6. The world wide web of American culture

If the sixties radicalized the content of American culture, the nineties revolutionized its form. The digital revolution began in California and enveloped the entire world, creating unprecedented opportunities for instantaneous communication and self-expression. “The world wide web of American culture” first describes the impact on American culture of 1970s counterculture; the music genres of disco, pop, and hip hop; the AIDS crisis; and the excesses of 1980s culture. It then explains how the rise of the Internet fostered a new plurality in American society. American culture continues to unite diverse and disparate segments of the population, even as it remains a battleground, fraught with the very tensions and conflicts that define the nation’s history and identity.

5. The suburbanization of American culture

After World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s dominant superpower, inaugurating a golden age of prosperity and abundance. Depression and war were over, affording time to enjoy the comforts of domestic normalcy. Yet the cultural record of that moment belied the cause for optimism. “The suburbanization of American culture” describes how postwar American culture registered a new set of spatial and racial tensions and codified a new suburban way of life. It considers Hollywood’s film noir genre; the soaring popularity of television in the 1950s; the development of shopping malls and theme parks; the increasing automobile culture; the rise of pop art and rock and roll; and the American youth radicalized by the Vietnam War.

1. American culture in red, white, and black

“American culture in red, white, and black” explains how diverse Americans planted the seeds of a new national culture during the colonial period, one that took shape through the contributions of people from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Even as rival colonial powers usurped Indian land, and as Anglo-Americans expanded the institution of slavery in the South, a homegrown American culture took shape that reflected a synthesis of European, African, and indigenous influences. Women also made distinct contributions to this new culture, even as they found limits to their independence and free expression. The growing print culture in colonial America, which saw the publication of newspapers, provided a vital network of communication.

4. The new mass culture, 1900–1945

A profound shift was underway in American culture at the turn of the twentieth century—a shift away from the Victorian ideals of the industrial era and toward a new set of values structured by a corporatizing economy. “The new mass culture, 1900–1945” describes how as an overflow of manufactured goods spilled outward from industrial centers, a new consumer ethic, pushed by a burgeoning advertising industry, exhorted men and women to indulge their growing spending power and leisure time. The early twentieth century witnessed the birth of a new mass culture, based on the new technologies of sight and sound. Cinema, advertising, and radio dominated this new cultural landscape.

2. Mass culture and mass politics, 1800–1860

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the framers of the Constitution confronted the task of forging a new national identity. “Mass culture and mass politics, 1800–1860” describes a surging phase of modernization in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War, fueled by new technologies of communication and transportation. It outlines the burgeoning working class and a new middle class born of a market revolution and abstract economic forces. The impact of the developing theater arts, the influence of African Americans on the regionally distinct Southern culture, and the discovery of western lands and peoples that inspired new forms of cultural expression during the antebellum period are also described.

Introduction: The stories of American history and why they matter

The book opens in explaining that this very short introduction to American cultural history emphasizes culture as a driving force in American history. Cultural history is the history of stories, their origins, transmission, and significance in time. However, no work of cultural history can disentangle the cultural from political, economic, and social processes of change. The relationship between culture and identity needs to be understood along with the spatial context of cultural production and its physical location within distinct geographies. American culture has been the sum of diverse global influences, from almost every part of the world, but it has not contained itself within national boundaries.

3. The age of the city, 1860–1900

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Americans united in an impulse to commemorate the lives lost and to coordinate that effort with new campaigns for civic beautification. “The age of the city, 1860–1900” describes how the new titans of industry, such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, sponsored the erection of new monuments and statues and endowed lavish facilities for parks, cemeteries, railroad stations, universities, museums, office buildings, and hotels. Yet this monumental display of sumptuous wealth hid new depths of poverty and squalor, as well as new heights of social unrest. In this tumultuous environment, a new set of cultural experiences and institutions provided a semblance of order against a backdrop of conflict and chaos.