Christian Lammert

Laura Bieger

The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love?the 1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of ?America,” dividing US society in deep and troubling ways. Yet despite the passage of time, the contemporary crises in the ?American way of life” and the political system that sustain it might well make one wonder: to what degree are we still living on the outskirts of the '60s? By examining crucial events, trends, and individuals from the civic, social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic spheres across a range of disciplines, this volume offers a nuanced and pluralist account of the longest decade in America.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America's Longest Decade

Revisiting the Sixties

Jason Weems

Joshua Shannon

Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art. Humans are organisms, but "the human being" is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

Humans

Johannes Voelz

Ramon Saldivar

Based on papers originally presented at a 2009 conference hosted at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut of the Freie Univet'at Berlin.

Laura Bieger

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