Recently added articles from Journal of American Culture:
The politics and ethics of literary revival: A test-case--shall we, ought we, can we make of Constance Fenimore Woolson a Kate Chopin?
Oct 01, 1999; ... The current proliferation of individual author societies reminds me of the proliferation of little nation-states in that part of the world that was known for a while in this century as the Soviet Union. Both proliferations are attempts to create spaces for the nurturing of particularities-and ...
Defending travel writing (against other writers): The case of Joe McGinniss's Going to Extremes
Oct 01, 1999; ... When I went to Alaska in 1988 I found that everyone there seemed to come from somewhere else--and often came for bizarre reasons--so a typical conversation involved your own tangled story of how you allegedly got there. A few Alaskans made a point of asking me if I lived in America: I soon ...
Television drama and popular film as medical narrative
Oct 01, 1999; ... The appeal of both television drama and popular film focusing on medical issues appears to be the product of a number of factors. Among these factors may be the anxiety many Americans feel about the overwhelming power of health care professionals and institutions, interest in life and death ...
The precious moments chapel: Suffering, salvation, and the world's most popular collectible
Oct 01, 1999; ... In May 1996, Joan Frankhauser made her first visit to the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, Missouri. Sixteen months previously, her husband of forty-two years, Fred, had died from a heart attack while she and her daughter attempted to provide CPR. Upon entering the chapel, Joan expected to ...
Challenging contemporary narrative theory: The alternative textual strategies of nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks
Oct 01, 1999; ... Cookies 2 eggs, 2 cups of Sugar, 1 cup of Milk, 1 Cup of butter[,] 1/2 nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of quick yeast[,] flour enough to make into a stiff dough, roll and cut out, dampen the top with water[,] dip into white sugar, then bake in a quick oven, From Sallie. -Mary Smith's ...
Angels and the AIDS epidemic: The resurgent popularity of angel imagery in the United States of America
Oct 01, 1999; ... Tony Kushner's Angels in America has been the most visible of the recent plays about life in the age of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Both part 1, Millennium Approaches, and part 2, Perestroika, enjoyed long runs on Broadway after opening in May of 1993, and part 1 received the ...
"What mean expendable?": Myth, ideology, and meaning in First Blood and Rambo
Oct 01, 1999; ... The year 1982 introduced to moviegoers a character that would eventually become a major popular culture icon, John Rambo. This is the year First Blood was released, which features Sylvester Stallone as an alienated and neglected Vietnam veteran who seems to roam the country until he enters the ...
The subculture of the beats: A sociological revisit
Oct 01, 1999; ... Introduction Much has been written about the literary works and life-histories of key figures of the Beat Generation: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Clellon Holmes, Gary Snyder, and others (for overviews, see Charters, "The ...
Popular culture: From being an enemy of the "feminist movement" to a tool for women's "liberation"?
Oct 01, 1999; ... The media has played a significant role in disseminating feminist ideas and politics over the last two decades. Early studies in the field often suggested that all media coverage was anti-feminist and criticized popular cultural texts for degrading women by constructing conventional and ...
Crow Indian Photographer: The Work of Richard Throssel
Oct 01, 1999; ... Crow Indian Photographer: The Work of Richard Throssel. Peggy Albright, foreword by Joanna Cohan Scherer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Peggy Albright's book is the first extensive study of Richard Throssel (1882-1933), a Creek Indian adopted into the Crow tribe. He ...
Readings in African Popular Culture
Oct 01, 1999; ... Readings in African Popular Culture. Ed. Karin Barber. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. This is a valuable book long overdue. Now that it is here, we can study African popular culture with much more knowledge than we have had in the past. Barber, who is Senior Lecturer in ...
The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering
Oct 01, 1999; ... The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War H and American Remembering. Philip D. Beidler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. On this we seem to agree-if ever there were a good war, it was World War II. Good and evil were easily defined, we did what we knew we had to to win, and we ...
Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s
Oct 01, 1999; ... Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s: Philip D. Beidler. Athens: University of Georgia Press. If you can or cannot remember the '60s, you will probably learn a lot, or be reminded of a lot, by taking this deja vu stroll down memory lane through the forest of ...
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival
Oct 01, 1999; ... When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Robert Cantwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. $24.95 cloth. In the years between 1958 (when the Kingston Trio had a hit with "Tom Dooley") and 1964/65 (when the Beatles and "the British invasion" swept the pop charts and Bob Dylan ...
American Sacred Space
Oct 01, 1999; ... American Sacred Space. Ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. This book flows from humankind's basic need to have something sacred, something primal and mythic in one's present and past. America-or more properly a new Garden of Eden-has ...
"Shook over Hell": Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War
Oct 01, 1999; ... "Shook over Hell": Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. Eric T. Dean, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. At a time when political, public, and popular debate have become preoccupied with trauma and, particularly, with the intersection of public events and ...
Digging for Dollars: American Archaeology and the New Deal
Oct 01, 1999; ... New Deal. Paul Fagette. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. $40.00 cloth. This 255-page volume contributes substantially to our understanding of economic relief in the form of employment during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the parallel need to conduct ...
The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counter-culture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Oct 01, 1999; ... The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Thomas Frank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. The history of "cool" is usually depicted as one of individuals rebelling against corporate mass culture. One of the several central details ...
Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism
Oct 01, 1999; ... Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. Allen Guttmann. New York: Columbia University Press. In this volume of his continuing series on sports, Allen Guttmann, one of the leading authorities on sports, brings us a concise, readable, and commonsense discussion of the ...
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Oct 01, 1999; ... The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Christopher Hitchens. London: Verso, 1995. $15.00 cloth. From time to time, with seeming regularity, women who have devoted themselves to religious and charitable work achieve heroic stature in popular culture. Times past ...