TY - BOOK AU - Papanikolas,Zeese TI - An American cakewalk: ten syncopators of the modern world SN - 9780804795395 AV - E169.1 .P214 2015eb U1 - 973.5 23 PY - 2015///] CY - Stanford, California PB - Stanford University Press KW - Authors, American KW - Biography KW - Artists KW - United States KW - Intellectuals KW - Écrivains américains KW - Biographies KW - Artistes KW - États-Unis KW - Intellectuels KW - BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY KW - Historical KW - bisacsh KW - HISTORY KW - State & Local KW - General KW - fast KW - Intellectual life KW - 19th century KW - 20th century KW - Vie intellectuelle KW - 19e siècle KW - 20e siècle KW - Electronic books N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Ghost dance -- Valentines -- Cakewalk -- Monsters -- The soul shepherd -- The return of the novelist -- An innocent at Cedro -- The rise of Abraham Cahan -- Beyond syncopation N2 - The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopation, so this book's protagonists--who range from Emily Dickinson to Thorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus--interrogated the modern American world through their own "syncopations" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor UR - https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&AN=1044206 ER -