A Companion to American Cultural History

Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction xi
Karen Halttunen

Part I Early America 1

1. Cultural Encounters: Americans and Europeans 3
Peter C. Mancall

2. Cultures of Colonial Settlement 17
Carla Gardina Pestana

3. British America in the Eighteenth Century 32
Karin Wulf

4. The Revolution and the Early Republic 46
Catherine E. Kelly

Part II The Nineteenth Century 63

5. Antebellum Cultural History 65
James W. Cook

6. Religion and Reform 79
Lewis Perry

7. Black Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 95
Demetrius L. Eudell

8. The Civil War in American Culture 110
Alice Fahs

9. The West 125
Ann Fabian

10. The Gilded Age 139
Scott A. Sandage

11. Immigration and Ethnic Culture 154
Hasia R. Diner

12. Cultural Watersheds in Fin de Siècle America 166
Janet M. Davis

Part III The Twentieth Century 181

13. Consumer Culture and Mass Culture 183
Charles F. McGovern

14. Modernism 198
Joel Dinerstein

15. Politics and Culture in the 1930s and 1940s 214
Julia L. Foulkes

16. The 1950s and 1960s 230
Daniel Belgrad

17. The Globalization of American Culture 246
Petra Goedde

Part IV Thematic and Methodological Approaches 263

18. Cultural Theory, Dialogue, and American Cultural History 265
George Lipsitz

19. Situating Visual Culture 279
Sally M. Promey

20. Material Cultures 295
J. Ritchie Garrison

21. Performance and Display 311
M. Alison Kibler

22. Gender and Sexuality 327
Jane H. Hunter

23. Race and Ethnicity 341
Eric Avila

24. Popular Culture 356
Nan Enstad

25. History and Memory 371
David Glassberg

Part V The Cultural Turn in Other Fields 381

26. Culturalist Approaches to Intellectual History 383
Casey Nelson Blake

27. The Impact of the Culture Concept on Social History 396
Lawrence B. Glickman

28. Religious History and the Cultural Turn 406
Leigh E. Schmidt

29. Political History and the Tool of Culture 416
Joanne B. Freeman

30. The Cultural History of Foreign Relations 425
Andrew J. Rotter

Index 437

"The thirty bibliographies of the most influential work in
American cultural history would by themselves make the book very
helpful to a wide audience. But the essays' historiographical and
thematic overviews provide the most valuable contribution, for each
essay is aimed squarely at the ways that the best works in the
field have been in conversation with each other." (A Journal of
Southern History, February 2010)

"A monumental achievement. The breadth of coverage is
staggering, and the depth of insight a credit to its multifarious
authors. Rarely can one book offer so much." (Reviews in
History, April 2009)

"This excellent reader in US cultural history for
undergraduates may also be useful to specialists as a general
overview of the field as it has evolved, especially over the past
four decades. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All
levels/libraries." (CHOICE, March 2009)

"A guide for scholars and students who are interested in
developments over the past quarter-century ... No reader should
come away from it without a good springboard to further study. It
is an appetite-whetter, a conspectus and a guide." (Reference
Reviews, January 2009)

"The contributors to this indispensable volume have applied to
scholarship in American cultural history the same keen imagination
and appreciation for complexity that has made the field so exciting
in recent years."

-Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester

"This important collection of original essays provides a most
useful and accessible survey of a new approach to United States
history. It is not just a companion but a text in its own right, a
new survey of the American past from many cultural
perspectives."

-Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University

"This volume marks a major contribution to the field of American
cultural history. Illuminating, accessible, and authoritative, it
will indeed prove a trusty companion for students and

scholars alike."

-John Kasson, The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill

"This well-wrought collection is a must-read. Its essays do more
than any other book to clarify the multiple meanings of cultural
history and to document the thorough penetration of cultural
approaches to all the sub-fields of American historical
scholarship."

-Richard W. Fox, University of Southern California

"A comprehensive and timely overview of American cultural
history, from its first pioneering examples to its most recent
linguistic, visual, transnational, and performative turns. Students
looking for a lucid and lively introduction to the themes, methods,
and impact of the culturalist perspective on US history will find
this volume indispensable."

-Jean-Christophe Agnew, Yale University

"This collection is a marvel of intelligent synthesis and
concise interpretation. Karen Halttunen has assembled some of the
best cultural historians in the United States and they have cast
unprecedented light on their contentious field from a rich variety
of chronological and conceptual perspectives. The result is an
indispensable scholarly resource."

-Jackson Lears, Rutgers University

Karen Halttunen is Professor of History and American
Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and
former president of the American Studies Association. She is the
author of Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of
Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1986) and
Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic
Imagination (2000).

K. Halttunen, University of Southern California