A Furious Battleground: World War I and the Development of Jazz in American Popular Culture

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-184
Author(s):  
Lisa R. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Popular Culture

Personalities in the Crowd: The Idea of the “Masses” in American Popular Culture

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 225-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
World War ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Masses

“There are no masses,” Raymond Williams wisely reminds us, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This idea of the social crowd, usually organic and with a mind of its own, rarely is used self-referentially; “masses” always describes others. During and immediately following World War I, American intellectuals, especially social theorists, were preoccupied with this new model for society. Authoritarian regimes abroad, America's own wartime hysteria (fueled by new communications technologies), the insistent urban context, and a consumer-based economy all made discussion of crowd behavior and mass persuasion an obvious product of new circumstances. Newer fields of sociology, psychology, and behaviorism, promised the necessary tools for understanding these “phenomena.” Walter Lippmann'sPublic Opinion(1922) was but the most popular and enduring in a genre that drew upon earlier native and European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, E. A. Ross, Boris Sidis, and William Trotter. By 1925, the American library on the mass mind includedThe Behavior of Crowds(Everett Dean Martin),Social Psychology(Floyd Henry Allport), andIntroduction to the Science of Sociology(Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess). This new body of work distinguished “the concept of the mass, a dispersed and passive body of uprooted individuals, from the pre-World War I concept of the crowd, a physically united and active throng.” The bestremembered effect of these ideas, upon the likes of H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, and other leading critics, was a skepticism about democracy's survival in the face of such new knowledge. But the idea of the “masses” had another life, outside of more formal circles, among Americans who were not so quick to decry a “boobocracy,” or perhaps more important and long-lasting, in the rising industries of mass communication and popular culture.

Not a Lost Generation: James M. Cain, Al Dubin, and the Doughboy's Voice in Popular Culture between the Wars

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER M. STERBA
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Lost Generation ◽  
American Life ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Norman Rockwell ◽  
Double Indemnity

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including 42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-656
Author(s):  
Mustafa Aksakal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Curricula

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Popular Culture and Modern War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Abra
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
World War ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Total War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Forms

This bibliography includes histories that explore the manifold meanings and purposes that popular culture has possessed in wartime. Popular culture provides entertainment and escapism for soldiers and civilians, while also allowing them to imagine and give expression to their wartime identities, and social and political worlds. Militaries embrace song or sport to entertain, but also to train and condition their troops. On the home front, it is often on the movie screen or the dance floor, or at the concert hall or the baseball game, where critical issues about class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nation are reflected, experienced, and debated. Popular culture also serves as a potent means of official and unofficial propaganda, and can offer a means of resistance against authoritarianism or occupation, or a pathway toward recovery from war. The bibliography adopts a broad definition of “popular culture,” which eliminates socially and historically constructed distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures, to consider the wide range of leisure forms and performing arts that entertained and shaped the experience of individuals and societies in wartime. The focus is primarily on popular cultural forms that possess an interactive or technologically-driven relationship between producer and consumer, or performer and audience, and so the bibliography does not deal with literature or the visual arts, which each have their own disciplinary specialists and immense scholarly literatures. The bibliography is also only concerned with popular culture produced during the war or wars in question, rather than as part of the retrospective articulation of individual or collective memory. Temporally, it is focused on the era of total war and beyond, including World War I, World War II, the Cold War and decolonization, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Significantly, at almost precisely the same moment in the early 20th century, warfare and popular culture both evolved and modernized in critical ways. The First World War erupted just as the Jazz Age took hold; new technologies for cultural dissemination emerged, and the transnational commercial leisure industries surrounding music, film, dance, theater, sport and a range of other cultural forms expanded exponentially. Works in this bibliography are concerned with what followed, and the intertwined modernities of both war and popular culture.

The History of Reading in Australia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Buckridge
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
World War ◽  
Australian Society ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
History Of

A history of reading in Australia needs to go beyond the question of what Australians have read in the course of their history (though this question in itself is important) to tackle the more elusive question of how they have read. This question implies a recognition that reading is not a single, uniform activity but a congeries of “literate techniques” that are spread unevenly across the reading population at any given moment, and that are themselves subject to evolution and change as new cultural, political, and educational pressures exert their influence on how people read. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of reading practices are especially evident in the first half of the 20th century, particularly between World War I and World War II when reading itself came to be problematized as never before by the rise of advertising, cinema, popular culture, and political propaganda. It is important too to consider the ways in which reading as an institution in its own right, something above and beyond both the texts being read and the activity of reading them, has developed historically. Here the question is not so much what people have read, or how, but why. What values—positive and negative—have been attributed to reading, by whom, and in association with what social ideals, purposes, and anxieties? Also relevant here is the changing place of reading in Australian society more broadly. In particular, its changing relationship with writing as a valued component of Australian culture is of interest.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document