by Paul J. Edwards<\/p>\n
Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America<\/i> by Patricia Vettel-Becker looks at the discourse surrounding photography from the 1930s to the early 1960s. She theorizes that as photography became an industry and an art, it also became a frontier for masculinity. Her goal is to show that photography and the discourse around critics and photographers created several postwar gender norms. Specifically, she examines how constructions of the lone male archetypes in the soldier, the cowboy, and the juvenile delinquent permeated into the idea of the male photographer. Throughout the book, Vettel-Becker creates a history based on expanding photography beyond a consumer product to an art form created within the male sphere. She also looks at the larger scope of commercial photography and photojournalism. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by George Walter Born<\/p>\n Art historian Barbara Novak boldly brings her field into a fruitful dialogue with intellectual history in Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875<\/i>.\u00a0 Pushing back against formalist strictures that had long governed art historical discourse, Novak originally published the book in 1980; since then, it has become a foundational work on the topic.\u00a0 With an interest in the history of ideas and in \u201ccultural art history,\u201dshe seeks \u201ca more \u2018ecumenical\u2019 art history\u201d (xxvi) that engages a broader range of concerns than previously. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by Emma Newcombe<\/p>\n In the introduction to her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,<\/i> New York University Language and Literature professor Mary Louise Pratt defines the term \u201ccontact zone\u201d as an \u201cencounter,\u201d a place of \u201cco-presence, interaction, and interlocking understandings and practices\u201d between an imperial nation and a colony. This idea of the contact zone as a space of colonial contention and interaction resonates throughout Susan Scott Parish\u2019s book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World<\/i>. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by Catherine Martin<\/p>\n When it is taught in schools, gay history is largely presented through the \u201cBig Bang\u201d model of social change.\u00a0 Like Rosa Parks, the men and women who resisted arrest at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village are seen as a beleaguered minority driven to the breaking point by repeated injustice.\u00a0 The ensuing explosion expanded across the country and generated the force behind the fight for civil rights.\u00a0 However, just as Parks\u2019 story was more complicated than a single woman\u2019s decision to not give up her seat on a bus, the Stonewall Riots were merely the most visible in a string of events that led, and are still leading, to increased civil rights for homosexual men and women.\u00a0 In The Lavender Scare<\/i>, David K. Johnson draws attention to one of the quieter battles in the war over equal rights \u2013 the 1975 end of the 25 year ban on homosexual employees in the federal government. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by Sam Palfreyman<\/p>\n In Martha A. Sandweiss\u2019 Print the Legend: Photography and the American West<\/i>, the author introduces her book as \u201ca story about photography and the American West, a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century.\u201d[1]<\/a> In her introduction, Sandweiss clarifies that her book is not a comprehensive history of photography in the West, but rather, she narrows her scope of interest to an exploration of public photographs\u2014those used for exhibition, publication, or sale\u2014from the mid-1840s to the early 1890s that portray the West and shaped popular thinking about this mythical region of the North American continent. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by Gretchen Pineo<\/p>\n \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t have to be that way!\u201d That is the refrain in Thomas Hubka\u2019s Houses Without Names<\/i> (University of Tennessee Press, 2013), challenging the status quo of how and why we look at housing the way we do. The long awaited second volume in the Vernacular Architecture Studies series, edited by Thomas Carter and Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, this volume picks up where Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley left off in Invitation to Vernacular Architecture <\/i>(University of Tennessee Press, 2005), challenging readers to apply the basic skills presented in IVA<\/i> to a vast and poorly understood group of buildings \u2013 the common house. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n by Catherine Martin<\/p>\n Just as the study of popular culture has only gained serious traction in the academy relatively recently, the study of working-class groups \u2013 especially women \u2013 has only begun to be addressed in the last few decades.\u00a0 In part, this has been a problem of sources.\u00a0 Unlike their middle-class counterparts, working-class men and women left few records of their reactions to and impressions of their experiences with urban industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n By Paul J. Edwards<\/p>\n Leo Marx\u2019s The Machine in the Garden<\/i> presents a literary history of leading American intellectuals wrestling with the dual nature of the advancing industrial age and the perceived abundance of the American landscape. His purpose \u201cis to describe and evaluate the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience.\u201d[1]<\/a> To this end, Marx looks to the origin of this ideal in the prose of Virgil to F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, his interest in exploring this ideal follows a select few examples. Early in his introduction he makes the Americanist goal clear: although the focus relies strictly on literature, the concern remains on the culture that creates this ideal. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n By Mary Potorti<\/p>\n The burgeoning field of Black Power studies has produced a wealth of innovative and sophisticated treatments of the activists, organizations, and ideas that emerged in the late-1960s offering new and radical visions of racial equality and social justice in the United States.\u00a0 Much research about Black Power has sought to understand the influence of its driving personalities, to examine specific tactics or ideals of leading organizations, or to elucidate national shifts through studies of social and racial developments in specific locales. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n By George Walter Born<\/p>\n In the context of the present de-centered conception of American Studies, one might logically ask how a scholar might still use a myth-and-symbol approach responsibly to analyze insightfully certain iconic and persistent American themes.\u00a0 Stephen Prothero, professor of religion at Boston University, in tackling no less a subject than Americans\u2019 conception of Jesus, goes a long way toward answering this question in his American Jesus<\/i>, which sparkles with wit, insight, and humor. Continued<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shooting From the Hip Book Review by Paul J. Edwards Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America by Patricia Vettel-Becker looks at the discourse surrounding photography from the 1930s to the early 1960s. She theorizes that as photography became an industry and an art, it also became a frontier for masculinity. Her goal … Continue reading Book Reviews<\/span> Nature and Culture Book Review<\/h2>\n
American Curiosity Book Review<\/h2>\n
Recovering the Smaller Battles: Overturning the Federal Government\u2019s Ban on Homosexual Employees<\/h2>\n
Print the Legend Book Review<\/h2>\n
Houses Without Names Book Review<\/h2>\n
Fumbling Toward Equality: Working-Class Women and the Commercialization of Leisure: Cheap Amusements Book Review<\/h2>\n
The Pastoral Ideal: The Machine in the Garden Book Review<\/h2>\n
An Anti-Empire State of Mind: Black Against Empire Book Review<\/h2>\n
A Quest for the Cultural Jesus<\/h2>\n