Product Description: National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies, 2017.The 'Jewish mother' figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis, artists, poets, and activists across time and place...read more

Product Description: Why do humans hold onto traditions? Many pundits predicted that modernization and the rise of a mass culture would displace traditions, especially in America, but cultural practices still bear out the importance of rituals and customs in the development of identity, heritage, and community...read more

Product Description: Modernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations with other Jews and non-Jews - a dynamic complicated by how non-Jews position the boundaries around what and who they define as Jewish...read more

Product Description: From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. Simon J. Bronner takes a long, engaging look at American campus life and how it is shaped by students and at the same time shapes the values of all who pass through it...read more

Product Description: Often overlooked as routine or even dismissed as odd customs, ritual in its many guises demands attention as a central strategy for embodying experience. Like other groups, Jews rely on ritual to provide an inventory of social meanings and a context for negotiating the challenges of everyday life...read more

Product Description: For much of the 20th century, the name Steelton represented a great industrial complex that stretched nearly four miles along the Susquehanna River near the state's capital of Harrisburg. Immigrants from all over Europe, particularly Slavs and Italians, worked with African Americans from the South at the Bethlehem Steel Company and gave Steelton its reputation for ethnic diversity, second only to its fame for industrial productivity...read more

Product Description: The Jewish Cultural Studies series offers a contemporary view of Jewish culture around the globe. Multidisciplinary, multi-focused, and eclectic, it covers the cultural practices of secular Jews as well as of religious Jews of all persuasions,Ëœand from historical as well as contemporary perspectives...read more

Product Description: The essays of Alan Dundes virtually created the meaning of folklore as an American academic discipline. Yet many of them went quickly out of print after their initial publication in far-flung journals. Brought together for the first time in this volume compiled and edited by Simon Bronner,  the selection surveys Dundes's major ideas and emphases, and is introduced by Bronner with a thorough analysis of Dundes's long career, his interpretations, and his inestimable contribution to folklore studies...read more

Product Description: For centuries, new sailors from European and North American countries have been subjected to an elaborate hazing at sea called “crossing the line.” Typically initiated upon a crossing of the equator, the beatings, dunkings, sexual play, and drinking displays that constitute crossing the line have in recent decades been banned by some fleets— but they have also been the subject of staunch defenses and fond reminiscences...read more

Offers approximately 270 essays on topics in American folklife as diverse as chain letters, the Internet, Little Havana, fans of heavy metal music, Wiccans, and zydeco.

Product Description: Take this test. You think today’s sensitive, caring man is: (a) a myth, (b) an oxymoron, or (c) a moron. No matter whether you laugh at this bit of folk humor, its wide circulation bespeaks a modern predicament for American men...read more

This lively reader traces the search for American tradition and national identity through folklore and folklife from the 19th century to the present. Through an engaging set of essays, Folk Nation shows how American thinkers and leaders have used folklore to express the meaning of their country. Simon Bronner has carefully selected statements by public intellectuals and popular writers as well as by scholars, all chosen for their readability and significance as provocative texts during their time. The common thread running throughout is the value of folklore in expressing or denying an American national tradition. This text raises timely issues about the character of American culture and the direction of American society. The essays show the development of views of American nationalism, multiculturalism, and commercialism. Provocative topics include debates over the relationship between popular culture and folk culture, the uniqueness of an American literature and arts based on folk sources, the fabrication of folk heroes such as Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan as propaganda for patriotism and nationalism, the romanticizations of vernacular culture by popularizers such as Walt Disney and Ben Botkin, the use of folklore for ethnocentric purposes, and the political deployment of folklore by conservatives as emblems of 'traditional values' and civil virtues and by liberals as emblems of multiculturalism and tolerance of alternative lifestyles. The book also traces the controversy over who conveyed the myth of 'America.' Was it the nation's poets and artists, its academics, its politicians and leaders, its communities and local educational institutions, its theme parks and festivals, its movie moguls and entertainers? Folk Nation shows how the process of defining the American mystique through folklore was at the core of debates among writers and thinkers about the value of Davey Crockett, John Henry, quilts, cowboys, and immigrants as symbols of America.

Product Description: The American essays of renowned writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) artistically chronicle the robust urban life of Cincinnati and New Orleans. Hearn is one of the few chroniclers of urban American life in the nineteenth century, and much of this material has not been widely available since the 1950s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Following Tradition is an expansive examination of the history of tradition—"one of the most common as well as most contested terms in English language usage"—in Americans' thinking and discourse about culture. Tradition in use becomes problematic because of "its multiple meanings and its conceptual softness...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Few regions have had as energetic and influential a promoter as Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958), who devoted his life's work to preserving Pennsylvania's cultural and natural heritage. His memory lives on in the legends he helped promote, such as that of the Indian princess 'Nita-Nee,' for whom Central Pennsylvania's Nittany Mountain is supposedly named...read more

Product Description: Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life

Product Description: Book by Bronner, Simon

Product Description: Book by Bronner, Simon

Product Description: Book by Vlach, John Michael

Describes college customs, beliefs, jargon, traditions, legends, jokes, pranks, and games