Search results for ""Author John Bloom""

The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture on them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity.

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In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American radio and telecom company, made a huge gamble on a revolutionary satellite telephone system called Iridium. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, built on technology for Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars,” Iridium was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment that sent waves of panic through phone companies around the world, because, surely, Iridium was the future of communication. Only months after launching service, bankruptcy was inevitable—the largest to that point in American history. It looked like Iridium would go down as just a “science experiment.”That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a retired former President of Pan Am, heard about Motorola’s plans to “de-orbit” the system and decided he would try to buy Iridium. Somehow, the little guy figured he could turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business.Eccentric Orbits masterfully traces the development of satellite technology, the birth of Iridium, and Colussy’s tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, despite having doors slammed in his face by all of Wall Street. Piecing together funding from a motley group of investors that included a mysterious Arab prince and friends of Jesse Jackson, he eventually made his case before the most powerful people at the Clinton White House, the Pentagon, the FCC, intelligence services, and a consortium of thirty banks, pleading for the only phone that works at the ends of earth. Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of innovation, failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the greatest deals of all time.

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Baseball card collecting carries with it images of idealized boyhoods in the sprawling American suburbs of the postwar era. Yet since the mid-1970s, it has grown from a pastime for children to a big money pursuit taken seriously by adults. This work employs interviews with collectors, dealers, and hobbyists to ask what this hobby tells us about nostalgia, work, play, masculinity, and race and gender relations among collectors. These interviews reveal the hobby's alienating, lonely and unfulfilling aspects, and demonstrate the nostalgia experienced among collectors for the ideal childhood world many middle class white males experienced in the postwar years, when baseball card collecting was a form of play, not a money-making enterprise. The work links this nostalgia to anxieties about de-industrialization and the rise of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. It examines the gendered nature of swap meets as well as the views of masculinity expressed by the collectors: is the purpose of baseball card collecting to form a community of adults to reminisce or to inculcate young men with traditional masculine values? Is it to establish "connectedness" or to make money? Are collectors striving to reinforce the dominant culture or question it through their attempts to create their own meaning out of what are, in fact, mass-produced commercial artifacts?

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In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American company, made a huge gamble on a revolutionary satellite telephone system called Iridium. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars,' Iridium's constellation of sixty-six satellites in six evenly spaced orbital planes meant that at least one satellite was always overhead. Iridium was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium was also a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month and bringing in almost no revenue. Bankruptcy was inevitable - the largest to that point in American history. It looked like Iridium would go down as just a 'science experiment.'That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former CEO of Pan Am, heard about Motorola's plans to 'de-orbit' the system and decided he would buy Iridium and somehow turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business.Eccentric Orbits masterfully traces the birth of Iridium and Colussy's tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, from meetings with his motley investor group, to the Clinton White House, to the Pentagon, to the hunt for customers in special ops, shipping, aviation, mining, search and rescue. Impeccably researched and wonderfully told, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of technological achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex and one of the greatest deals of all time.

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"Most of the contributions strongly project the authors' perceptions of the role of race on their subjects, and essays should elicit lively discussions in the classroom." —CHOICE Frederick Douglass liked to say of West Indian boxer Peter Jackson that "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question." His comment reflects the possibilities for social transformation that he saw in the emerging modern sports culture. Indeed, as the twentieth century developed, sports have become an important cultural terrain over which various racial groups have contested, defined, and represented their racial, national, and inter-ethnic identities. Sports Matters brings critical attention to the centrality of race within the politics and pleasures of the massive sports culture that developed in the U.S. during the past century and a half. The contributors collected here address such issues as popular representations of blacks in sports. They consider baseball—from Nisei players in Oregon to Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. And they look at the use of warrior imagery in representations of Native American athletes and the evolution of black expressive style within basketball. Sports Matters challenges our presumptions about sports, illuminating in the process the complexities of race and gender as they relate to popular culture. Contributors include Amy Bass, John Bloom, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Gena Caponi, Montye Fuse, Randy Hanson, Michiko Hase, George Lipsitz, Keith Miller, Sharon O'Brien, Connie Razza, Sam Regalado, Greg Rodriguez, Julio Rodriguez, Michael Willard, and Henry Yu.

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