Studies in American Popular History and Culture
Early American Women Dramatists, 1780-1860
1st Edition
By Zoe Desti-Demanti
August 14, 2015
First published in 1999. Although contemporary feminist criticism has mainly focused upon American women playwrights of the twentieth century-women, there is evidence that a feminist tradition rooted deep in the nationalistic and democratic impulses of the American nation existed more than a ...
Piety and Power: Gender and Religious Culture in the American Colonies, 1630-1700
1st Edition
By Leslie Lindenauer
August 12, 2015
Piety and Power explores gender and religion in the seventeenth century in three American colonies with a dominant religious traditions. The book examines not only the domestic and devotional aspects of women's lives, but also the more public roles that women engaged in as arbiters of community ...
The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century American Fiction
1st Edition
By Amal Amireh
August 12, 2015
This book studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870. These representations have been invisible in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies due to the general view that antebellum writers did not engage with ...
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State
1st Edition
By Michael Stancliff
April 23, 2015
A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and ...
Hollywood and the Rise of Physical Culture
1st Edition
By Heather Addison
April 23, 2015
This book examines the relationship between cinema and physical culture i.e. activities such as dieting and muscle-building. It presents a case study of Hollywood's impact on the American reducing craze of the 1920s as the basis for speculating interrelationship of Hollywood and physical culture....
Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919-1923
1st Edition
By Todd J. Pfannestiel
April 23, 2015
Using New York as a lens, this book examines the Red Scare that griped America between 1919-1923 and the pattern it established for future episodes of political repression. It also presents the first in-depth study of the Soviet Bureau, the unofficial Bolshevik embassy that attempted to establish ...
The Lyrics of Civility: Biblical Images & Popular Music Lyrics in American Culture
1st Edition
By Kenneth Bielen
February 05, 2015
This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of religious images in popular music. Examining bestsellers from 1906 to 1971, the work explores the role religious images have in the secularization of American culture. Popular music lyrics that express an adherence to a sacred order are ...
Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin and Roseanne
1st Edition
By Suzanne Lavin
September 11, 2014
This work examines the dramatic changes in America women's comedy performance in the years 1955-1995.The study focuses on the standup of Phyllis Diller and Roseanne andon the character comedy of Lily Tomlin. As the historical arc of women's comedy unfolds, it outlines a change from the traditional ...
Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
1st Edition
By Jaime Osterman Alves
December 11, 2013
Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, this book examines fictional works and historical documents featuring descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. Alves argues ...
Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama
1st Edition
By Megan Sanborn Jones
December 11, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer...
Antebellum Slave Narratives: Cultural and Political Expressions of Africa
1st Edition
By Jermaine O. Archer
October 14, 2013
Though America experienced an increase in a native-born population and an emerging African-American identity throughout the nineteenth century, African culture did not necessarily dissipate with each passing decade. Archer examines the slave narratives of four key members of the abolitionist ...
Agents of Wrath, Sowers of Discord: Authority and Dissent in Puritan Massachusetts, 1630-1655
1st Edition
By Timothy L. Wood
May 01, 2013
This book explores the authorities of Puritan Massachusetts balanced concern for the stability of the colony and the integrity of its Puritan mission with the hopes of reconciling dissidents back into the colonial community....