The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American HistoryRichard Wightman Fox, T. J. Jackson Lears University of Chicago Press, 1993 - 292 من الصفحات "We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re-examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'—which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever-present wholeness—will shelter us. The PC buttons on historians' chests today stand not for 'politically correct' but 'positively cultural.'—from the Introduction More and more scholars are turning to cultural history in order to make sense of the American past. This volume brings together nine original essays by some leading practitioners in the field. The essays aim to exhibit the promise of a cultural approach to understanding the range of American experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Expanding on the editors' pathbreaking The Culture of Consumption, the contributors to this volume argue for a cultural history that attends closely to language and textuality without losing sight of broad configurations of power that social and political history at its best has always stressed. The authors here freshly examine crucial topics in both private and public life. Taken together, the essays shed new light on the power of culture in the lives of Americans past and present. |
المحتوى
Introduction | 1 |
Sherwood Anderson Looking for the White Spot | 13 |
Unlimnd They Disappear Recollecting Yonnondio From the Thirties | 39 |
Early American Murder Narratives The Birth of Horror | 67 |
Intimacy on Trial Cultural Meanings of the BeecherTilton Affair | 103 |
The Class Experience of Mass Consumption Workers as Consumers in Interwar America | 135 |
Between Culture and Consumption The Mediations of the Middlebrow | 163 |
Fighting for the American Family Private Interests and Political Obligation in World War II | 195 |
Making Time Representations of Technology at the 1964 Worlds Fair | 222 |
An Atmosphere of Effrontery Richard Serra Tilted Arc and the Crisis of Public Art | 246 |
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advertising aesthetic American culture Anderson argued artifact artistic audience authentic avant-garde Beecher Beecher-Tilton Boston Casey Nelson Blake century Chain Store Chain Store Age consumer contemporary corporate crime criminal critics cult of horror cultural history democratic discourse early eighteenth-century Elizabeth Tilton Erskine's essay evil execution sermon exhibits experience Fair's Federal Plaza fiction fighting Futurama genteel grocery Henry Ward Beecher historians human intellectual Jason Fairbanks John Erskine Lerner liberal literary literature lives mass consumption mass culture ment middlebrow modern moral murder Narrative nature Norman Rockwell nuclear Olsen political obligation popular protect public art Public Sculpture public spaces Randolph Bourne readers Richard Serra Rockwell sense Sherman Sherwood Anderson social society story testimony Theodore Theodore Tilton Tillie Tillie Olsen Tilted Arc tion tradition trial University Press Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk Winesburg workers working-class World's Fair writing wrote Yonnondio York