Product Description: A highly regarded scholar in the fields of American cultural history and print culture, Joan Shelley Rubin is best known for her writings on the values, assumptions, and anxieties that have shaped American life, as reflected in both high culture and the experiences of ordinary people...read more

Product Description: The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest examples of the American writer's search for a "usable past." In this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture -- the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary...read more

Product Description: Simultaneously the memoir of a famed composer, conductor, and music educator, and an important historical sourcebook on the American musical scene during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the autobiography of Gunther Schuller chronicles the first thirty-five years of this multifaceted and expansive figure's life and work...read more

Product Description: Listen to a short interview with Joan Shelley RubinHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & CraneIn the years between 1880 and 1950, Americans recited poetry at family gatherings, school assemblies, church services, camp outings, and civic affairs...read more

Examines the growth of book clubs, reading groups, and new forms of book reviewing in the first half of the twentieth century to chronicle the rise of middlebrow culture (view table of contents)