Recently added articles from The Journal of American Culture:
Fictionalizing the Folkloric: Matt Clark's Hook Man Speaks
Dec 01, 2008; ... Matt Clark's 2001 novel Hook Man Speaks emerges from the familiar, protean American "contemporary legend" of the Hook Man- for Clark "the rock star of folklore" (142). Identified by Jan Brunvand as the "archetypal example of the genre" and a "favorite of folklore scholars" Encyclopedia 200), the ...
"We Never Locked Our Doors at Night": Newark on the 'Net, Minus the Mob
Dec 01, 2008; ... In an episode of the recently concluded HBO series, The Sopranos, the New Jersey mob boss decides to show his teenage son the old Newark neighborhood. "We're talking history here, A.J. Your family's history. Newark's history." His son, though, remains unimpressed. "Well who gives a shit about ...
A Red Moon over the Mall: The Sputnik Panic and Domestic America
Dec 01, 2008; ... What happened after the fourth of October, 1957, was nothing short of a total crisis of confidence in the American way of life. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had just initiated the space age by launching the first manmade satellite, named Sputnik or "fellow traveler" and Americans ...
Avalon Lost: Suburbanization and Its Discontents in Barry Levinson's Avalon
Dec 01, 2008; ... Barry Levinson's film Avalon (1990) dramatizes the changes that occur over time among the Krichinskys, a Jewish-American family of East European heritage in mid-twentieth-century Baltimore. Levinson said of his film that "'Avalon'. . . dealt with the 50's- the rise of television and the demise ...
All The Essentials of HBO and The Sopranos
Dec 01, 2008; ... All The Essentials of HBO and The Sopranos Jim Welsh The Essential HBO Reader Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, Eds. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. The Sopranos on the Couch: The Ultimate Guide Maurice Yacowar. New York: Continuum, 2007. As ...
Brothers Among Nations: In Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America 1580-1660
Dec 01, 2008; ... Brothers Among Nations: In Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America 1580-1660 Cynthia J. Van Zandt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Increasingly the large world community is realizing that regardless of many local and largely insignificant differences, the earth is ...
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death/Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone with the Wind/Political Conspiracies in America: A Reader
Dec 01, 2008; ... Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death Mark S. Schantz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery Since Gone with the Wind Tim A. Ryan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ...
How the States got their Shapes
Dec 01, 2008; ... How the States got their Shapes Mark Stein. Washington: Smithsonian, 2008. Anyone viewing a map of the United States or, more closely, traversing large areas will be astounded by the seeming hodge-podge and irregular arrangements of states boundaries, as well as the satisfaction of being ...
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
Dec 01, 2008; ... Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World David Brion Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. David Davis undertakes to explain the despicable institution of slavery in the New World by searching for its beginnings in the ancient world of the Babylonians and ...
Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter
Dec 01, 2008; ... Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter James E. Caron. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Sam Clemens, young man of satire and jokes, metamorphosed, as we all know, into Mark Twain, acute reader and understander of human nature by accurately reading the columns about ...
Moose Crossing: Portland to Portland on the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway
Dec 01, 2008; ... Moose Crossing: Portland to Portland on the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway Max J. Skidmore. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2007. The Theodore Roosevelt International Highway spans more than 4,000 miles from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon by way of Ontario, Canada. Created at ...
More than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era
Dec 01, 2008; ... More than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era James Marten and A. Kristen Foster, Eds. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2008. In our near obsession with studying the Civil War, many of us tend to overlook the fact that it was a civil war that was dividing the society ...
Notes on a Life
Dec 01, 2008; ... Notes on a Life Eleanor Coppola. New York: Dolubleday/Nan A Talese, 2008. This book is Eleanor Coppola's second installment of her continuing adventures with Francis, her extravagant, Italian, filmmaking winemaker of a husband. Her first book was entitled Notes on the Making of ...
Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle Over Guns
Dec 01, 2008; ... Out of Range: Why the Constitution Can't End the Battle Over Guns Mark V. Tushnet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. The "battle of cultures" metaphor has emerged as a leader among analytic frameworks vying over a satisfactory interpretation of the meaning of guns in American ...
Securing America's Future: A Bold Plan to Preserve and Expand Social Security
Dec 01, 2008; ... Securing America's Future: A Bold Plan to Preserve and Expand Social Security Max J. Skidmore. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Securing America's Future is more than simply a worthy successor to Max Skidmore's earlier book, Social Security and Its Enemies: The Case ...
Shopping for Jesus: Faith in Marketing in the USA
Dec 01, 2008; ... Shopping for Jesus: Faith in Marketing in the USA Dominic James, Ed. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008. If scholars of consumer culture have it right, Americans (and, indeed, much of the world) live thoroughly commodified lives in which marketing, branding, shopping, and ...
Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics
Dec 01, 2008; ... Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics Jeffrey Sconce, Ed. Duke University Press, 2007. In the impressive group of essays Jeffrey Sconce has collected in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, twelve film scholars explore "issues ...
Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920
Dec 01, 2008; ... Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920 Ellen Ross, Ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Ellen Ross's anthology of "journalism, policy-oriented social observation, fiction, art and poetry" by late nineteenth and early twentieth century "lady slum travelers" ...
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
Dec 01, 2008; ... The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire Matt Taibbi. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2008. Like it or not, Europeans are laughing at America. Case in point: Stephen Bates reported for The Guardian Weekly ...
The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance
Dec 01, 2008; ... The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance Chad Berry, Ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Those of us who grew up in the Depression in small towns or the country in the Southeast and south of Chicago will remember how important to our sanity was the National Barn ...