Product Description: Within their approach to trace the routes of music and music's impact on identity formation the editors take the popularity of American music more or less for granted. Most genres addressed in this study have emerged within the multiethnic US or the Americas on a larger scale, most have traversed through the Americas and, in different adaptations, through different parts of the world...read more

Product Description: Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation...read more

Product Description: The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture—civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors—to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking...read more

Looks at the development of a split between serious and popular culture in America and discusses drama, opera, orchestral music, art, and literature

Product Description: The Divided Mind examines the debate between innovation and tradition in American culture of the early years of the twentieth century. Peter Conn discusses literature, painting, music, architecture and politics, using illustrations of the artwork, buildings and popular graphics of the period...read more

Product Description: This book is an analysis of the movement's functions and activities. It presents the history of the movement as it has been captured and recorded by the first generation of people who have been involved. Second edition with a new Introduction...read more