 billion is spent on public relations annually.

With fewer journalists and the price of investigative news reporting high, news divisions

are relying on PR news releases to fill up their pages and airtime. There are more people

working for PR than for news; they provide sophisticated press packages and video clips

that may be published without changes.

Government policies are affected when corporations hire public-relations firms to

found so-called grassroots citizen campaigns to lobby Washington and other local and

state governments. National Smokers Alliance, a group that champions smokers’ rights,

was created by a PR firm with money from Phillip Morris. The government itself has also

relied on PR, from the setting-up of the office of War Information during the Second

World War to spin-doctors hired by different administrations. Not only American

government, but foreign governments, like Kuwait, during the

Gulf War,

and Colombia,

also hire big American PR firms to build their image. Other non-

rofit organizations also

hire PR firms (for example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, to promote an anti-

abortion

message).

The image of the PR professional remains rather unsavory in media, especially when

associated in the 1990s with political lies and manipulation (

Wag the Dog,

1998;

Primary

Colors,

1999; television’s

Spin City,

ABC, 1996–).

Further reading

Hazen, D. and Winokur, J. (1997)

We the Media,

New York: The New Press.

CINDY WONG

public schools

The public system of education in the United States is a government-controlled, age-

graded, hierarchically structured, free and often compulsory system composed of groups

of schools administered by full-time experts and staffed primarily by state-certified

teachers. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, industrialization,

urbanization, the development of a

working class,

the shift in the definitions and role o

the

family

and the

state

’s assumption of responsibility for certain aspects of social

welfare

all contributed to the establishment and standardization of state systems o

education designed to achieve specific public policies and, ostensibly, to give all

children

access to educational opportunity and thus to social and economic advancement.

Entries A-Z 921

Within each state, public schools are generally organized into districts, originally

intended to allow for local control within state systems of education, but which also lead

to inequity of educational opportunity because a district is only as wealthy as the home-

owners within it (see

financial aid

). Each school district is governed by a local

school

board,

composed of

community

and business people, as well as an administrative

hierarchy, These governing bodies choose leaders, collect school

taxes,

select curricular

materials and hire teachers—all within parameters dictated by the state.

The administrative hierarchy of public schools includes, at the top, superintendents,

whose primary role is to supervise classroom instruction and assure curricular uniformity

and continuity across the elementary schools (kindergarten through 5th or 6th grade, for

children ages five to twelve), middle schools (6th or 7th grades through 8th grade, ages

twelve to fourteen) and

high schools

(9th to 12th grades, ages fourteen to eighteen)

which compose a district. Next in the hierarchy principals are responsible for

administering school policy within their individual elemen-tary, middle or secondary

schools. School-board members, superintendents and principals—the three most powerful

contingents in public-school systems—tend to be

white,

professional males. Teachers,

however, tend to be primarily female, particularly at the elementary level.

Teachers in public schools must adhere to strict, district- and state-mandated policies

and curricular guides. Throughout the history of public schooling there have been debates

about curricula—what students study in school (which texts written from whose

erspectives and including whom) and what they and teachers may and may not talk

about (e.g.

abortion, religion

and other controversial issues may be defined but not

discussed)—and pedagogical approaches, which range from conservative, highly

structured and highly standardized models to critical, constructivist pedagogies which

draw on and attempt to develop the active, creative capacities and diversities of learners.

(See

education and society

for an extended discussion of these last two points.)

Questions of who has access to quality education have also been central to

conceptualizations and reforms of public education. Segregation in public schools in the

United States has often correlated with the maintenance of a cheap labor force.

Immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—first Japanese, Chinese

and Korean immigrants, who worked for low wages on railroads, in factories and on

farms, then

African Americans

in the

South,

who worked for industrialization and the

maintenance of

agriculture,

and then Mexican farm workers in the early twentieth

century—were segregated in public schools and received an inferior education to that o

their European American counterparts. There were numerous “separate-but-equal”

rulings in the courts regarding

segregation

in the public schools, and it was not until

1954 that the US

Supreme Court

ruled, in

Brown

Board of Education of Topeka,

Kansas, that separate schools were inherently unequal and that school desegregation was

necessary. This decision legitimated education and public schooling as an appropriate

arena for societal issues and conflicts; the classroom became the context of social issues,

with teachers

in loco parentis,

and the state with its agenda for its ward. While

institutional segregation has been challenged by law, unofficial segregation remains in

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 922

the form of attendance patterns across schools (most students are assigned to

neighborhood schools) and tracking within schools, which critics suggest often reinforces

racial and socioeconomic inequities.

Just after the Second World War, the National Education Association and the

American Federation of Teachers—the two largest teachers’

unions

in the United

States—made several unsuccessful attempts to elicit more federal aid for schools. But it

was only after the launching of Sputnik in 1957, when schools were criticized for failing

to produce enough scientists and engineers, that the federal government stepped in to try

to assuage the distrust in educators, and it did so with the National Defense Education

Act of 1958. This Act provided money for specific educational categories, including

science,

mathematics,

foreign languages and counseling and testing programs (see

standardized testing

). Its passage signified that the federal government would not

simply supply monies to states, but would attempt to influence the curriculum taught in

schools.

The appropriation of curricular choices from educators continued as a theme, as state

departments of education as well as local governing bodies of schools became

increasingly composed of politicians and business people—neither educators nor

representatives of the majority of the population whom schools serve. After the

Sputnikinspired focus on math, science and foreign languages in the late 1950s, the 1960s

and 1970s saw first a swing towards more progressive and alternative forms of education

(see

education: values and beliefs

) and then a back-to-

asics movement in the schools,

with an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic.

The 1980s and 1990s ushered in a proliferation of options within the American public-

school system. Among these are

charter schools,

which are public schools operating

under a contract or charter granted by a school district, university state education board,

or some other public authority, depending on the state. Organized by teachers, business

people and/or other interested parties, charter schools are generally non-selective,

tuitionfree, non-sectarian and based on choice. There are also vouchers and other school-

choice plans that aim to offer parents and students the opportunity to select and receive

ublic monies for where children attend school, regardless of geographical or financial

status.

None of the reforms to public schools, however, has changed the reality of inequitable

resources, support and access among the school children of the United States. Even in its

new diversified forms, the public-school system seems to continue to reinforce social

inequity sorting students by

race,

ethnicity,

social

class,

gender and special interest

through curricular choices, pedagogical approaches, counseling and standardized

testing—the gate-keeping mechanisms which regulate educational access and

advancement.

Further reading

Entries A-Z 923

Spring, J. (1994)

The American School: 1642–1993,

3rd edn, New York: McGraw-Hill,

Inc.

Katz, M.B. (1987)

Reconstructing American Education,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

ALISON COOK-SATHER

publishing

While traditionally seen as a “gentleman’s”

rofession marked by small, intimate

roduction, intellectual values and high culture (except for some commercial presses),

late twentieth century book publishing in America told, once again, the story of corporate

mergers within a realm defined by public discourse. The once-artisanal imagery of a pre-

industrial field has given way to intensive marketing, corporate control, rapid evaluations

of success and failure and balance sheets based on subsidiary rights rather than volumes

sold or read. Book publishers like Simon & Schuster and The Free Press are part o

Viacom, Bantam Doubleday Dell was absorbed by Bertelsmann AG of Germany

HarperCollins forms part of the News Corporation and Random House, Knopf, Pantheon,

Crown and Ballantine are all under Advance Publication. While the bestsellers published

y big houses dominate the marketplace, there are, nonetheless, some independent

publishing houses and numerous university presses—

ublishing can still be done on a

relatively cheap scale. To understand American publishing culture one has to recognize

its product as well as its economic structure.

Reading was one of the most popular leisure activities in the first half of the twentieth

century, and led to the establishment of distinguished publishers like Random House

(1925) and Alfred Knopf (1915) beside older houses like Houghton Mifflin.

New York

City, NY dominated publication, although

Philadelphia, Boston

and other cities were

active centers. This was also an era of important editors who found and guided many o

America’s great writers. While sales were important, Random House also supported

Modern Library editions that made world and American classics accessible for

generations. Bookstores, meanwhile, were elite retreats and nurturing local

establishments.

After the Second World War, both the expanding markets fostered by the

GI Bill

and

new families of the

baby boom

increased the market for textbooks and other sales. This

was also the era in which paperbacks—and paperback publishers—

rovided America

with even cheaper reading. By the 1960s, publishers expanded by going public (selling

stock in private companies) and merging, a pattern that would intensify thereafter. The

danger was overproduction, although the number of publishers allowed both avant-garde

and saccharine bestsellers to find their way to market. Yet mergers soon combined

aperback and hardback houses, as well as other media companies, changing publishing

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 924

inexorably into a business driven by deals rather than culture.

But what of the product? Major fiction and social issues/non-fiction attract people’s

attention and prestigious book reviews in the

New York Times

and other serious news

ublications. Yet, specialized lists and interests that distinguish houses and editors

compete with the need for mass sales and links to movies or other media. Publishers need

the regular summer blockbuster by Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy or Elmore Leonard, or

sleepers like

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,

which stayed on the

ew Yor

Time

’s bestsellers list for years. Prizes like the

Pulitzer Prize

or the American Book

Award confer prestige, but do not necessarily provide the profits that a romance, a

successful children’s series or an instant celebrity book will rake in.

In fact, the business produces many types of books. The education book market, for

example, now accounts for more than 20 percent of all book sales (over $20 billion

annually) in America, dominated by Harcourt General and McGraw-Hill. This also vests

power with state officials who may decide on textbooks for large markets like

Texas

schools.

With increasing affluence, there are many nonfiction “lifestyle”

ooks published on

hunting,

tennis, cooking

and home decorating. In a culture that claims everyone can

succeed, more books are published on self-improvement—how to get thin, to have self-

esteem, to get rich. Graphic novels, upscale

comic

books, try to appeal to people who do

not read much. Audio books cater to older people and to commuters who spend a great

deal of time in their cars.

Children

and

teenagers

also create a lucrative market through

direct sales, and schools and

libraries

Book publishing then has met an extremely diversified market, but, more and more,

ooks are published only because there is a perceived market, not because of literary and

social values. This is especially true in terms of relations with other media, where books

have established an ever-closer relationship with movies and, to a lesser extent,

television

. Bestsellers by authors such as Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy,

Stephen

King

and John

Grisham

seem to go immediately from novels into movies. In

turn, novelization publishes books based on successful movies. Celebrity biographies and

product linkages (e.g.

Star Trek

guides) also increase mutual sales. Mergers have

intensified these connections—with their diversified holdings, conglomerates want to sell

not only the book, but the toy the

game,

the T-shirt and the music that go along with the

book.

The situation is uniquely American in that publishing must compete with other

mass

media

to become lucrative. While Gallimard makes an annual 3 percent profit, and is

considered healthy, American publishing houses have a profit target of 12–15 percent.

The big conglomerates envision their publishing arms to be as remunerative as

cable

television and film. Newhouse bought Random House for $60 million; ten years later it is

worth $1 billion. Hence, publishers bet on high advances for famous writers for perceived

huge returns, while foreclosing development of unknowns or risky topics.

With publishing concentrating more and more on celebrities, the overheads o

ublishing houses have also increased. Instead of paying editors the same salaries as

Entries A-Z 925