Download City Folk (NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis) by Daniel J. Walkowitz PDF

this is often the tale of English nation Dance, from its 18th century roots within the English towns and nation-state, to its transatlantic bounce to the U.S. within the twentieth century, instructed by means of not just a well known historian but in addition a folks dancer, who has either immersed himself within the wealthy background of the people culture and rehearsed its steps. In urban folks, Daniel J. Walkowitz argues that the background of kingdom and people dancing in the United States is deeply intermeshed with that of political liberalism and the ‘old left.’ He situates folks dancing inside strangely diversified contexts, from revolutionary period reform, and playground and college events, to the alterations in shopper tradition, and the venture of a modernizing, cosmopolitan heart classification society. Tracing the unfold of people dancing, with specific emphases on English kingdom Dance, overseas people Dance, and Contra, Walkowitz connects the background of people dance to social and foreign political impacts in the United States. via archival examine, oral histories, and ethnography of dance groups, urban folks permits dancers and dancing our bodies to talk. From the norms of the 1st half the century, marked strongly by means of Anglo-Saxon traditions, to the chilly conflict nationalism of the post-war period, and at last directly to the counterculture events of the Nineteen Seventies, urban folks injects the riveting historical past of people dance in the course of the tale of recent the United States.