The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture

How American entertainment teaches about changing technologies, attitudes about identity, marginalization and resistance, and socio-cultural politics.

American popular culture wields tremendous power as a cultural force both domestically and abroad but is rarely studied for this purpose. Today, when students' beliefs and values are more highly molded through commercial entertainment than at any historical time, analysis of this process is fundamental to a humanities education.The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a comprehensive treatment of American popular culture. It is organized around the major time frames for defining American history, as well as genres of popular culture and, pivotally, around historical instances where American popular culture has been a key transformative agent shaping American history, values, and society. This ambitious book by a team of scholarly experts from across the humanities offers unique historical breadth and depth of knowledge about the ongoing power of commercial entertainment. The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture is a fresh, original and authoritative treatment of the aesthetics, producers and artists involved in American popular culture, a phenomena that exerts tremendous cultural power both domestically and internationally.