Books by "John Kenneth Turner"
11 books found
Mexico and the United States share a border of more than 2,000 miles, and their histories and interests have often intertwined. The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and continued in one form or another for the next thirty years, was keenly observed by U.S. citizens, especially those directly involved in Mexico through property ownership, investment, missionary work, tourism, journalism, and education. It differed from many other revolutions in this century in that Marxist–Leninist theory was only one of many radical and reformist influences. Historian John A. Britton examines contemporary accounts written by Americans commenting on social upheaval south of the border: radical writers John Reed, Anita Brenner, and Carlton Beals; novelists Katherine Anne Porter and D.H. Lawrence; social critics Stuart Chase and Waldo Frank; and banker-diplomat Dwight Morrow, to mention a few. Their writings constitute a valuable body of information and opinion concerning a revolution that offers important parallels with liberation movements throughout the world today. Britton's sources also shed light on the many contradictions and complexities inherent in the relationship between the United States and Mexico.
John Ross has been living in the old colonial quarter of Mexico City for the last three decades, a rebel journalist covering Mexico and the region from the bottom up. He is filled with a gnawing sense that his beloved Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the western world are doomed, and the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and blight will be globalized into one more McCity. El Monstruo is a defense of place and the history of that place. No one has told the gritty, vibrant histories of this city of 23 million faceless souls from the ground up, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed, deconstructed the Monstruo's very monstrousness, and lived to tell its secrets. In El Monstruo, Ross now does.
In History and Modern Media, John Mraz largely focuses on Mexican photography and his innovative methodology that examines historical photographs by employing the concepts of genre and function. He developed this method in extensive work on photojournalism; it is tested here through examining two genres: Indianist imagery as an expression of imperial, neo-colonizing, and decolonizing photography, and progressive photography as embodied in worker and laborist imagery, as well as feminist and decolonizing visuality. The book interweaves an autobiographical narrative with concrete research. Mraz describes the resistance he encountered in US academia to this new way of showing and describing the past in films and photographs, as well as some illuminating experiences as a visiting professor at several US universities. More importantly, he reflects on what it has meant to move to Mexico and become a Mexican. Mexico is home to a thriving school of photohistorians perhaps unequaled in the world. Some were trained in art history, and a few continue to pursue that discipline. However, the great majority work from the discipline known as "photohistory" which focuses on vernacular photographs made outside of artistic intentions. A central premise of the book is that knowing the cultures of the past and of the other is crucial in societies dominated by short-term and parochial thinking, and that today's hyper-audiovisuality requires historians to use modern media to offer their knowledge as alternatives to the "perpetual present" in which we live.
"There can be no more important issue than the issue of war with Mexico; for all other issues are tied up with it. The forces of progress will have to gather swift strength, or they will feel the crunch of the Iron Heel." -John Kenneth Turner, Hands Off Mexico In Hands Off Mexico (1918), John Kenneth Turner, who, along with his wife, had long been involved in Mexico's revolutionary movement, sought to plead the Mexican cause during a time when the US government was reevaluating its policies toward Mexico. His pleas for the US to refrain from invading Mexico, played an important role in the drafting of the US Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924.
Costs of War
by John V. Denson