Search Results

This book examines why many Americans choose to live in small towns—and what it means to do so. Drawing on in-depth semistructured qualitative interviews with more than 700 people currently living in small towns scattered among forty-three states—from community leaders to ordinary residents—the book offers an exceptionally rich sense of what it is like to live in a small town and the various ways in which residents find community in these places. The interviews reveal the diversity of social strata of which small communities are composed, as well as how residents of small towns construct the meaning of their community in ways that reinforce loyalty to it and one another. The book also explores the meanings of community spirit in small towns, social and political issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and the roles played in small towns by religious congregations.

This chapter examines the marks of distinction that residents use to describe social strata in their communities as well as the local expectations that blur these distinctions. To understand how people in small towns view their communities, and how their communities shape their behaviors and attitudes, a good start is to look at the people themselves. Doing so reveals an interesting irony. The millions of people in the United States who live in small towns are quite diverse. They vary in background, race, age, family style, sexual orientation, education level, occupation, and income. At the same time, townspeople argue that they are not so different from one another. They see their fellow residents as similar to themselves: profoundly democratic, neighborly, and basically equal. The chapter considers the socioeconomic status of small-town residents as well as various categories of residents, namely: gentry, service class, wageworkers, and pensioners.

This chapter first draws together conclusions about the range of claims and counter‐claims made about divine qualities during the Republican period by individuals and groups from a range of social strata. It highlights the importance both of physical resources and of oral culture in the ways the cognitive vocabulary of divine qualities was used in Republican society. It then explores engagements with such qualities in the early empire. The capacity to restrict meanings and associations increased with the existence of an imperial family, but divine qualities also continued to be important in this period because alternative readings and associations could still be made, and such qualities were useful to senators and other people as well as to emperors. Imperial case studies include episodes found in Suetonius, Tacitus, and Dio, acclamations, Pompeian graffiti, ships, slave names, and the tomb of Claudia Semne.

This chapter scrutinizes the city in Fritz Lang's M, which suggests that the city itself is a product of modernity and is somehow responsible for madness, moral evil, and the existence of a monster like Hans Beckert. It explores how M is also a film about a community in the grip of fear and paranoia in a way that subverts a more straightforward social drama. It also describes Lang's kangaroo court that represents a divided social strata that was essentially united only by violence. The chapter suggests that the kind of violence enacted by Beckert is not only the product of a diseased mind, but it is something anyone could be capable of. It analyses M film's production, in which Lang made use of the city of Berlin in a sort of proto-neorealist sense and employed non-professional actors from among the city's criminal class.

This chapter focuses on medical impostors and quacks in early modern England. It explains that quack is the term used to describe someone claiming medical skills or university degrees to gain the status of a licensed physician, and that it could also refer to someone using techniques and forms of knowledge which were disapproved of as superstitious. The chapter describes the performative strategies of so-called quacks that enabled them to become consultants to people of all social strata, and argues that medical imposture displays conflicts which arose over professionalisation and institutionalisation, either between regular and irregular doctors, or among the latter.

This chapter focuses on the second generation of adult comics that was born in the midst of the 1977 student protest movement. This generation was deeply influenced by, and, in turn, influenced the concomitant explosion of new counterculture media. The disillusionment with the outcomes of 1968 and the development of new social and economic assets were giving shape to a different audience of adult comics and counterculture in general, a new entity the puzzled sociologists of the times called the new social subject. It is important to scrutinize carefully the factors that brought about the existence of this emerging social stratum, since it provided the audience and the breeding ground from which the authors of the new adult comics would spring.