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Article: Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.
- Article from:
- The Progressive
- Article date:
- January 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 The Progressive, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It is part of my job, as someone who teaches media studies, to keep up with the recent work on the history of popular entertainments and the rise of the mass media in America. This year, the task has been a real pleasure, and I want to recommend three truly wonderful books that are a delight to read, and compel us to rethink our cultural history.
Ann Douglas's tour de force, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar Straus Giroux), provides a pulsing, detailed, and vivid portrait of New York City's ascendance as cultural capital of America during this era, and explores how achieving this position depended absolutely on the tangled and troubled ...