73: John Kasson's Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man

In Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, John Kasson argues that "manliness" is always under construction, but manliness at the turn of the century was particularly so.  In response to the emergence of corporate capitalism, the changing nature of work, urbanization, and the New Woman, three men, Eugen Sandow, Houdini, and Tarzan, helped create something called the "Revitalized Man."  A "model of wholeness and strength," Revitalized Man transcended the social and political upheaval of the period and united people across classes and genders to celebrate common ideals of masculinity.

Kasson's is not the first history of manliness at the turn of the century; his choice of a strongman, an escape artist, and a fictional character as subjects intentionally shifts the focus off of Teddy Roosevelt and politics and into an emergent mass spectacle culture.  And because studies of mass culture at this time usually focus on representations of the female body, his choice to study male bodies is disruptive as well.  In different ways, all three figures show how "modernity was understood in terms of the body and how the white male body became a powerful symbol by which to dramatize modernity's impact and how to resist it."  They also show how masculinity at this time was closely related to ideas (and anxieties) about racial and sexual dominance.

42: David Hall's Worlds of Wonder

Like John Butler and Bob Abzug, David Hall sets out to decenter Parry Miller's Puritan-focused history of religion in early America.  In Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Vernacular Religion in Seventeenth Century New England, Hall argues that far from an institutional orthodoxy, religion in the New World was a fluid process in which formal Christianity and popular religious beliefs informed one another.  Unlike in the Old World, multiple belief systems didn't exist side by side; they intermingled - to the point where clergy incorporated wonder and miracles and regular people worried about sin and repentance.

Unlike Butler, Hall relies not just on formal church records but on any source that will give him information about the religious lives of ordinary people; he thus reads official manuscripts alongside popular broadsheets, ballads, chapbooks, and devotional books, all of which would have been accessible to regular people.  Hall's is not the first book to extend the "new social history" to religion (that honor belongs to Keith Thomas' 1971 study of witchcraft in Europe), but it IS the first to use this method for religion in the New World.  It also does a good job of situating American religion in its broader transatlantic context, rather than trying to keep it separate as something uniquely American. AND it contributes to the history of reading in America by expanding the definition of "literature" to include popular publications.

While it would be nice not to have to infer what people were thinking based on the few popular written sources we have left from them, and while it would be even nicer if this book didn't extrapolate from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to speak for all of New England, Hall does bring in new, interesting sources, like the Wonder Books and Samuel Sewell's journals, and I, for one, am entertained by the idea of Puritan ministers incorporating the language of witchcraft into their sermons in hopes of reaching more of the people.

32: Philip Deloria's Playing Indian

In Playing Indian, Philip Deloria investigates Americans' long history of dressing up and acting like Indians, and he discovers that Americans use Indian play to work through who they are as individuals and as a nation.  This argument - that pretending to be something you're not helps you figure out who you are - is not terribly innovative, but in Deloria's hands, playing Indian connects particular kinds of representation with particular politics.  Thus, playing Indian is not just about representing "American ideas about Indians;" it's about putting ideas about Native Americans at the center of what it means to be American, even as Native Americans themselves are quarantined and hidden from white view.

To make this rather complex argument, Deloria traces the American game of playing Indian from the Boston Tea Party and other Revolutionary War incidents through 19th century societies, early 20th century Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls, post-WWII Indian hobbyists, and "new-age pseudo-Indian spirituality."  In each of these instances, he shows how Americans played Indian to define themselves: Tea Partiers (the first ones) wanted to imagine themselves as part of the continent's ancient history and to separate themselves from England; 19th century secret societies wanted to show that they possessed secret, authentic, uber-patriotic knowledge; Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls embraced Indian play as an escape from modern consumer society and a return to the primitive and the authentic; Cold War hobbyists sought out real Indian objects and people in the hopes of becoming Indian; new-age multiculturalism turns Indians into fashion statements and distracts cultural attention from the poverty of the Rez.

Because this is a history of American images of Indians and not of Indians themselves, the book focuses on the development of these American institutions and identities more than on the plight of the tribes as they were relocated and forced into reservations, though the real-world history of Native Americans underpins his argument that Indian play does serious cultural and political work.  In doing so, he places himself not just within the literature on relationships between Indians and American culture, but also in a growing body of literature on whiteness and othering.  Like Roedgier and other whiteness scholars, he draws on a wide variety of cultural sources to show how the other is key to the construction of the self; by viewing Indians through the lens of American Indian play, he also shows how incorporation by a dominant culture always constructs and shapes an oppressed one, politically as well as culturally.

30: Kathy Peiss' Hope in a Jar

Some books on feminism and women's culture make me really psyched to be a lady.  Some make me feel like a grumpy old stick in the mud, grousing about too-short skirts and a lack of self-respect among the younger generation.  Unfortunately, Hope in a Jar belongs in the latter category.

I'm not trying to say that it's an unnecessary or uninteresting book - it's quite the opposite, actually.  Hope in a Jar is a history of the American cosmetics industry "from the bottom up," and Peiss takes pains to show how women and minorities actively participated in and shaped beauty culture and the cosmetics industry that grew out of it.  It's the first book to take this industry seriously by looking at it from this perspective; even better, Peiss is an American Studies scholar, so she does that thing where she tells you a lot about both her little slice of life and about its impact on American culture as a whole.  Accordingly, Elizabeth Arden, Madame C.J. Walker and Mary Kay, among others, are portrayed as both intimately connected to the all-female networks, grassroots marketing strategies, and white-focused beauty standards developed in Americas beauty culture and savvy businesswomen who brought fresh ideas into American business culture.  Therefore, after WWI, when the beauty business mushroomed (along with the rest of the economy) into a male-operated, mass-media behemoth, it was instrumental in bringing both female consumers and female businesswomen into the mass market, thus empowering women in the interwar economy.

Women were also empowered in those interwar years by the application of makeup itself.  Rather than succumb to sedate mass-market beauty prescriptions, women followed the lead of their favorite actresses and painted up; bobbed hair, short skirts, and rouged lips and cheeks defied authority and emphasized women's sex appeal.  How better to celebrate their new status as equals in the marketplace than by asserting their physical presence and personal autonomy?

Right.  Here's where my inner grump comes in: even if makeup can be seen as liberatory (which, hey, in the 1920s it probably was), it still focuses the attention on a woman's body, on appearances, on sexuality.  At the risk of sounding like a generation-late Andrea Dworkin or a watered-down Maureen Dowd, women are always already seen as sexualized bodies, so emphasizing those bodies isn't particularly subversive.  And anyway, the slide back from subversive subject to sexualized object is just too easy when both take the female body as their reference point.

But I digress.  That kind of feminism definitely had its place, and Peiss' book is good at exploring its empowering intersections with mainstream beauty culture.

29: Joy Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West

Buffalo Bill's Wild West is one of those cool pop culture books that simultaneously teaches you a ton about a cultural product and about the culture that produced it.  In this case, the product is the ever-evolving, politically-topical, travelling western variety show hosted by "Buffalo Bill" Cody around the turn of the last century; the culture that produced it is turn-of-the-century America, a world as uneasy about the conflict and exploitation in its past as it was about the growth of industrial capitalism in its midst.  Arguing that Buffalo Bill himself was among the first modern American celebrities, Kasson shows how his Wild West shows knit together celebrity, American history, and cultural memory into a new narrative of American national identity.

Kasson uses a lot of interdisciplinary hoopla to achieve her goal, but basically, her argument goes like this.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was enormously popular starting in the 1890s, and its producers constantly tweaked it to incorporate both audience feedback and topical stories, so we can safely consider it embedded enough in turn-of-the-century American culture to have both affected and reflected the mood of the times.  Further, the show presented itself as both authentic history and spectacle, and Buffalo Bill himself was both a real person and a widely-publicized invented celebrity.  By walking a very hazy line between fact and fiction, the show started an enduring link between American history and popular culture, where history becomes a spectacle created by the people for their own edutainment.  Conflicts, wars, even struggles with Native Americans get whitewashed; in the name of pleasure, even the bloodiest battle scenes end with Indians - yes, real Indians! - and Anglos reconciled to the applause of the audience at the end of the show.

And finally, from history as edutainment, it's but a few short steps to national identity as edutainment: to paraphrase my friend Jessica, we like the lies we tell ourselves; if we tell them enough, eventually we come to believe them.

I like this book because it is readable, but also because it still rings true today.  Have you been to Disneyland?  Seen Lincoln?

26: Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

Reviews of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man seem to follow roughly the same format: a brief overview of McLuhan's life that characterizes him as a wacky, provincial English professor-turned-overnight-celebrity; a few vague references to his most famous dictums; and an extension of his work to today's media, with an insistence that despite the passage of time, McLuhan's work is still surprisingly fresh and new and relevant. 

Be that as it may (hey, I'm all for finding relevance, even if I don't have the need to call someone a prophet), McLuhan's language is as obtuse as it is lovely, which makes for hard slogging.  Since one of the things he's known for is his tendency to write in aphorisms, I think the easiest way to summarize him here is to write out the three that gave me the most trouble, plus a fourth that gives me faith in humanity.

"the medium is the message"

This is the phrase McLuhan is probably most famous for.  Because it is so short, it's also a hard one to wrap my head around, and McLuhan wasn't much for giving careful explanations. The "is" doesn't help, either, because it implies that the two things are equal - which is confusing because it implies a tautology.  The way that this makes sense to me is to think about the relationship between social media and communication forms: a tweet or a Facebook status update or a Tumblr post is radically different from a blog post both in length and content; with less space and a greater emphasis on visuals, whatever information you're trying to convey in these smaller, more networked formats gets compressed, transformed, digested.  It's less medium = message and more medium --> message.  And the most successful messages are those that are well-tailored to by synergistic with their medium.

"the content of any medium is always another medium"

Ok.  Thanks, McLuhan, for defining a word with itself.  He goes on to explain, however, in his chapter on radio, that "[t]he content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel.  So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming."  In a way, media are like a hall of mirrors or like Baudrillard's simulacra, copies of copies of copies; or maybe, in a more subversive vein, like Judith Butler's processes of translation.  They are telescoping, reflecting and repeating one another like a big, coordinated multimedia ad campaign.  And because of the time-space compression of newer media (see the blog-to-Twitter progression), older media are kept alive, at least for a time, within newer media: books within e-books within blogs and so on.

 "the bad news sells the good news"

Ever wonder why the news is always bad?  It's because bad news draws the viewer in to gawk or recoil in horror at the spectacle, so that the good news - the advertisements that show you what you can buy to make the horror go away - can catch you at a vulnerable moment.  Thus, when McLuhan was writing, anyway, commercials and programming were combined into one big program, so that program flowed into ad flowed back into program.  The interesting thing is that because a series of commercials is really a set of fragmented, disconnected texts, programmers rely on viewers' brains to fill in the gaps and connect the fragments into a larger coherent narrative.  Luckily, our brains are trained - ideologically, repetitively - to look for common threads, and to see nothing strange about a seamless integration of real life news, entertainment, and injunctions to consume.

Although "the medium is the message" seems to argue that content follows form, the telescoping nature of media seems to ensure that we stay on a technologically-mediated level playing field of reflected images, and the media themselves seem capable of sheer manipulation, I don't think that McLuhan was necessarily a technological determinist.  I say this because of his discussion of bicycles:

"It was no accident that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in some ways like bicycles.  The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being."

Technologies may condition the way humans communicate, but human beings are still very much a part of the technological system; technological change is still "organic evolution" because technologies are "extensions of our physical being" and therefore humans, not technologies, control the direction and rate and quality of technological change.  To folks who fear that the culture industry is going to take over the world and we'll wake up one day and find ourselves in the middle of Idiocracy, McLuhan argues that humans have the power to stop that kind of development from happening.  Which, if you think about it, was a necessary, albeit old school, message for Cold War America, presented in an interestingly old-fashioned print media-turned-celebrity package.

2: James Shortridge's The Middle West

Shortridge is a geographer with a fascination for cultural history, and the whole point of this book is to figure out where, exactly, the Midwest is, and what it means in American culture. The basic argument is that the Midwest and the popular conception of it have changed over time, but that the Midwest - particularly in its rural, yeoman farmer incarnation - is inextricably linked to American identity as a whole, so changes in the Midwest reflect changes in American culture more generally.  It's not exactly the most controversial of books (unless, I guess, you live in Michigan and have strong ties to your identity as a Midwesterner?) but it does use a pretty innovative combination of sources and methods.  Also, I don't know what the average computer was capable of in the late 1970s/ early 1980s, but he does an impressive amount of data crunching from handwritten sources and generates some cool maps as a result.

While he does do some surprisingly interesting stuff with old magazines, journals, and novels, the parts I like most about this book (surprise, surprise) are the maps.

One of the things he argues is that the image of the Midwest as a rural, prosperous, agricultural place has been so important in American culture that the physical location of the Midwest in the popular imagination has migrated as a result.  The cool thing is that he has the data to prove it.

Here, he reproduces a map created by a gentlemen who, in 1958, asked 450 postmasters whether their community was in the Midwest or not.

 Sorry for my crappy Hipstamatic photography, but the black dots in the shaded region are postmasters who said they were in the Midwest, and the open circles are postmasters who said they were not in the Midwest.  In 1958, the epicenter of the Midwest was in Chicago, and the Midwest itself mostly still covered the traditional 12 Midwestern states: Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois. Also, he doesn't talk about this, but the postmasters look like they're along rail (or maybe water?) lines radiating out from Chicago, which might have something to do with the configuration of the region both physically and in their imaginations.

Fast forward to 1980.  Shortridge is ok with using pop lit to gauge past attitudes, but I think he thinks that where the present is concerned, there's no sense in mucking around with cultural productions when you can just ask people what they think.  So he does.  In 1980, he has friends in 32 states survey more than 2,000 undergrads on their opinions of the Midwest.  He asks his respondents to do two things: first, to write down all the traits they consider to be quintessentially Midwestern; and second, to circle the Midwest on a map.

In response to the first question, students from both inside and outside the traditional 12 Midwestern states all write pretty much the same thing: Midwesterners are hardy, honest, friendly, hardworking farmers who live in flat places with cold winters and hot summers.  In response to the second, they draw a wide variety of maps, but when he puts all of their responses together, the composite map looks like this:

Apparently, sometime between 1958 and 1980, the Midwest migrated down from the heavily industrialized Great Lakes to one of the last bastions of prosperous agriculture in the states - Kansas and Nebraska.  Shortridge theorizes that this movement shows just how badly Americans need the Midwest to be a rural heartland - rather than update our popular conception of the pastoral Midwest to include the industrialization in, say, Chicago and Detroit, we would rather just move it down to rural Kansas and pretend Chicago and Detroit don't exist.

This is all very strange, and very contingent on Americans being a coherent unit undivided by pesky things like race, gender, and class.  It does, however, have a certain resonance with Michael Pollen's "supermarket pastoral," and with the nostalgia embedded in things like the current farm-to-market movement.  Who knows - maybe American culture, or at least part of it, does still need to believe we come from a nation of yeoman farmers.