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Popular Cutlure in American History
Popular Culture in American History collects the most widely cited and important writings on three hundred years of American popular culture. Each of the ten essays serves as a case study of a particular moment, issue, or form of popular culture, from seventeenth-century chapbooks to hip hop. Pedagogical features include further reading lists, contextualizing editorial introductions, discussion questions and chronologies of key events.
- GenresHistory
280 pages, Paperback
First published October 26, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 12, 2021
While it's not the exhaustive history of American pop culture that I hoped it'd be, this collection of analytic essays and excerpts does provide a nice variety of time periods and perspectives that help elucidate what was popular in America's past.
The book defines popular culture as "the folklore of industrial society" (based on the words of Lawrence Levine) and emphasizes how connected it is, especially in the west, to a capitalism that has both been a boon and an affliction to the spread of that folklore. On the one hand, it has pioneered new technical means of spreading media more cheaply and efficiently, allowing a wider range of the population to partake in different kinds of entertainment. While, on the other, it has limited that entertainment based on what offers the most titillation at the expense of things that might be more thoughtful and subdued.
For the most part, the best chapters were the ones I learned the most from. The chapter on the penny presses, which began in the 1830s, illustrates how cheap newspapers could democratize information but could also reduce them to the lowest common denominator. While this new industry allowed more people to consume news, it also focused on the easily sensationalized news of violent crime and murder and exacerbated already existing xenophobia. The details of these often urban crimes bled into fiction of the period as well. As morbid as Edgar Allan Poe might have been (he was often more deductive or psychological than outright gory), he had nothing on the lurid details of the (mostly) true crime columns.
The chapter on Shakespeare offers an interesting argument for how pop culture and elite culture can trade places. Throughout the nineteenth century, Shakespeare, at least in America, was considered low brow entertainment. Most common folk knew the famous Shakespearean speeches and stories, as is made clear by how many parodies existed of them. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that Shakespeare moved to elite status, possibly because of the shift away from America's focus on language to the country's obsession with visuals.
Otherwise, there are informative chapters on the dichotomies of the western as a genre; an all-around performer like Frank Sinatra, his public image, and his relationship to the American dream; and advertising and twentieth century media like TV and radio. The analysis of the minstrel show, in which black culture was often parodied in very offensive ways, tries to make the case that these performances could be empowering as well but never explains this adequately enough. And the section on the downside of early blogs feels downright quaint in the current era where conspiracy theories and grifters now run rampant online.
If nothing else, the book functions as a great access point into a number of social and political issues as filtered through the lens of the popular masses.
The book defines popular culture as "the folklore of industrial society" (based on the words of Lawrence Levine) and emphasizes how connected it is, especially in the west, to a capitalism that has both been a boon and an affliction to the spread of that folklore. On the one hand, it has pioneered new technical means of spreading media more cheaply and efficiently, allowing a wider range of the population to partake in different kinds of entertainment. While, on the other, it has limited that entertainment based on what offers the most titillation at the expense of things that might be more thoughtful and subdued.
For the most part, the best chapters were the ones I learned the most from. The chapter on the penny presses, which began in the 1830s, illustrates how cheap newspapers could democratize information but could also reduce them to the lowest common denominator. While this new industry allowed more people to consume news, it also focused on the easily sensationalized news of violent crime and murder and exacerbated already existing xenophobia. The details of these often urban crimes bled into fiction of the period as well. As morbid as Edgar Allan Poe might have been (he was often more deductive or psychological than outright gory), he had nothing on the lurid details of the (mostly) true crime columns.
The chapter on Shakespeare offers an interesting argument for how pop culture and elite culture can trade places. Throughout the nineteenth century, Shakespeare, at least in America, was considered low brow entertainment. Most common folk knew the famous Shakespearean speeches and stories, as is made clear by how many parodies existed of them. It wasn't until the early twentieth century that Shakespeare moved to elite status, possibly because of the shift away from America's focus on language to the country's obsession with visuals.
Otherwise, there are informative chapters on the dichotomies of the western as a genre; an all-around performer like Frank Sinatra, his public image, and his relationship to the American dream; and advertising and twentieth century media like TV and radio. The analysis of the minstrel show, in which black culture was often parodied in very offensive ways, tries to make the case that these performances could be empowering as well but never explains this adequately enough. And the section on the downside of early blogs feels downright quaint in the current era where conspiracy theories and grifters now run rampant online.
If nothing else, the book functions as a great access point into a number of social and political issues as filtered through the lens of the popular masses.
June 11, 2023
I find it difficult to rate Anthologies, especially as these are a mixture of decent to “meh” essays on pop culture from the creation of the penny press to the creation of the internet. Some were thought provoking, but most didn’t seem to expand my knowledge of the various topics. I found the sponsorship section to be the most interesting. Overall, one of the textbooks I wanted to read the whole thing even if not assigned, so will go in the like category.
August 11, 2016
Maybe it's because I read this for school, but I just didn't like it. It didn't seem to go into detail (enough for me anyway) about some of the "popular culture" described. There is a lot of popular culture out there, and I wish this book would have gone into more of it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews