America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers, but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In his new book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017), Stoll visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wages-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

“I wanted to write a book about notions of progress and why we think of certain people as being in its way,” he said.

“How is it that we refer to billions of people in the world as backward and primitive, as being either incapable of what we consider to be progress or in need of some kind of transformation in order to be part of the ‘modern world?’ I see all of these characterizations as fictions.”

Stoll has studied the reasons why people get kicked off their land, and in Ramp Hollow, he interprets it through the characteristics of capitalism as it originated in seventeenth-century England and the way it organizes life in the United States. In that system, land and labor have to become commodities, and both need to be free from any traditional claims on them. The process is known as “enclosure.”

The Way Capitalism Works

“In enclosure, not only does the lord take control of a piece of land and turn it into private property, but laborers are also available because the peasants who lived on that land and produced their own livelihood now need to make a living. They make that living by earning wages sometimes in the very fields they tilled for their own good,” he said.
“Enclosure is essential to capitalism everywhere; otherwise people who are producing their own wherewithal have no need to work for wages.”

Appalachia is an ideal archetype of enclosure, he said, because coal mining transformed the region very quickly. Eastern elites, like English lords, saw the transformation from an agrarian to an industrial/capitalist economy as necessary.

The book focuses on the formation of the rural working class during the 19th century. It details episodes such as the Whiskey Rebellion, the founding of West Virginia, and the arrival of timber and coal companies. Stoll relied on records he discovered during trips to the area, like a trove of documents from the Flat-Top coal company stored haphazardly in a dilapidated library in Bluefield, West Virginia.

“The archive in Bluefield began as the obsession of one person who’d collected an enormous trove of documents. Nothing was catalogued, things were just laying around. I’d never seen anything like it, but that’s where I found some of the most important documents in the making of the book,” he said.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

To give a voice to the voiceless, he also paired previously unpublished letters by residents with literature by authors born and raised in the mountains. One of these was G.D. McNeill, whose collection of short stories, The Last Forest (1940), includes a story called “The Last Campfire,” about a group of men who return to their boyhood home for one last camping trip. As they take in the view of a mountain called Big Black, that had been so important to all of them, “they cry out at the sight of the barren mountainside,” said Stoll, upon seeing how clear cutting had stripped it of vegetation.

“Those documents showed me the transition that people went through, from autonomy in their mountain households to dependency living on wages in lumber camps,” he said.

Although Ramp Hollow does not delve into the current state of Appalachia, Stoll said that it might interest those living there. It’s common to find residents who take pride in playing a part in America’s energy independence, but yet dismiss black lung disease and disasters like the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion as a necessary and noble sacrifices.

“I’m not trying to embarrass anybody, but I want to present to them their own history in a way that is much more truthful than what they might have heard elsewhere,” Stoll said. “They were taken advantage of by government and by capital, and the two cooperated to dispossess them for the most selfish of possible reasons.”

The discussion, which was held at the New York Ethical Culture Society, was led by Christiana Peppard, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology, science, and ethics, and Steven Stoll, Ph.D, professor of history. Students were required to read the encyclical over the summer, and share their thoughts on a university blog.

Peppard prefaced remarks on the document by noting its historical significance. Although the Catholic Church has long addressed environmental concerns, this was the first encyclical in which ecology is central, she said. According to the pope, ecology is a triad of important relationships: among human beings themselves, between human beings and God, and between humans and the planet that sustains them.

“There’s never been an encyclical that talks about these three sets of relationships as central to Catholic social teaching, even though Pope Francis draws so much on the established tradition of Catholic social teaching, and quite frankly, that’s exciting,” Peppard said.

She said that the FCLC students were animated by the issues of modern anthropocentrism, ecological debt, the technocratic paradigm, and the commodification of water, according to postings on the blog.

The encyclical genuinely aspires to address every person on the planet, regardless of their faith, she said.

“You don’t have to be Catholic . . . to read, think about, and reflect critically and constructively upon what Laudato Sí might be saying,” she said.

Peppard and Stoll opened up the floor to the students, who addressed the room through two microphones.

One student from Hong Kong bemoaned the fact that a vista that her parents could once see clearly had become choked with smog by the time she grew up. A student from Brooklyn cautioned against assumptions that the planet needs help from humans for its own survival, pointing out that the earth has thus far survived many species.

Students who self-identified as conservatives expressed hope that the church’s reframing of environmental issues would help them to bridge the partisan divide in this country. A student who hailed from Berkley, California, lamented that Laudato Sí contained few concrete proposals.

Stoll noted how Pope Francis explores the way we make things, and challenges us to think of the earth as a single human community instead of a set of nation states, commodities, or exchanges. If we did, he said, we’d reject the capitalistic notion that everything, including water, needs to be commoditized. This goes for the skies too.

“The atmosphere is not a commodity, and has not been commodified as such, but loading it with methane and carbon dioxide claims it as a necessary attribute to manufacturing,” Stoll said.

“Francis calls the atmosphere a ‘common good,’ giving no industry or corporation the right to reduce its capacity to sustain human life.”

Although the Pope’s Laudato Sí has attracted criticism from free-market advocates, Stoll said they miss the larger, more profound point that Francis makes of thinking as the world as one interconnected system; although sooty skies and urban abandonment have been vanquished in New York City, they are still very much issues in other places.

“The only truly outrageous notion we have about the world is that the present condition will continue indefinitely, that things will stay exactly the same. Imagining . . . a wider sense of well-being, and decoupling the earth from its commodity value, is an entirely new (view),” he said.

Prior to the global economic crash of 2008, many nations faced a crisis of a different sort—a food crisis—brought on by a worldwide spike in the prices of commodities like corn, wheat, and rice. Haiti was one of the countries particularly hard hit. In the spring of that year, many Haitians starved even though they were surrounded by rice. Imported rice.

For Steven Stoll, Ph.D., associate professor of history, the situation was perplexing.

“I knew that Haitians had produced a very distinct kind of rice that they were extremely proud of,” he said. “Where was that rice?”

According to Stoll, policies established by the International Monetary Fund created a situation in which Haitian rice became more expensive than imported rice—in effect, forcing Haitians to abandon their domestic farmers for engagement in, and dependence on, the global market.

It was a move designed to “modernize” Haitian society by turning the people into wage earners who could purchase goods. Stoll, however, questions the notion that traditional agrarian societies need such modernization, given the often dismal results it produces, as exemplified by Haiti.

“Haiti once had a thriving countryside,” he said. “What happened to it? All of these people now lived in the bidonvilles—in the slums. How did they get there? It was the entrance for me into asking the larger question of how agrarian people become dependent.”

The plight of agrarian societies is the central focus of Stoll’s research, and he is currently at work on a book titled Outliers and Savages: The Ordeal of the Agrarian Household in the Atlantic World.

“More people have been members of agrarian households than any other class in human history,” said Stoll. “Yet these people have been under siege in the last 200-300 years all over the modernizing world.

“I’m interested in how they hung on, how they were undermined, the resistance they put up, and ultimately, I’m interested in whether or not this model should be regarded as a possible route for economic development. Perhaps instead of dispossessing agrarians, development agencies should be working to strengthen them and make it possible for them to do what they do better: grow and sell their garden and field crops without industrializing them or turning them into wage workers.”

In tracing a history of agrarian households in North America, Stoll looks to the Appalachian societies that first populated the forested mountains of western portions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, which, at that time, marked the nation’s frontier. In the period after the Revolutionary War, this “American peasantry,” as Stoll refers to them, were extraordinarily adept at thriving in a harsh landscape that was undesirable to landowners grabbing up fertile bottomland. They were also able to maintain their economic independence from the burgeoning nation-state.

According to Stoll, such independence rankled Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, who tried to force Appalachians to pay a tax on rye whiskey, thus provoking the Whiskey Rebellion of the late 18th century.

“If you’re not paying taxes, then you’re not part of the economy,” said Stoll, in summing up Hamilton’s position. “And if you’re not part of the economy, you’re not a citizen,” he continued.

Stoll emphasizes, however, that Appalachians also engaged in vigorous trade and bought the things they desired but couldn’t make themselves.

“That didn’t mean that they bought and sold everything in their lives, turned everything into a commodity, including their own labor,” he said. “The market was something that they chose—not something that they were compelled to. They could buy and sell because it was opportunity, because it was enticing.”

Though the Appalachians stood up to Hamilton and did
not pay the Whiskey Tax, they later succumbed to other pressures when the desire grew for natural resources on their land—namely, timber, metals, minerals, and eventually coal. When wealthy landowners gained control of their land and cut down their forests, Appalachians were forced to seek work as coal miners and became dependent on wages. Their agrarian society collapsed.

To outsiders, the move from agrarianism to market dependence may signify a positive shift away from outdated practices toward modernization. Stoll, however, attributes this view to
a theory developed by 18th-century Scottish philosophers, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith, who conceptualized human society as naturally progressing through sequential stages from hunting, herding, and farming, to a commercialized division of labor.

“There’s no evidence for this [theory]whatsoever,” said Stoll. “Yet it influenced the way people in the West looked at economic development for centuries . A lot of people look at how we live as the outcome of a process of social evolution that says that this is the best of all possible worlds. But that view invalidates the way billions of people live by defining them as backward.”

Stoll sees proof of the continuing value of subsistence food production in places like Uganda, where, despite political problems, there is a “thriving food producing peasantry,” which produces so much food that some of it is exported.

“It’s a very unusual situation in which the government actually derives GDP import dollars from a non-capitalist sector of production,” he said. “They more than feed themselves. Far from starving, they’re thriving.”