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Paul S. Boyer

Bio: Paul S. Boyer is an academic researcher from Northwestern University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Colonialism & Politics. The author has an hindex of 18, co-authored 37 publications receiving 2634 citations.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: By the Bomb's Early Light as mentioned in this paper explores the cultural fallout in America during the early years of the atomic age and argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima.
Abstract: Originally published in 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to explore the cultural 'fallout' in America during the early years of the atomic age. Paul Boyer argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima. The book is based on a wide range of sources, including cartoons, opinion polls, radio programs, movies, literature, song lyrics, slang, and interviews with leading opinion-makers of the time. Through these materials, Boyer shows the surprising and profoundly disturbing ways in which the bomb quickly and totally penetrated the fabric of American life, from the chillingly prophetic forecasts of observers like Lewis Mumford to the Hollywood starlet who launched her career as the 'anatomic bomb.' In a new preface, Boyer discusses recent changes in nuclear politics and attitudes toward the nuclear age.

456 citations

Book
01 Jan 1978
TL;DR: In the early 19th century, the Jacksonian era as discussed by the authors was a time of increased concern about the urban threat and the need for urban moral reform, leading to the emergence of the YMCA movement.
Abstract: Part One. The Jacksonian Era 1. The Urban Threat Emerges: A Strategy Takes Shape 2. The Tract Societies: Transmitting a Traditional Morality by Untraditional Means 3. The Sunday School in the City: Patterned Order in a Disorderly Setting 4. Urban Moral Reform in the Early Republic: Some Concluding Reflections Part Two. The Mid-Century Decades: Years of Frustration and Innovation 5. Heightened Concern, Varied Responses 6. Narrowing the Problem: Slum Dwellers and Street Urchins 7. Young Men and the City: The Emergence of the YMCA Part Three. The Gilded Age: Urban Moral Control in a Turbulent Time 8. "The Ragged Edge of Anarchy": The Emotional Context of Urban Social Control in the Gilded Age 9. American Protestantism and the Moral Challenge of the Industrial City 10. Building Character among the Urban Poor: The Charity Organization Movement 11. The Urban Moral Awakening of the 1890s 12. The Two Faces of Urban Moral Reform in the 1890s Part Four. The Progressives and the City: Common Concerns, Divergent Strategies 13. Battling the Saloon and the Brothel: The Great Coercive Crusades 14. One Last, Decisive Struggle: The Symbolic Component of the Great Coercive Crusades 15. Positive Environmentalism: The Ideological Underpinnings 16. Housing, Parks, and Playgrounds: Positive Environmentalism in Action 17. The Civic Ideal and the Urban Moral Order 18. The Civic Ideal Made Real: The Moral Vision of the Progressive City Planners 19. Positive Environmentalism and the Urban Moral-Control Tradition: Contrasts and Continuities 20. Getting Right with Gesellschaft: The Decay of the Urban Moral-Control Impulse in the 1920s and After Notes Index

394 citations

Book
01 Jan 1985
TL;DR: By the Bomb's Early Light as mentioned in this paper explores the cultural fallout in America during the early years of the atomic age and argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima.
Abstract: Originally published in 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to explore the cultural 'fallout' in America during the early years of the atomic age. Paul Boyer argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima. The book is based on a wide range of sources, including cartoons, opinion polls, radio programs, movies, literature, song lyrics, slang, and interviews with leading opinion-makers of the time. Through these materials, Boyer shows the surprising and profoundly disturbing ways in which the bomb quickly and totally penetrated the fabric of American life, from the chillingly prophetic forecasts of observers like Lewis Mumford to the Hollywood starlet who launched her career as the 'anatomic bomb.' In a new preface, Boyer discusses recent changes in nuclear politics and attitudes toward the nuclear age.

343 citations


Cited by
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TL;DR: For example, the authors argues that culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action."
Abstract: Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action. The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model. Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term "culture." Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing, 1974). For purposes of this paper, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which "social processes of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community" (Hannerz, 1969:184) take place.

6,869 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify a number of ways in which the form of economic organization of a society appears to influence the process of human development by shaping tastes, the framing of choice situations, psychological dispositions, values, and other determinants of individual behavior.
Abstract: Drawing on experimental economics, anthropology, social psychology, sociology, history, the theory of cultural evolution as well as more conventional economic sources, I review models and evidence concerning the impact of economic institutions on preferences, broadly construed. I identify a number of ways in which the form of economic organization of a society appears to influence the process of human development by shaping tastes, the framing of choice situations, psychological dispositions, values, and other determinants of individual behavior. I conclude by commenting on some implications for economic theory and policy analysis.

1,635 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines recent geographic perspectives on park use, drawing upon environmental justice, cultural landscape and political ecology paradigms to redirect our attention from park users to a more critical appreciation of the historical, socio-ecological, and political-economic processes that operate through, and in turn shape, park spaces and park-going behaviors.
Abstract: Geographic research on parks has been wide-ranging but has seldom examined how and why people use parks, leaving these questions to leisure science, which privileges socio-demographic variables over urban socio-spatial explanations (eg, historical, political-economic, and location factors). This article examines recent geographic perspectives on park use, drawing upon environmental justice, cultural landscape, and political ecology paradigms to redirect our attention from park users to a more critical appreciation of the historical, socio-ecological, and political-economic processes that operate through, and in turn shape, park spaces and park-going behaviors. We challenge partial, user-orientated approaches and suggest new directions for geographic research on parks.

458 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A normative prohibition on nuclear use has developed in the global system, which, although not (yet) a fully robust norm, has stigmatized nuclear weapons as unacceptable weapons of mass destruction.
Abstract: We have recently witnessed the e ftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare. The non-use of nuclear weapons since then remains the single most important phenomenon of the nuclear age.Yet we still lack a full understanding of how this tradition arose and is maintained and of its prospects for the future. The widely cited explanation is deterrence, but this account is either wrong or incomplete.Although an element of sheer luck no doubt has played a part in this fortuitous outcome, this article argues that a normative element must be taken into account in explaining why nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. A normative prohibition on nuclear use has developed in the global system, which, although not (yet) a fully robust norm, has stigmatized nuclear weapons as unacceptable weapons of mass destruction. Without this normative stigma, there might have been more ‘‘use.’’ 1 This article examines this phenomenon in the context of the nuclear experience of the United States. This investigation is motivated by several empirical anomalies in the conventional account—deterrence—of the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. First is the non-use of nuclear weapons in cases where there was no fear of nuclear retaliation, that is, wherethe adversary could not retaliate inkind.Thisanomaly includes the e rst ten years or so of the nuclear era, when the United States possessed e rst an absolute nuclearmonopoly andthenan overwhelmingnuclear advantageover theSovietUnion. It also includes non-use by the United States in Vietnam (where the United States dropped tonnage equivalent to dozens of Hiroshima bombs) and in the 1991 Persian

449 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is argued that 'health' is a key concept in the fashioning of identity for the modern and contemporary middle class and that the 'unhealthy' come to be represented as the other of this self.

449 citations