Cedar Point: A Park in Progress

This is a biography of an amusement park, Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, by its marketing director. This life history, using sources close to the park and in the popular press ouer many decades, traces the many shifts in circumstance, philosophy and mood in its development ouer a span from 1897 to its present status as “one of the great parks of the country.” This case study of a single park that has incorporated characteristics of many growth stages ofparks ingeneral serues as a capsule history: from its beginnings as a resort; expansion of rides and attractions during the flush years of the 1920s; the backsliding deterioration of the Depression years and the immediatepost- War period; the decline of the big-city parks and the moue to the suburbs in the 50s; and the Disney effect: the advent of the national super theme park, with its revolutionary impact on the traditional park concept. According to Hildebrandt, Cedar Point is “the only modern superpark that also has an ancient history…. the only old-time amusement park to successfully make the transition to the new amusement park culture.”     

Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form

The Disney parks—Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida—presented a radical refinement and departure from the traditions of the amusement park: the theme park. Designed for the values of long distance travel, suburban lifestyle, family life, the major vacation excursion, and the new visual culture of telecommunications, these places have grown to attain the status of national popular culture capitals. Because of their importance to American life, these institutions have suffered more than their share of attacks as key symbols ofpopular culture. Like all such targets of elitist ire (led by such accusations as “plastic” and “mindless”), the Disney parks must be experienced carefully and studied closely to see beyond these simplistic slings and arrows. Emerging from this study was a contention directly opposed to the common wisdom of the theme parks' futuristic and artificial nature: they may in fact serve as cultural preserves for the most nostalgic images and dreams of a nation. They are a very special kind of museum, of course—of past and future not as they were or will be but as popular taste has shaped and nurtured them in the collective imagination. The Disney “archive” of Americana is thus highly valuable as a display of popular thought on every featured theme.     

Disney World as Structure and Symbol: Re-Creation of the American Experience

It has been said that the Disney theme parks are the cities America wishes it had; immune to death and taxes, clean, orderly, crime-free family style environments of optimism and nostalgia, politically independent, with the advantages but few of the vices of real cities. Treatments of the amusement park in political terms, such as Michael Harrington's Atlantic article, “To the disney Station,” while invariably critical, indicate the important position these places have attained as complex institutions in themselves—living commentaries on society at Large, as well as important standard-setters for new social, political and economic philosophy for planning and control in all sectors of national life. In this way, Disney's worlds—and parks built under their influence—have come to be viewed as societies in miniature, reliable images of work, leisure, human relations and politics in the larger world outside. Here anthropologist David Johnson uses morphology as the key to discerning the meanings of these prototype parks for basic cultural values in many aspects, including work, class, economic order, technology, individualism, history, and cross-cultural adventure. In fact, these Disney versions have now themselves become a special mode of first-hand experience in the repertoire of the great national shared experience.     

Fantasy Lands and Kinesthetic Thrills

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks aided in the transformation of spectacle as total-body experience. By studying the ways that Coney Island's unique beachside resort produced entertainment that appealed to all of the senses, we seek to “make sense” of the amusement area in its historical and geographic specificity. Even in its early years of development the beachside resort was touted (and critiqued) in the popular press as a carnivalesque atmosphere that escalated the senses. With the opening of Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks provided dream worlds of technological and architectural wonder that invited kinesthetic. Coney Island reconfigured the dizzying effects of urbanism, modernity and the capitalist machine as entertainment, inviting pleasure seekers to experience the shock of modernity as fun. Mechanical amusements celebrated and fostered thrill seekers as sensuous beings who experienced leisure not just through their eyes but with and through their entire bodies. Though the impossibilities of recreating the sensorial experiences of pleasure seekers at Coney Island remains a methodological limitation, this article contributes to literature that understands the senses as lived, embodied phenomena that are products of culture.     

The Parks of Vienna

In this cross-cultural and historical contrast to the American park style, we see an eighteenth-century Viennese park, the Prater. This park has long been a showcase for the panoply of Viennese popular culture (“To be Viennese has long meant to visit the Prater”), serving as a generous stage for the mixing of classes and cultures. Here was a crossroad where immigrants, travelers, ethnics and the lower echelons could observe and mingle with the middle and upper reaches of society; a living laboratory of acculturation to the life of a cosmopolitan city. Together with the Schoenbrunn Zoo and other mainstays of the recreational outing, the park also provides an early example of environmental awareness in a rapidly expanding area calling for a balance between urban growth and green space. These effects indicate that popular culture, even within the limited realm of entertainment such as the amusement park, carries more serious implications for social and environmental issues.     

The later social adjustment of a group of borderline defective delinquents trained at the oaks school 1

In Part 1 of this article, the author provides an overview of the history of psychoanalytic treatment of those identifying as homosexual. In Part 2, the author interviews “Rob” to more fully demonstrate the corrosive effects over a lifetime of analytic and psychotherapeutic treatment, as it had once been practiced. Rob, a man primarily attracted to men, spent many years in treatment with different therapists and analysts during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Now in his early eighties, Rob is married and remains closeted to all but a few close associates. When Rob entered treatment many years ago, he was told that his homosexual attractions were symptoms of an illness and with treatment he could change. Rob's experience is uncannily similar to multiple reports that exist in the professional and lay literature. Rob knows that nothing can undo the damage he suffered, yet it remains his wish that the psychoanalytic community would acknowledge, and even apologize, to all those who were harmed—including the many who took their lives—by theories and practices that were once so central to mainstream psychoanalysis.     

中央公园与民初北京社会

中央公园是北京城第一个近代意义上的“公园”,作为一个新兴的城市公共空间,中央公园接纳了近代社会生活的大量内容,新与旧、中与西、政治与文化、国家与社会,均在此有充分的呈现。可以说,中央公园为我们提供了一个社会史研究的模型,它见证了历史,也映射了民国初年北京社会的驳杂面相。     

Main Street U.S.A.: A Comparison/Contrast of Streetscapes in Disneyland and Walt Disney World

All visitors to Disneyland and Walt Disney World must enter the “magic kingdoms” by way of Main Street, U.S.A.—the Disney version of a small town landscape of around the turn of the century, the “classical period” in American streetscape evolution. Extending far beyond its park setting, Disney's idealized Main Street (along with the overall design of which it is a part) is “one of the most successfully designed streetscapes in human history,” and has exerted enormous impact. Its design and images have influenced city and new town planning and the restoration of real Main Streets across the country, inspiring architectural restoration philosophy and practice; in short, writing an important chapter in the history of America's fondest image of itself. It was in fact from the ranks of planners and designers, not academic intellectuals or even social commentators (who scorned and reviled Disney's creations), that the initial awareness and appreciation of theme parks as structures and images came, as a leading edge in the breakthrough in perception of popular environments which has occurred only within the past decade. Richard Francaviglia is concerned with the architecture and design of Main Street U.S.A. as it preserves, controls, modifies and perpetuates a central collective image. But he goes further, comparing the original articulation in California with the Florida version a design generation later. What is ultimately revealing is the contrast of both of these related but distinct ideals within the parks to Main Street as it actually existed.     

中国古宫词含义考辨

以宫词为题的诗是宫词的研究对象,如何对待那些数量可观的无宫词之名、却有宫词之实的诗,关键在于宫词含义的理解。通过梳理历代宫词之渊源流变,考察出宫词是以妃嫔宫女生活为主要描述对象,此为核心含义宫词,其中包括宫中行乐词与宫怨诗二类;又有不涉宫女之事的宫词,即为边缘含义宫词。     

The Sale of Two Cities: A Semiotic Comparison of Disneyland with Marriott's Great America

Much is revealed through the contrast of two related but divergent forms. In this essay, Elizabeth Mechlingand Jay Mechlingcontrast Disneyland with a later but more loosely themed park, Marriott's Great America in Santa Clara, California. Using the perspectives and methods of semiotics in Louis Marin's Marxist reading, this essay asks, “What are the stories that Disneyland and Marriott's Great America tell?…the ways in which popular culture both teaches and evokes stories that ‘think themselves’ in our minds.” These two parks, though allied in the theme format and rooted in a common bourgeois capitalist culture, are found to promote very different attitudes and values.     

GIRLS MAKING CHOICES ABOUT CAREERS: THE IMPORTANCE OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Because of the gender-differentiated nature of the Australian workforce, it is important to gain a clear understanding of how girls and women make choices about careers. The data in this paper originate from a study involving girls discussing their subject choices as they move into Year 11 at school. The study revealed a strong link between subject choices and career aspirations. Furthermore, personal experiences of a career through home or school activities were usually necessary for a girl to aspire towards that career. This raises questions about the efficacy of trying to influence career decisions through brief exposure to role models. It also suggests the need to supplement the experiences of those girls with limited experiences related to careers.     

Explaining Diversityin the Development of Same-Sex Sexuality Among Young Women

This article summarizes findings from two ongoing studies charting the development of 167 adolescent and young adult sexual-minority women. Resultsdocument considerable variation in the quality, relative distribution, and context of women's same-sex and other-sex attractions. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, the timing of a woman's first same-sex attractions is not systematically related to subsequent features of sexual identity development. Rather, the quality and context of a woman'searly attractions and behavior is more important. We argue that variability in sexual-minority and heterosexual women's development is best explained by interactions between personal characteristics and environmental contexts, and we urge future studies of the sexual-minority life course to include women with same-sex attractions that do not identify as lesbian or bisexual.     

A price worth paying? Accountability,red tape and the regulation of affordable housing

Although it is not a pressing social problem in the same way as, for example, poverty, child abuse, or climate change, red tape causes frustrations for many working in public and private sector organisations, perhaps even more than for the ordinary citizen dealing with large government agencies. This paper will explore some dimensions of this contentious issue. It will consider the positive view of regulation advanced by regulation theorists, and some qualitative researchers associated with this tradition. Drawing on a qualitative research study concerning the regulation of affordable housing in Australia, it examines the nature of administrative burdens. It is suggested that three factors lead to the perception of red tape: whether regulation is seen as making a difference to services beyond accountability; whether the measures used are meaningful; and the resources available for compliance. Qualitative researchers can help those in government seeking to reduce administrative burdens by supplying realistic accounts that address the views and experiences of those subject to regulation.     

Negotiating the ‘state of exception’: Gypsies' encounter with the judiciary in Germany and Italy, 1860–1914

The tensions between judicial and executive authorities regarding so-called Gypsies in fin de siècle Germany and Italy reveals an inherent contradiction between the universalist dictates of the modern Rechtsstaat and the requirements of building a national state free of perceived outsiders. The frustration of executive authorities with judicial authorities who insisted on protecting the universalist individual enshrined in law pushed executive authorities to utilize the ‘state of exception' to achieve their vision of the national community. Rather than choosing to create illiberal laws that would expressly exclude Gypsies from the national body, and would resolve the tension with the judiciary, authorities in Germany and Italy instead chose to go around the law by treating Gypsies as an exception not subject to the law. The state of exception not only deprived those labelled as Gypsies of a method of resistance, since many were able to use unwilling courts to protect them from over-zealous executive authorities, but also created a group of stateless people, persecuted and lacking basic human rights.     

Why There are Fewer Children

Is it good or bad that the number of children being born is constantly declining? A majority of those writing on the subject say "bad"; a majority of those who give birth think, judging by their course of conduct, "good." Who is right? Those who write or those who give birth? Today this is one of the most complicated problems, and our present and future depend on it in many ways.     

Perceptions of Staff Supervision in the Probation Service

Summary This study collates and comments upon the views of main-gradeprobation officers in West Yorkshire on the subject of staffsupervision. It shows that a majority of officers hold positiveopinions about supervision, provided that it is related to assistingthem in their main task of helping clients. The use of supervisionas a means of administrative control over standards of workis acceptable only to a minority of officers. The article includesa detailed analysis of the content of officers' own definitionsof supervision from which many examples are quoted. It showsalso the degree of importance accorded to supervision in relationto other probation officer and senior probation officer functions.     

Pre-War and Post-War Lebanese Immigrants in Melbourne

The following paper forms part of a thesis on the Lebanese community in Melbourne. The Lebanese community in Australia has not been the subject of any systematic study and thus the author attempted to investigate as many facets as possible of the life style of Melbourne's Lebanese immigrants. The purpose of this paper is to examine the causes and characteristics of immigration from Lebanon to Melbourne before and after the Second World War.     

构建陕西省精品旅游景区策略研究

“十二五”期间,随着陕甘宁革命老区振兴、关天经济区发展与西安国际化大都市建设等政策的拉动,陕西旅游业步人转型和升级攻坚阶段,面临着前所未有的机遇与挑战。对此,应转变旅游开发理念、调整省内精品景区旅游业发展定位,对潜力景区提升与改造,扩大旅游资源范围,提升旅游产品品位,落实陕西省“168”旅游发展战略,分层次、分重点地建设一批精品旅游景区,通过精品旅游景区的建设,形成主题突出、功能齐全、层次丰富的具有震撼力的国际、国内冶内多条精品旅游线路,以点带面,延伸旅游产业链,最终促进陕西旅游业结构调整、转型升级。     

从野蛮到文明——汉唐长安动物戏的发展演变

动物戏是杂技的一种,表演难度很高,具有极强的艺术性、观赏性和娱乐性。汉唐长安的动物戏有其明显的发展演变过程,差异较大。汉代的动物戏种类较多,大致包括马戏、斗兽、驯兽、斗禽、驯禽以及弄蛇等,其中,有关驯兽和驯禽的记载相对较少,而较为原始的斗兽则颇为盛行,虽然比较刺激,但却显得血腥残酷。经过几百年的发展演变,唐代长安的动物戏已发生了很大变化,血腥残酷的斗兽表演鲜有所闻,而驯兽、驯禽却至为繁荣,成为唐代长安动物戏的主流。