Introductory description

The Formation of American Culture explores the history of the United States (1876-1929) through the rise of the culture industries, including the production, censorship, and consumption of literature, theater, music, film, radio, television, sport, fashion, and advertising -- and the ways in which individuals have sought to resist or reformulate dominant national discourses through cultural production.

Topics include women's literature, the early history of baseball, the creation of the Western, the emergence of working-class culture in dime novels and vaudeville, blackface and the erasure of African American history, Hollywood's attitudes toward working women in the 1920s, modernism, and the rise of middlebrow culture.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: The Feminization of American Culture
Week 2: Virginians and Dudes: Selling the West
Week 3: Reading Topic: Making Baseball White
Week 4: Vaudeville and Theatrical Culture
Week 5: Immigrants and Tramps
Week 6: Reading week
Week 7: The New Woman
Week 8: Silent Hollywood
Week 9: The Dark Side of Modernism
Week 10: Passing: Race and the Middlebrow

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the formation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship related to the history and theory of culture.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

• Carl Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (1935)
• Nina Baym, Women's Fiction (1978/1993)
• Suzanne Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas (2003)
• Lisa Botschon and Meredith Goldsmith, eds., Middlebrow Moderns (2003)
• Cynthia and Sara Brideson, Ziegfeld and His Follies (2015)
• Paula Marantz Cohen, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth (2001)
• William F. Cody, The Life of Buffalo Bill (1994)
• Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins (1970)
• Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1995)
• Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper (1995)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• David Forgacs, A Gramsci Reader (1988)
• David Goldberg, Discontented America (1999)
• Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)
• Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life (2007)
• M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (2009)
• W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance... (2000)
• Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (1929)
• Eric Lott, Love and Theft, Blackface Milstrelsy and the American Working Class (rev. 2013)
• Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (1986)
• April Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy (2008)
• Jean Matthews, The Rise of the New Woman (2003)
• Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Modernism, Nativism, Pluralism (1995)
• Krystyn Moon, Yellowface (2005)
• Fred Pasley, Al Capone: Biography of a Self-Made Man (1930)
• Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986)
• Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Imigrants and the American Melting Pot (1996)
• Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992)
• Robert Rydell, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World (2010)
• Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (1928)
• Robert Sklar, Movie Made America (1975)
• Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment (1985)
• Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (1992)
• Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982)
• Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (1989)
• Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill's America (2005)
• G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (1989)
• Harold Wilson, McClure's Magazine and the Muckrakers (1970)
• Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.