Volumes in the series explore the intersection of the history of expressive culture and the history of ideas in modern America. The series aims to challenge scholars in American studies and cultural studies to consider the ideas that have informed and given form to artistic expression—whether in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature. The series also expands the domain of intellectual history by examining how artistic works, and aesthetic experience more generally, participate in the discussion of truth, value, civic purpose, and personal meaning. The series is closed to new submissions.
In Becoming Jane Jacobs, an intellectual biography of the great urbanist, Peter L. Laurence asserts that The Death and Life of Great American Cities was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities.
In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.
Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era
Jeffrey Trask
Price: $34.95
ISBN: 9780812222852
Pub Date: October 2013
Format: Paperback
312 Pages
Things American examines the relationship between American museums and cultural democracy in the first part of the twentieth century by looking at the role museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the institutions it inspired played in Progressive Era social and cultural reform.
"Takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles."—John Szwed, author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis
The Sociable City chronicles how, as the city's physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms to explore and advocate for the social configurations made possible by urban living.
Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World
Daniel Horowitz
Price: $69.95
ISBN: 9780812243956
Pub Date: April 2012
Format: Hardcover
504 Pages
Between 1950 and 1972, American and European writers came to envision consumer culture in fresh, provocative ways. Across national boundaries, they shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.
California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century
Richard Cándida Smith
Price: $32.00
ISBN: 9780812222210
Pub Date: December 2012
Format: Paperback
264 Pages
Exploring the transformation of California into a center for contemporary art through the twentieth century, this book dramatically illustrates the paths California artists took toward a more diverse and inclusive culture.
Late Modernism remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture.
In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.
Examining the work of well-known American artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Frederic Remington, and Mary Cassatt, Charles Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the reception of art and the development of modern ways of seeing it.
