A Companion to American Cultural History

"The thirty bibliographies of the most influential work in American cultural history would by themselves make the book very helpful to a wide audience. But the essays′ historiographical and thematic overviews provide the most valuable contribution, for each essay is aimed squarely at the ways that the best works in the field have been in conversation with each other." ( A Journal of Southern History, February 2010) "A monumental achievement. The breadth of coverage is staggering, and the depth of insight a credit to its multifarious authors. Rarely can one book offer so much." ( Reviews in History , April 2009) "This excellent reader in US cultural history for undergraduates may also be useful to specialists as a general overview of the field as it has evolved, especially over the past four decades. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries." ( CHOICE , March 2009) "A guide for scholars and students who are interested in developments over the past quarter–century … No reader should come away from it without a good springboard to further study. It is an appetite–whetter, a conspectus and a guide." ( Reference Reviews , January 2009) In the past few decades, the field of American cultural history has emerged as a central area of interest for American historians. The field now embraces a holistic concept of "culture" as the entire range of practices, representations, languages, and beliefs that make up a particular society’s way of life. A Companion to American Cultural History offers a historiographic overview of the scholarship, with special attention to the major studies and debates that have shaped the field, and an assessment of where it is currently headed. Primarily intended for cultural historians and students, the book will also appeal to all readers interested in the significant impact the burgeoning field of cultural history has made on American history scholarship.

Notes on Contributors viii Introduction xi Karen Halttunen Part I Early America 1 1. Cultural Encounters: Americans and Europeans 3 Peter C. Mancall 2. Cultures of Colonial Settlement 17 Carla Gardina Pestana 3. British America in the Eighteenth Century 32 Karin Wulf 4. The Revolution and the Early Republic 46 Catherine E. Kelly Part II The Nineteenth Century 63 5. Antebellum Cultural History 65 James W. Cook 6. Religion and Reform 79 Lewis Perry 7. Black Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 95 Demetrius L. Eudell 8. The Civil War in American Culture 110 Alice Fahs 9. The West 125 Ann Fabian 10. The Gilded Age 139 Scott A. Sandage 11. Immigration and Ethnic Culture 154 Hasia R. Diner 12. Cultural Watersheds in Fin de Siècle America 166 Janet M. Davis Part III The Twentieth Century 181 13. Consumer Culture and Mass Culture 183 Charles F. McGovern 14. Modernism 198 Joel Dinerstein 15. Politics and Culture in the 1930s and 1940s 214 Julia L. Foulkes 16. The 1950s and 1960s 230 Daniel Belgrad 17. The Globalization of American Culture 246 Petra Goedde Part IV Thematic and Methodological Approaches 263 18. Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History 265 George Lipsitz 19. Situating Visual Culture 279 Sally M. Promey 20. Material Cultures 295 J. Ritchie Garrison 21. Performance and Display 311 M. Alison Kibler 22. Gender and Sexuality 327 Jane H. Hunter 23. Race and Ethnicity 341 Eric Avila 24. Popular Culture 356 Nan Enstad 25. History and Memory 371 David Glassberg Part V The Cultural Turn in Other Fields 381 26. Culturalist Approaches to Intellectual History 383 Casey Nelson Blake 27. The Impact of the Culture Concept on Social History 396 Lawrence B. Glickman 28. Religious History and the Cultural Turn 406 Leigh E. Schmidt 29. Political History and the Tool of Culture 416 Joanne B. Freeman 30. The Cultural History of Foreign Relations 425 Andrew J. Rotter Index 437

Karen Halttunen is Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and former president of the American Studies Association. She is the author of Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle–Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (1986) and Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (2000).

"The thirty bibliographies of the most influential work in American cultural history would by themselves make the book very helpful to a wide audience. But the essays′ historiographical and thematic overviews provide the most valuable contribution, for each essay is aimed squarely at the ways that the best works in the field have been in conversation with each other." ( A Journal of Southern History, February 2010) "A monumental achievement. The breadth of coverage is staggering, and the depth of insight a credit to its multifarious authors. Rarely can one book offer so much." ( Reviews in History , April 2009) “This excellent reader in US cultural history for undergraduates may also be useful to specialists as a general overview of the field as it has evolved, especially over the past four decades. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.” ( CHOICE , March 2009) "A guide for scholars and students who are interested in developments over the past quarter–century … No reader should come away from it without a good springboard to further study. It is an appetite–whetter, a conspectus and a guide." ( Reference Reviews , January 2009)