An unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of '50s rock and roll, from the biggest stars,
like Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, to those who barely grabbed the spotlight.

An “all-you-can-eat” tour of American life in the postwar period, told through the foods we loved.

Tells the story of New York's playing grounds, teams, and ballparks of yesteryear.

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai’i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

A deeply personal study of post-9/11 film that exposes how genre can frame the shifting meanings of the War on Terror and its impact on American law and culture.

Examines the ways in which post-apocalyptic films express white racial anxiety.

Offers a wider approach to Italian American culture, one that stresses both its material, urban components and the creativity of its formal literary codes.

Unique empirically grounded analysis of how audiences negotiate sexism and feminism across media, from popular television shows to dating apps.

A celebration of Anishinaabe intellectual tradition.

Uses comedy skits, from Monty Python to Key and Peele, to probe how humor works.

Participant-observation-based studies that explore a range of Sufi movements operating across the contemporary American religious landscape.

Analyzes six films as allegories of capitalism’s precarious state in the early twenty-first century.

Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation’s poetry and its culture.

Investigates the cultural value of film violence.

Explores how white supremacist groups use popular music and culture to teach hate and promote violence.

Examines how postfeminism and postracialism intersect to perpetuate systemic injustice in the United States.

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American.

Explores how the USHMM and other museums and memorials both displace and disturb the memories that they are trying to commemorate.

Uses both historical and contemporary case studies to examine how race and ethnicity affect the places we live, work, and visit. .

Updated version of an engaging overview of the television situation comedy.

Offers a critical history of the role of pain, suffering, and compassion in democratic culture.

Explores the curating of “difficult knowledge” through the exhibition of lynching photographs in contemporary museums.

Traces the route, history, and geography of US 20, America’s longest road.

Argues that homophobia will not be eradicated in the United States until religion is ended.

Traces the historical dimensions of Native North American drama using a critical perspective.

Offers nearly forty years of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Hudson River Valley’s role in the American Revolution.

A fascinating look at the lives, culture, and religious and ritual observance of three generations of Iranian Jewish women in the United States.

Brilliant study of the effects of colonialism on the physical, mental, and spiritual health of Native Hawaiians, and their efforts to decolonize through healing and remembering.

Offers important new perspectives on the African Diaspora in North America.

Geographical perspectives on the changing patterns of race and ethnicity in the United States.

An interdisciplinary look Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA), the first historically Black sorority.

Provides an alternative history of nutrition in the U.S. that focuses on the power of scientific language.

Fascinating stories of ordinary people in the Middle Colonies who remained loyal to the Crown.

Explores John Quincy Adams’s oratorical work in support of government-funded science.

Philosophical exploration of Jamaica Kincaid’s entire literary oeuvre.

Examines the liberating power of speech and its influence on generations of Italian American writers.

Explores the arrested development of American culture.

Examines the relationship of civic discourse to built environments through a case study of the Cabrini Green urban revitalization project in Chicago.

Looks at the connections between Thoreau’s Walden and the work that influenced it, the Bhagavad-Gita.

Argues that Herman Melville’s later work anticipates the resurgence of an American exceptionalist ethos underpinning the U. S.-led global “war on terror. ”

Presents the perspectives of contemporary college students on their lives and educations.

Tells the story of Poughkeepsie’s transformation from small city to urban region.

Compelling stories and striking photographs illustrate the challenges and highlights of Latino/a life in Portland, Maine.

Pinpoints the limits of many current globalization theories in challenging racial oppression, and argues instead for local and situated strategies for resisting racism and imperialism.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Demographers explore population diversity in the United States.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Focuses on strategies for solving communication problems in presidential campaigns.