Books in the The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America series

"Takes us back to that moment between the fifties and the sixties when a new music called free jazz took root in the coffeehouses and nightclubs of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles."-John Szwed, author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis

In this broadly conceived study Steven Conn examines the development of American museums across the twentieth century with a historian's attention and a critic's eye. He focuses on an array of museum types and asks illuminating questions about the relationship between museums and American cultural life.

Between 1950 and 1972, American and European writers came to envision consumer culture in fresh, provocative ways. Across national boundaries, they shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.

The Sociable City chronicles how, as the city's physical and social landscapes evolved over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban intellectuals developed new vocabularies, narratives, and representational forms to explore and advocate for the social configurations made possible by urban living.

Written by some of the most respected and accomplished scholars working in their fields, this volume illuminates the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the historical intersection of the arts, public culture, and the state in modern America.

Between 1850 and 1880, thousands of women moved to New York City to study art and pursue careers as painters, designers, illustrators, and engravers. This book reconnects their accomplishments to the city's conspicuously democratic art institutions, its burgeoning illustrated press, and the prevailing aesthetic ideal known as the Unity of Art.

An intriguing look at the changing roles of artists in modern America.

Exploring the transformation of California into a center for contemporary art through the twentieth century, this book dramatically illustrates the paths California artists took toward a more diverse and inclusive culture.

Things American examines the relationship between American museums and cultural democracy in the first part of the twentieth century by looking at the role museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the institutions it inspired played in Progressive Era social and cultural reform.

In Improvised Continent, Richard Candida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.

Late Modernism remaps the landscape of American modernism in the early decades of the Cold War, tracing the combative debate among artists, writers, and intellectuals over the nature of the aesthetic form in an age of mass politics and mass culture.