New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

The famous "Stage Yankees," with their eccentric New England dialect comedy, entertained audiences from Boston to New Orleans, from New York to London in the years between 1825 and 1850. They provided the creative energy for the development of an American-type character in early plays of native authorship. This book examines the full range of their theatre activity, not only as actors, but also as playmakers, and re-evaluates their contribution to the growth of the American stage. Yankee theatre was not an oddity, a passing fad, or an accident of entertainment; it was an honest exploitation of the materials of American life for an audience in search of its own identification. The delineation of the American character—a full-length realistic portrait in the context of stage comedy—was its projected goal; and though not the only method for such delineation, the theatre form was the most popular and extensive way of disseminating the American image. The Yankee actors openly borrowed from what literary sources were available to them, but because of their special position as actors, who were required to give flesh-and-blood imitations of people for the believable acceptance of others viewing the same people about them, they were forced to draw extensively on their actors' imaginations and to present the American as they saw him. If the image was too often an external one, it still revealed the Yankee as a hardy individual whose independence was a primary assumption; as a bargainer, whose techniques were more clever than England's sharpest penny-pincher; as a country person, more intelligent, sharper and keener in dealings than the city-bred type; as an American freewheeler who always landed on top, not out of naive honesty but out of a simple perception of other human beings and their gullibility. Much new evidence in this study is based on London productions, where the view of English audiences and critics was sharply focused on what Americans thought about themselves and the new culture of democracy emerging around them. The shift from America, the borrower, to America, the original doer, can be clearly seen in this stager activity. Yankee theatre, then, is an epitome of the emerging American after the Second War for Independence. Emerging nationalism meant emerging national definition. Yankee theatre thus led to the first cohesive body of American plays, the first American actors seen in London, and to a new realistic interpretation of the American in the "character" plays of the 1870s and 1880s.

The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. The Invention of Latin American Music portrays music as the field where, for the first time, the cultural idea of Latin America disseminated through and beyond the region, connecting the culture and music of the region to the wider, global culture, promoting the now-established notion of Latin America as a single musical market. Palomino explores multiple interconnected narratives throughout, pairing popular and specialist traveling musicians, commercial investments and repertoires, unionization and musicology, and music pedagogy and Pan American diplomacy. Uncovering remarkable transnational networks far from a Western cultural center, The Invention of Latin American Music firmly asserts that the democratic legitimacy and massive reach of Latin American identity and modernization explain the spread and success of Latin American music.

In this comprehensive revision of the most influential, widely read analysis of the US trade policymaking system, Destler addresses how globalization has reshaped trade politics, weakening traditional protectionism but intensifying concern about trade's societal impacts. Entirely new chapters treat the deepening of partisan divisions and the rise of "trade and . . ." issues (especially labor and the environment). The author concludes with a comprehensive economic and political strategy to cope with globalization and maximize its benefits. The original edition of American Trade Politics won the Gladys Kammerer Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book on US national policy.

Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.

The Corso: The Real Nuyorican Salsa Story is a must-read book not just because it’s a fantastic and incredible story of success but also it’s a historic legacy of how it was at the beginning of the salsa movement. It is narrated firsthand by someone who was there and was an important part of it, if not the most important. Pete Bonet was born in a very humble, extremely poor part of the island of Puerto Rico. Even the police would not go in there. It was too dangerous. It is a place called El Fanguito, “the Muddy.” His mother, Olga, was abandoned there with her six children, ages fifteen down to a newborn baby. Pedrito, as he was called, was the fourth child; he was six years old when his father left for good. Olga was left alone with no money, no food, no man to protect the family, no government help, no nothing, not even shoes for the kids to go to school. The neighbors would say, “Poor Olga, she’s going to die along with all the six kids.” Pedrito left that part of the world at the age of fifteen to go to New York City, not knowing how to say no in English. At the age of twenty-one, Pedro graduated from Central Commercial High School with honors in bookkeeping and business law, typing sixty words a minute without errors. He then took the test in order to enter the United States Air Force and qualified in administration and thus entered the United States Air Force. Upon returning home with an honorable discharge, Pedro went to work for different construction companies as a timekeeper onsite—Marshall Const. Co., Arc Electric Co., Turner Const. Co., Melnick Const. Co., among others. He would go dancing on weekends to different nightclubs in New York City, from the world-famous Palladium Ballroom called the home of the mambo and cha-cha-cha, located on Broadway and Fifty-Third Street, the Manhattan Center on Thirty-Fourth Street, the Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx, and this was where Pete met the love of his life, Margie. They fell in love at first sight while dancing to the wonderful music of Tito Rodriguez and his big band orchestra. They got married six months later and still together today, in the year 2019, fifty-seven years and still counting. Pete Bonet, as he got to be known, got into music by mere chance. He started singing with Alfredito Valdez and his charanga, then Ray Barretto and his charanga, La Moderna. Then he went with Mongo Santamaria and his orchestra under the musical direction of trumpet player Marty Sheller. He formed his own big band together with the great Louie Ramirez as his arranger and musical director. After a couple of years, he got a call from Tito Rodriguez and went on to sing with the one and only Tito Rodriguez and his big band. Upon Tito Rodriguez’s death, he joined the Joe Cuba Sextet. He also sang with the king of Latin music, Tito Puente and his big band, and over forty other Latin orchestras in New York, Hollywood, and Puerto Rico. By reading this book, you will get to appreciate that great era, an extraordinary moment in time, the very beginning when the term “salsa” was born and started to be used instead of all the different names of all that great Cuban music. You will feel all the excitement of non-Latins dancing in clubs like the Corso that most likely will never be repeated again.

This political analysis of teen culture examines the historical and ideological development of American youth society, the economic and ideological relationship between television and popular music, and the ideological rivalry between Nickelodeon and Disney. More than mere entertainment, teen sitcoms and pop music portray a complex and often contradictory set of cultural discourses. They engage in a process of ideology marketing and "hip versus square" politics. Case studies include Saved by the Bell, Britney Spears, the movie School of Rock, early "pop music sitcoms" like The Monkees and The Partridge Family, and recent staples of teen culture such as iCarly and Hannah Montana. What is occurring in teen culture has a crucial bearing as today's teens age into adulthood and become the dominant generation in the impending decades.