Books in the Studies in American Popular History and Culture series

This study examines the relationship between cinema and physical culture, including activities such as dieting and muscle-building. Hollywood's long-standing prominence on the world stage makes it an ideal place to begin such an examination.

Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyses criticism of the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City.

Noting that the variation between the playwrights can be as great as between men and women, and acknowledging that her subjects are limited to a narrow class and race population, Detsi-Diamanti the cultural and historical specificity of women playwrights of the period and the interrelationship between their dramatic efforts and the formation of an American national and literary identity. Her major themes are metaphors of freedom, industrial capitalism, and gender perspective and ideology.

This book studies the representations of working-class women in canonical and popular American fiction between 1820 and 1870.

This work examines how libraries could respond to their communities need through the use of numerous primary and secondary sources during World War II in America.

This book examines the evolution of Progressive-era girls' peer groups, their representation in popular girls' fiction, and the influence of these upon young women's lives during the years leading up to the Second World War.

Reconciles two conflicting schools of thought within the historiography of American Puritanism. This book contends that under the threat of social and intellectual chaos on the frontiers of America, there emerged a core Puritan mission that was either embraced or spurned by New England's founders, but widely understood by all.

Separating popular fiction into "lowbrow" and "middlebrow," Wood (U. of Wisconsin, River Falls) argues that lowbrow, like highbrow, evolves from folkloric tradition and contains messages about how to find a satisfying niche in the social order. Middlebrow, on the other hand, evolves from myth tradi

Examines Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's radically egalitarian practice through her involvement in the abolitionist movement, emancipation, Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era, placing her work firmly in black-nationalist lineages. This book contributes to the contemporary portrayal of Harper as a theorist of African-American feminism.