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Article: Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- December 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Journal of Social History. 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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Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century. By Susan Smulyan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 202 pp.).
Professor Smulyan, a member of the American Civilization program at Brown University, explores four quite disparate yet highly intriguing case studies that span the 1930s to the 1960s in order to demonstrate that popular culture (contrary to her students' persistent perspective) attracts and involves more than "just escape" from reality. Instead, she insists that ideology underlies and conditions various forms of cultural performance, consumerism, the exportation (and exploitation) of American films abroad, and the changing character ...