CultureAmerica

The first book to examine the depictions of Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. Looks at the popular films, TV shows, radio programs, and magazine coverage that re-imagined the Catholic role in American culture.

An examination of the figure who continues to expose key fault lines in the nation's self-definition. Draws on references ranging from All in the Family to All the President’s Men to show how Nixon has remained one of America’s most durable and multifaceted icons in the fierce debates over the import and meaning of the last sixty years of national life.

West of Harlem relocates the “New Negro” to the new landscape of the borderlands West, examining the work of writers like Arna Bontemps, Anita Scott Coleman, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer and shows that debates over cultural nationalism and uplift long considered central to New Negro politics and culture were even more complicated, and that fantasies of the West as both a deracinated frontier and a hybrid borderlands are undermined by black western experience.

How do contemporary neo-Confederates simultaneously cling to the symbols and narratives that tether the Confederacy to histories of racism and oppression in the United States while distancing themselves from these histories.

Curating America's Painful Past is an in-depth investigation of how America's past is currently remembered at the national museums in Washington, DC. Tim Gruenewald reveals how the tragic past is either minimized or framed in a way that does not threaten dominant national ideologies.

The history of Hopi runners and their national and international (Olympic) success and the Hopi running philosophy that empowers them, by a member of the Hopi community.

Magic Bean traces the paths by which the soybean—as a crop, food, and idea—made its way into American farming, bodies, and culture over the course of the twentieth century. Along the way, it shows that its coming was by no means predictable,even as its consequences have been important.

A cultural history of pesticide use in the United States, explaining why Americans embraced these chemicals from World War II to the present day.

The history of America’s move away from renewable energy to fossil fuels and the cultural and ecological changes and consequences.

Through his career, politics, and films, Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Kramer significantly shaped American culture during the Cold War.