A Companion to American Cultural History

by Halttunen, Karen

• ISBN13: 9780631235668
• ISBN10: 0631235663
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780470691090
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-26
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• More Book Details
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Summary

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.

Author Biography

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).

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Early America

Cultural Encounters: Americans and Europeans

Cultures of Colonial Settlement

British America in the Eighteenth Century

The Revolution and the Early Republic

The Nineteenth Century

Antebellum Cultural History

Religion and Reform

African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The Civil War in American Culture

The West

The Gilded Age

Immigration and Ethnic Culture

Cultural Watersheds in Fin de Si_cle America

The Twentieth Century

Consumer Culture and Mass Culture

Modernism

Politics and Culture in the 1930s and 1940s

The 1950s and 1960s

The Globalization of American Culture

Thematic and Methodological Approaches

Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History

Situating Visual Culture

Material Cultures

Performance and Display

Gender and Sexuality

Race and Ethnicity

Popular Culture

History and Memory

The Cultural Turn in Other Fields

Culturalist Approaches to Intellectual History

The Impact of the Culture Concept on Social History

Religious History and the Cultural Turn

Political History and the Tool of Culture

The Cultural History of Foreign Relations

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