Reviews for Culture As History

The average rating for Culture As History based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-04 00:00:00 Joshua Humphrey America transitioned from a Puritan culture to a culture of abundance and conspicuous consumption. This transition reached its apotheosis in the 1920s–30s. New technologies (particularly mass communications), the creation of a bureaucratic state after the Civil War, the availability and mass production of new goods, photography that shaped public tastes, and advertising that glamorized consumption fueled this transition. Susman notes that an electrified world of consumers did not negate Americans’ interest in magic, the occult, fantasy stories, or play. Indeed, Progressives were interested in giving people outlets for self-expression, while many advocates of consumer culture thought they were ushering in a utopian world, although their capitalist methods diverged from the socialist utopias of the nineteenth and early twentieth century imagination. On a historiographic level, Susman pushes his reader to use words and language to tease out the dialectical tensions in American culture, and to engage with self-reflective dialogue with other historians. Lots of cool ideas and pithy quotes in here, but Susman's thematic structure and tangential writing style make it difficult to take away the major ideas of his chapters. This book gives you a method for studying culture and a few big claims, but the individual chapters are sometimes baffling.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-15 00:00:00 Cathy Mussert This book, which I read first as an undergrad and which then struck me as the snooziest of snoozers, has since become central to my work in American studies/cultural studies. The current version of the book is print-on-demand and looks it; the photographs suffer greatly, appearing to have been reproduced on a circa-1989 Xerox machine. It's also overpriced and rendered in a terrible typeface. That being said, the essays contained herein, which at this point probably warrant a new introduction from someone who knew something about the late (and mostly forgotten) Rutgers prof Susman, are pretty fantastic. His chapter on the inherent conservatism of reform, "re-form," always being "re-formed" is in keeping with the mostly neutral (in the context of Susman's consensus liberalism, that is) tone of the book (for material on conservativism and socialism, look elsewhere, to Wiebe or Kolko or Hofstadter or ???; the same goes for the essays on Puritanism and the progressive historians, stick to Hofstadter and Perry Miller). But then you get to these powerhouse pieces: the prosopography of Barton/Ford/Ruth, the People's Fair of '39, the essays on personality and on communications. He takes a bit of a long time to get to his main points (clearly this was never a man who wrote for a popular audience, even if he didn't have the same scorn for pop culture that, say, Adorno evidenced when he ripped into jazz music), but reasonably sharp undergrads will follow him to his big conclusions, which are actually surprisingly great and have aged very well. The problem with Susman, of course, is that he died before *doing* much of the work for which he had offered preliminary sketches, and so he is best known to us through this volume of essays, which is what it is and what it is happens to be a book that is, as noted earlier, available only in "print on demand" form. But hey, take a risk and assign it if you're teaching a US history survey or an upper-level cultural history course. They might dislike it as much as I once did, preferring Adorno and Benjamin (the latter holds up, while the former reveals himself as an elitist crabapple) because Euros are always better, and then it might change their lives.