Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America

This book is a collection of essays dealing with the ways in which specific popular entertainment media, mass consumer products, and popular movements affect politics and political culture in the United States. It seeks to present a range of possibilities that reflect the dimensions of the current debate and practice in the field. Some of the contributions to this volume place popular culture media such as films, music, and books in a broad social context, and several articles deal with the historical roots of twentieth-century American popular culture. Popular culture is treated as categorically neither good nor bad, in either political or aesthetic terms. Instead, the essays reflect the editors' convictions that popular culture is simply too important to be ignored by those academics who treat politics and its history seriously. The collection also shows that studying popular or mass culture in a historical way illuminates a variety of possible relationships between popular culture and politics.

About the author

Ronald Edsforth is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan. Larry Bennettt directs the Urban Studies Program and is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at DePaul University. He is the author of Fragments of Cities: The New American Downtowns and Neighborhoods and co-author of Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline.

Product details

• Assisted by: Larry Bennett (Editor), Ronald Edsforth (Editor)
• Publisher: Global Academic Publishing
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.11.1991
• EAN: 9780791407653
• ISBN: 978-0-7914-0765-3
• No. of pages: 222
• Weight: 481 g
• Series: SUNY Series in Contemporary Co; SUNY Series in Contemporary Co; Suny Popular Culture and Polit
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; Politik und Staat, POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, Archaeology / Anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social