The Politics and Pedagogy of Popular Culture in Contemporary Textbooks

Abstract

What is the place of popular culture in United States history textbooks? Inside these unified chronologies about the public exercise of political, military, and economic power, is there room for the ways that ordinary people make meaning for themselves in their everyday activities? Scholarly study of popular culture is not an exercise in comic relief from the more serious study of public power, but rather a process of discerning how power relations writ large throughout society manifest themselves in common experiences. Consequently, popular culture can present important opportunities for examining the lives of people who rarely appear directly in accounts of politics, economics, and war, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, the people who do not leave their private papers to historical museums, who do not write memoirs, and who rarely if ever see their names in the newspaper. In the past decade the study of popular culture has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in United States social history. Blending an anthropological sensitivity to the uses and effects of culture with traditional historical concerns about change over time, innovative scholars have found answers to important historical questions in seemingly insignificant sites and practices, ranging from the dime novel to the dance hall, from pageants to parades, from museums to the movies, from the blues to the beer parlor.1