American Dream is precisely a narrative that assumes equality in the face of manifest inequality: where the “opportunity” of some to gain extraordinary power is taken as evidence of the opportunity of all; and where the miseries of the many are taken as a testament of personal inadequacy.
The American Dream - everyone has the opportunity to do or become anything they want, but often there are fewer opportunities for some.
However, the dominant meaning of tolerance implies inequality
This is an interesting thing to think about. I never considered that we could only tolerate people we feel are not equal to us.
This plus the question “would you leave your kid home alone?” was the immediate frame for Jolene’s story, which was, in fact, qualitatively and quantitatively different.
Even if this was the intention of the movie, the kid ended up okay in the end. Obviously, something like this would not happen in real life and it was meant to be funny, so why take it so seriously?
We would suggest that the hostility of the studio audiences in both programmes was not coincidental but indeed actively (if not intentionally) set up.
Is this a "what if" the audience's hostility was scripted or was it actually? That seems like a terrible thing to do even for views. TV show audiences should just be there to watch and applaud instead of causing problems.
What followed was an escalating barrage of accusation where a tidal wave of competing, smug outrage engulfed the audience and Jolene herself
This is similar to what happens on the internet. People can post something completely normal and people will find something to criticize them for without a care about context or anything.
For instance, the programme All the Family is Gay (1991) featured a mother and her four lesbian daughters who were estranged by the mother’s homophobia
Is this an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show? I couldn't find anything about it online. Why would a TV show bring out gay people during a time in which it wasn't widely accepted and give light to homophobia? This reminds me of the murder following the Judy Jones show.
many of our informants were girls during the golden age of radio, an era often considered to be from the mid-1920s through the mid-1960s (Siegel, 2006), so it is understandable that radio was the mass medium most referenced by the women in our study.
Is reading books considered pop culture? Or was that not a part of girlhood in the 1920s and previously?
Almost all thirty informants immediately focused on outdoor activities—tag, hide-n-seek, jumping rope, picnics, hiking, swimming, bike riding, random adventures with friends, and so on. Regardless of whether our informants grew up in a rural or urban setting, they typically recalled their girlhood as a time when media and popular culture were peripheral or absent from their lives
This is interesting to think about such a low amount of media consumption. I always imagined that on top of outdoor activities and activities without media, there would also be a decent amount of time spent consuming media, even if that was radio or magazines.
Marketers began targeting high school-aged girls in the 1920s, increasing the practice in the 1930s and 1940s (Schrum, 2004). For example, Seventeen magazine, founded in 1944, sold out its first issue of 400,000 within 6 days (Schrum, 2004).
Smart idea, high school girls are definitely easy to sell to. Didn't the pop culture at this time kind of create "one girlhood" as opposed to multiple girlhoods because teenage girls had a lot of the same things?
While some scholars contend that the 1950s post-war period was the historical moment when the U.S. teenager and teen culture were essentially ‘‘born’’ (Doherty, 1988, p. 35), other scholarship has shown that characteristics defining the teenager in Western cultures pre-date the 1950s (Savage, 2007; Schrum, 2004) primarily due to the dramatic increase in high school attendance at mid-century spurred in part by returning World War II veterans displacing young people from the workforce and pushing them back into schools
"Teen culture" was heavily portrayed in media following the second world war and especially in the 80s and 90s. It is interesting to think about the romanticism of high school and the teenage years was mostly due to the increase in school attendance following the war.
We intentionally use the plural, ‘‘girlhoods,’’ in acknowledgment that there is no single, uniform ‘‘girlhood.’’ Rather, there are ‘‘girlhoods’’—cultural constructs that vary by race, ethnicity, class, nationality, generation, regionality, sexual identity, and so on.
It is interesting to hear girlhood talked about in this way because often in TV and media we only get one story about girlhood. This story is often a white middle class teenage story of girlhood without any semblance of what girlhood was like for girls of color or different social status, etc.
Short words gained an advantage over long words
Telegraphs changed the way people wrote and it seems like it created some version of slang for telegraphs.
these devices paved the way for future technological advances
The telegraph was crucial to the development of modern-day communication technology. It resembles pay phones with time per cents and even sms messaging rates.
All send Merry Christmas to you all. Too busy to write. Sent box express yesterday.”
Thoughts condensed to partial sentences to save money?
astronomical observations, the correct mean and solar time.
how is it possible to determine the "correct mean and solar time" if time is just a social construct?
Each culture breaks down time into units that are useful and meaningful to it.
It is interesting that there are different versions of time depending on the culture. Obviously, time has been standardized, but it is cool to think about the concept of different calendars... for example the Mayans.
Why study history?
What kind of jobs are there for historians? Are historians being paid to log events of present day that will become history, or do they strictly study the past?
History also helps provide identity
"History also helps provide identity..." I think this paragraph makes a good point. History allows us to connect with ancestors that we have never met through learning about their history. It also allows us to develop an identity based off of this understanding of familial history.
A study of history is essential for good citizenship.
How can we function as better citizens by understanding history?
What does a well-trained student of history
"What does a well-trained student of history..." I never really thought about the importance of assessing parts of history. Since everything I have learned historically was through textbooks and not my own analysis, I didn't think about all the work that went into creating those books and stories about our past. It is incredible to think about all the work that went into deciphering which information is correct between multiple interpretations
history offers a storehouse of information
"History offers a storehouse of information about...." While historians are not commonly thought about when we list important jobs, they are the bridge to knowing what works and what doesn't. History is important to study because it teaches us the faults that previous societies have made as well as the successes of certain societies. This allows us to use the information from the past to form a society out of the things that work so it can function properly