Description
Book SynopsisA Companion to American Cultural History offers a historiographic overview of the scholarship, with special attention to the major studies and debates that have shaped the field, and an assessment of where it is currently headed.
- 30 essays explore the history of American culture at all analytic levels
- Written by scholarly experts well-versed in the questions and controversies that have activated interest in this burgeoning field
- Part of the authoritative Blackwell Companions to American History series
- Provides both a chronological and thematic approach: topics range from British America in the Eighteenth Century to the modern day globalization of American Culture; thematic approaches include gender and sexuality and popular culture
Trade Review"The thirty bibliographies of the most influential work in American cultural history would by themselves make the hook very helpful to a wide audience. But the essays' historiographical and thematic overviews provide the most valuable contribution, for each essay is aimed squarely at the ways that the best works in the field have been in conversation with each other." (
A Journal of Southern History, February 2010)
"A monumental achievement. The breadth of coverage is staggering, and the depth of insight a credit to its multifarious authors. Rarely can one book offer so much." (
Reviews in History, April 2009)
“This excellent reader in US cultural history for undergraduates may also be useful to specialists as a general overview of the field as it has evolved, especially over the past four decades. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.” (CHOICE, March 2009)
"A guide for scholars and students who are interested in developments over the past quarter-century … .No reader should come away from it without a good springboard to further study. It is an apitite-whetter, a conspectus and a guide." (Reference Reviews, January 2009)
Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors viii
Introduction xi
Karen Halttunen
Part I Early America 1
1. Cultural Encounters: Americans and Europeans 3
Peter C. Mancall
2. Cultures of Colonial Settlement 17
Carla Gardina Pestana
3. British America in the Eighteenth Century 32
Karin Wulf
4. The Revolution and the Early Republic 46
Catherine E. Kelly
Part II The Nineteenth Century 63
5. Antebellum Cultural History 65
James W. Cook
6. Religion and Reform 79
Lewis Perry
7. Black Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 95
Demetrius L. Eudell
8. The Civil War in American Culture 110
Alice Fahs
9. The West 125
Ann Fabian
10. The Gilded Age 139
Scott A. Sandage
11. Immigration and Ethnic Culture 154
Hasia R. Diner
12. Cultural Watersheds in Fin de Siècle America 166
Janet M. Davis
Part III The Twentieth Century 181
13. Consumer Culture and Mass Culture 183
Charles F. McGovern
14. Modernism 198
Joel Dinerstein
15. Politics and Culture in the 1930s and 1940s 214
Julia L. Foulkes
16. The 1950s and 1960s 230
Daniel Belgrad
17. The Globalization of American Culture 246
Petra Goedde
Part IV Thematic and Methodological Approaches 263
18. Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History 265
George Lipsitz
19. Situating Visual Culture 279
Sally M. Promey
20. Material Cultures 295
J. Ritchie Garrison
21. Performance and Display 311
M. Alison Kibler
22. Gender and Sexuality 327
Jane H. Hunter
23. Race and Ethnicity 341
Eric Avila
24. Popular Culture 356
Nan Enstad
25. History and Memory 371
David Glassberg
Part V The Cultural Turn in Other Fields 381
26. Culturalist Approaches to Intellectual History 383
Casey Nelson Blake
27. The Impact of the Culture Concept on Social History 396
Lawrence B. Glickman
28. Religious History and the Cultural Turn 406
Leigh E. Schmidt
29. Political History and the Tool of Culture 416
Joanne B. Freeman
30. The Cultural History of Foreign Relations 425
Andrew J. Rotter
Index 437
