The paradoxes of the American decadent movement in the 1890s and 1920s.

Scholars engage the ideas and legacy of Cary Nelson in conversations about the corporate university, teaching, poetry, and activism.

Essays explore the broad cultural impact of Oprah’s Book Club.

Essays explore a wide range of contemporary feminist mothering practices.

Collection of scholarly essays on the wildly popular Comedy Central show.

Interview-based study of contemporary African American feminist men.

Essays and poems explore the contemporary relevance of Emerson’s work and thought.

Explores the cultural significance of the metrosexual in sports.

Juxtaposes the meteoric rise of Barack Obama with far-reaching—and disturbing—shifts in black leadership in post–Civil Rights America.

Explores James’s concept of the individual in terms of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and religion.

Explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress.

A postmodern critique of sociology’s presuppositions.

Explores the Christian Right’s use of tailored rhetorics to advance multiple and varied antigay political projects.

Examines contemporary anxiety over the phenomenon of conspiracy theories.

Connects the American exceptionalist ethos to the violence in Vietnam and the Middle East.

Contributors explore the relationship between food and the production of ideology.

Explores the role of the literary protest essay in addressing social divisions in the United States.

Essays on phenomenological encounters with the world.

Critically examines the quiz show genre in American culture from the 1930s to the present.

Examines the forces that have shaped Italian American writing, from the novels of John Fante to the musings of Tony Soprano.

Details the reactions of men and women serving aboard a hospital transport ship during the American Civil War.

Examines the battle to develop the oil resources of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Investigates the changing relationship of humanities, culture, and interdisciplinarity and its impact on humanities disciplines, American culture studies, and undergraduate education.

Writings by twentieth-century imprisoned authors examining confinement, enslavement, and political organizing in prison.

Explores the role and function of the autopsy in Western culture, from Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lecture to The X-Files and CSI.

A historical romp through the fascinating subject of murder jurisprudence in the United States from the colonial period to the present, showing how changing social mores have influenced the application of murder law.

The first comprehensive survey of the work of the Uruguayan printmaker and graphic artist Rimer Cardillo, presented in both English and Spanish.

An analysis of how Oprah's Book Club has changed America's reading habits.

A history and social psychology of punk music.

Interviews with prominent filmmakers, actors, and others on the art, craft, and business of moviemaking.

An exploration of the voluntary simplicity movement including comments from simple livers and a look at class, race, and gender in this movement.

Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

Explores leadership and civic virtue in American culture.

Provides an overview of the past, present, and future of Italian American culture.

Explores changes in American attitudes toward Italy and Italians during a crucial period of U. S. immigration history.

Sees a way out of the contentious debates over the role of religion in American public life by looking back to the ideas of John Locke and the nation's Founders.

Explores the underlying assumptions of environmental studies and the need for a new paradigm for understanding our world.

Studies how women in a reservation economy have creatively responded to federal policy.

Demographers explore population diversity in the United States.

Using the example of the Eastern Algonkians, this book argues that Native Americans did not convert to Christianity, but rather made sense of Christianity in their own traditional ways and for their own social purposes.

A comprehensive look at a classic work of popular fiction and its hold on the American imagination.

Explores the cultural work of two important early-twentieth-century writers: the poet William Carlos Williams and the educator/philosopher John Dewey, both key figures in American democracy.

Uses Michael Jordan as a vehicle for viewing the broader social, economic, political, and technological concerns that frame contemporary culture.

Examines the transformations of Italian American ethnic identity in twentieth-century Philadelphia.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this fast-paced ride through the postmodern landscape of American popular culture explores how our responses to headline events and popular films help script the ways in which we imagine ourselves and the world around us.

An unusual, deft, often piercing meditation on storytelling, ethnicity, and the Italian/American experience.

Examines a wide variety of cultural and technological phenomena that have helped shape American popular culture over the last 150 years.

Focusing on the more than one million Jewish children and adolescents living in the United States, this book questions the future of the Jewish community's next generation.

Documents and describes the Menominee Indians' tribal practice of sustainable environmental development.

Presents a multi-layered social history of a soldier and his Italian American family during World War II.

Explores the contradiction between the Constitution's importance as a political document with its weakness as a symbol in American popular culture.

For almost a century, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Michael Ondaatje, and Ishmael Reed have expressed an affinity for jazz, hearing the music as a model for writing. Jarrett examines their work and the work of others who have brought jazz into languag

Provides a framework and an example for studying diverse cultures in a respectful manner, using the thematic focus of corn to examine the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) culture.

An edited transcript of the great Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce's last year-long course in metaphysics, given at Harvard in 1915-1916.

Presents Thomas Merton as the quintessential American outsider who defines himself in opposition to the world and then discovers a way back into dialogue with that world and compassion for it.

Drawing on the work of popular American writers, American philosophers, and Continental thinkers, this book provides a new interpretation of pragmatism and American philosophy.

Examines how both negative and positive stereotypes of the "Indian" have influenced the study of Native American religions.

Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

Analyzes American Indian education in the last century and compares the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.

This first book-length examination of the American reception of German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel explores the practical and strategic uses of Simmel's ideas.

Argues that the transformation of our world into a global society is causing a resurgence of tribalism at the same time that it is inspiring the ideology of political holism and global interdependence.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

Focuses on strategies for solving communication problems in presidential campaigns.

This book is about the way that popular film brings to a "sayable" level that which haunts us in the media headlines.

Little Big Men is a study of competitive bodybuilders on the West Coast that examines the subculture from the perspective of bodybuilders' everyday activities. It offers fascinating descriptions and insightful ...

This is the first descriptive analysis of how American Indian policies are made both at the statewide and at agency levels. Pertinent to all states, the study describes New York's historic policies and ...

To the Iroquois, "extending the rafters" meant adding onto the longhouse, both in the literal sense of making room for new families and in the figurative sense of adding adopted individuals or tribes ...

What forces transformed a community in which industrial workers and other citizens exercised a real measure of power over their lives into a metropolis whose inhabitants were utterly dependent on Big ...