The Journal of American Culture back issues from March 2007:
A Hunger for Home: Homesickness and Food in a Global Consumer Society
Mar 01, 2007; ... In 1991, Anton Shammas wrote of a Palestinian immigrant who had come to the United States, secretly carrying with him plants, seeds, and seven birds native to the West Bank: "Maybe that's why Abu-Khalil can feel at home in California, surrounded by the artifacts of his lost Palestine. This ...
Art in the Parlor: Consumer Culture and Currier and Ives
Mar 01, 2007; ... The development of the modern American economy took a major leap forward in the midnineteenth century. The American economy moved dramatically in the direction of mass production and expanded product advertising, prompting the development of a modern consumer culture. Feeding those developments ...
The Consumer Culture Research Landscape
Mar 01, 2007; ... This introductory article for the special issue of The Journal of American Culture serves two functions. First it briefly sketches the current status and historical background of consumer cultural research. And second, it introduces the reader to the individual scholarly research articles that ...
Valued Amish Possessions: Expanding Material Culture and Consumption
Mar 01, 2007; ... Old Order Amish1 life is often romanticized in the contemporary American imagination. Despite the severe persecution that drove the Amish from their European homeland and their subjection to ridicule and hate crimes throughout much of the twentieth century, today they generally enjoy a hallowed ...
The Predicaments of Plenty: Interwar Intellectuals and American Consumerism
Mar 01, 2007; ... Scholars have thoroughly charted the rise of American consumer culture and the intellectual responses it has engendered. They have paid far less attention, however, to the ways in which the Great Depression forced a fundamental change in intellectual attitudes toward this development, which is ...
Consumer Activism, Commercialism, and Curriculum Choices: Advertising in Schools in the 1930s
Mar 01, 2007; ... The commercialization of US education is one of the rapidly expanding developments in our times and for clear reasons. A visit to almost any modern high, middle, or elementary school in this country finds school cafeterias, hallways, and gymnasiums turned into giant advertising billboards for ...
The Consumer Culture of Poverty: Behavioral Research Findings and Their Implications in an Ethnographic Context
Mar 01, 2007; ... In an industrial society groups are stratified in terms of the material assets or resources they control, the benefits and privileges they receive from these resources, the cultural experiences they have accumulated from historical and existing economic and political arrangements, and the ...
Winning the War of Words: The "Front Group" Label in Contemporary Consumer Politics
Mar 01, 2007; ... When political interest groups contend for public support, both money and legitimacy are critical resources. Money is especially useful in disseminating ideas, while legitimacy aids their reception and acceptance. In political contests pitting private interest groups such as large corporations ...
Review of Two Documentary Films from The Cinema Guild: Buried in the Back Yard and Other People's Pictures
Mar 01, 2007; ... Two distinctive 2006 documentaries distributed by The Cinema Guild, Buried in the Back Yard (thirty minutes) and Other People's Pictures (fifty-three minutes) are both studies of apparently ordinary people pursuing strange obsessions. However, the two obsessions investigated here are wildly ...
9/11: The Culture of Commemoration
Mar 01, 2007; ... 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration David Simpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Professor Simpson's analysis of responses to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, calls into question the arguments that the world was changed and that nothing would ever be the same ....
Americanism and Americanization: A Critical History of Domestic and Global Influence
Mar 01, 2007; ... Americanism and Americanization: A Critical History of Domestic and Global Influence Mel van Eiteren. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. In this wide-ranging and deep-plunging analysis of America, Professor van Eiteren studies the yellow brick road to a nation that though sometimes rough ...
Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg
Mar 01, 2007; ... Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg Alice Goldfarb Marquis. Boston: MFA Publications, 2006. It is a tribute to the author's tenacity and tolerance that she managed to read all of Greenberg's letters and other documents in which he heaped scorn and vitriol on his family, his ...
Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child/Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment
Mar 01, 2007; ... Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child Nicholas Sammond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment Douglas Brode. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. The year 2005 marked the ...
By his Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis
Mar 01, 2007; ... By his Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis John D. W. Guice, Editor. Contributions by James J. Holmberg, John D. W. Guice, and Jay H. Buckley. Foreword by Elliott West. Introduction by Clay S. Jenkinson. Norman: University of Oklahama Press, 2006. Some historical ...
Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction
Mar 01, 2007; ... Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young, Editors. New York: Routledge, 2006. Ferris and Young's collection begins an important conversation about an explosively popular yet often critically dismissed genre. Most readers and moviegoers are familiar with the ...
Chorus and Community
Mar 01, 2007; ... Chorus and Community Karen Ahlquist, Editor. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. In our divided and fragmented world, the desired goal is "community," especially political, family, and social. No community is more easily achieved than that of music in general and the chorus in ...
Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life
Mar 01, 2007; ... Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life Andrew Perrin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. This book echoes Tom Paine's "These are the times that try men's souls," and in our age when democracy is under stress though the author diminishes its impact, its ...
Crime Wave: The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Crime Movies
Mar 01, 2007; ... Crime Wave: The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Crime Movies Howard Hughes. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Throughout the history of movies, audiences have been obsessed with tales of crime. As Howard Hughes notes in his preface to Crime Wave, "Many of the highest-grossing, most popular US ...
Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation
Mar 01, 2007; ... Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation Mitchell K. Hall. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. "Popular culture in the postwar United States underwent a revolutionary transformation," writes Mitchell K. Hall (1). It is an assertion with which few would argue ....
Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
Mar 01, 2007; ... Dependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Karen Sánchez-Eppler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. "This book is about dependency" (ix), begins Karen Sánchez-Eppler in her study of childhood in nineteenth-century America. Throughout her book, she ...
Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Anatebellum New Englanders
Mar 01, 2007; ... Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Anatebellum New Englanders Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 2006. We all know the importance of all forms of literature in pioneer and frontier America, how most people were literate and ...
Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America
Mar 01, 2007; ... Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America Thomas J. Ferraro. New York: New York University Press, 2005 Singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, who dubbed his mother "the Italian," once said, "Seriousness and joy, that's how I approach my work; that's what I learned from my mother" ...
Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, & Critics
Mar 01, 2007; ... Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, & Critics Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence, Editors. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Volume 14 in the Popular Culture & Everyday Life Series. With a new scholarly history of ''writer-director-producer'' ...
Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home
Mar 01, 2007; ... Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home Walter D. Kamphoefner & Wolfgang Helbich, Editors. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Our ever-growing literature about the Civil War is enriched by this volume of letters, ...
Herndon's Lincoln: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik
Mar 01, 2007; ... Herndon's Lincoln: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Editors. Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Interest in the life and political career and by association with his law partner William H. Herndon and the biography he proposed to ...
Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American
Mar 01, 2007; ... Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American Peter Decherney. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. In this study of the birth and growth of Hollywood's film industry Decherney gives a complete and interesting account of how the people in our society who know ...
Kids These Days: Facts and Fiction About Today's Youth
Mar 01, 2007; ... Kids These Days: Facts and Fiction About Today's Youth Karen Sternheimer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Karen Sternheimer's Kids These Days: Facts and Fiction About Today's Youth is a book long overdue. Sternheimer decided to write it while researching her first book, It's ...
Myth, Manners, & Memory
Mar 01, 2007; ... Myth, Manners, & Memory Charles Reagan Wilson. Volume 4 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. This new edition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is an improvement over the earlier edition because it has been ...
Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film
Mar 01, 2007; ... Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film Sarah Hentges. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 2006. One cannot fault Sarah Hentges for wanting to create a source for students of teen cinema that dealt specifically with the presentation of adolescent ...
Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America 1630-1965
Mar 01, 2007; ... Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America 1630-1965 Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, Editors. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2006. Courses in American Protestant religion have been as varied as the landscape and the history of the inhabitants ....
Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West
Mar 01, 2007; ... Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West Kay Botham and Sara M. Patterson, Editors. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. The mysteries and mystique of the American West are so deeply embedded in the American (world) psyche that they cannot fade. Perhaps ...
Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts
Mar 01, 2007; ... Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout, Editors. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Organizing fourteen essays into three sections, Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout, both theology scholars, seek to ...
Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America/A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America
Mar 01, 2007; ... Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: Studies in Religion and Politics. A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America Stephen ...
Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society 1874-1974/The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916
Mar 01, 2007; ... Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society 1874-1974 Michael J. Pfeifer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916 William D. Carrigan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. These two ...
Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table
Mar 01, 2007; ... Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender, and Class at the Dinner Table Sherrie A. Inness. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Sherrie A. Inness has emerged as a leading scholar in the areas of girls' culture and food culture. Her latest work, which explores the issues of race, gender, and class in ...
Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea/Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor
Mar 01, 2007; ... Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea Laura Hapke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor Daniel E. Bender. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Laura Hapke's book Sweatshop: ...
Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11
Mar 01, 2007; ... Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin, Editors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. This volume is a collection of twelve essays on the psychological, cultural, and political consequences of the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The ...
The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Michael Gray, Editor. New York: Continuum, 2006. A book about a mountain of a person must be a mountainous book. This encyclopedia about Bob Dylan is such a book. According to the editor, Dylan's "work has revolutionized song, reached into every area of popular ...
The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture Michael F. Robinson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. In many ways, America is the most obvious statement of human nature. This is especially true in the two manifestations of wanting to do things simply because ...
The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative Deborah Lutz. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Lutz's subject in this book is what most of us recognize and admit: "The project of this book is to gaze, steadily and attentively, at ...
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries Marilyn Johnson. New York: HarperCollins, 2006 "Why does someone start to read obituaries?" asks Marilyn Johnson in her introductory chapter of The Dead Beat. "She gets older; she knows more dead people ....
The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era Wilma King. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. The position and role of free black women during the slave era raise questions which, because of the obscure nature of the evidence, still largely elude those of us ...
The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball (Second Edition)
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball (Second Edition) David Nemec. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Baseball nuts, fans, and the general American public should all have access to this mountain of baseball information. And it is a ball park of ...
The Historical Dictionary of American Radio Soap Operas
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Historical Dictionary of American Radio Soap Operas Jim Cox. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005. James Thurber, in a frequently quoted definition, describes the soap opera as "a kind of sandwich, whose recipe is simple enough, although it took years to compound. Between thick slices of ...
"The Home Front" During World War II in Rural Alabama
Mar 01, 2007; ... "The Home Front" During World War II in Rural Alabama Howard L. Reeves. Vernon, AL: The Lamar Democrat, 2005. Increasingly, cultural enthusiasts and historians are searching through regional histories in order to enrich their knowledge of local histories and details. This account of a ...
The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War II
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War II David A. Hollinger, Editor. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Definitions of the humanities tend to list skills taught (critical thinking, self-understanding, communication, etc.) or the academic ...
The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids Alexandra Robbins. New York: Hyperion Books, 2006 According to Alexandra Robbins, America's relentless demand for ever-greater scholastic achievement has not only fostered widespread academic dishonesty but has also contributed to an ...
The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland William Barillas. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006. It is a commonplace belief that the Midwest has always had a strong claim on our attention because of the notion that it is the most ...
The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling and Fan Culture in the 1950s
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Revenge of Hatpin Mary: Women, Professional Wrestling and Fan Culture in the 1950s Chad Dell. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Upon seeing Chad Dell's book on wrestling in the 1950s, I immediately thought of my grandmother, an Italian immigrant living in Pittsburgh, who was a huge fan of ...
The Road
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Road Jack London. Introduction by Todd de Pastino, Editor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. The hobo holds a particular place in American mythology. He, or less often she, is free of bonds but a victim of class divisions, ready for adventure but riddled with ...
The Songs that Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Songs that Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945 John Bush Jones. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006. Those of us who are old enough to have lived during World War II will remember that the airwaves, society, and home scene were constantly filled with ...
The Sound of Stevie Wonder: His Words and Music
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Sound of Stevie Wonder: His Words and Music James E. Perone. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006. The rich music and storied life of Stevie Wonder, one of America's preeminent music artists, luminates each page of this installment in the Praeger Singer-Songwriter collection. The ...
The Spectacle of Death
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Spectacle of Death Kristin Boudreau. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006. This is a searching inquiry into the gulf that sometimes divides what is legal "justice" and its desired manifestation among the public. As the author says, "The permeable boundary between fact and fiction, ...
The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday H. Peter Steeves. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. For more than fifty years, significant doctrinal differences among American academic philosophers have turned on commitments either to the analytic or ...
The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Tom Paine
Mar 01, 2007; ... The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Tom Paine Paul Collins. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006. Today, many of us are amateur or professional genealogists, searching the records on the Internet for accounts of who our ancestors were, and therefore who we are. Some, in the ...
We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II
Mar 01, 2007; ... We'll Always Have the Movies: American Cinema During World War II Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Books on World War II-era films enter crowded territory. Consider the population: catalogs (Shull and Wilt's Hollywood War Films, ...
Why New Orleans Matters
Mar 01, 2007; ... Why New Orleans Matters Tom Piazza. New York: ReganBooks, 2005. Do you hear that sound, that low moan, distinct from the din of mourning for Katrina's dead and the utter physical destruction of vast expanses of property and land in Louisiana and Mississippi? More than a year after the ...
Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West
Mar 01, 2007; ... Wrangling Women: Humor and Gender in the American West Kristin M. McAndrews. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006. Most Americans-men, at least-still look upon the American West through the lenses of the cowboy movie, where men do the hard work, the hard fighting, the hard living, then ...
Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color
Mar 01, 2007; ... Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and about Women of Color Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Editor. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006. This deeply needed volume works under the assumption that we all should know, but sometimes fail to consider, that all writings of ...
Letter to the Editor
Mar 01, 2007; ... Ray B. Browne opens his rather sketchy review of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (The Journal of American Culture 27:4 [2004]: 437-38) charitably, but then turns the rest of his one-paragraph comments into what reads more like a retaliation for my reaction against the ...