Jackson Lears Research Articles

What the Market Will Allow: High Culture and the Bottom Line

The search for a framework of literacy that can accommodate a broader sense of what it means be literate in American mass culture, recalls not only such imports as Huxley's, Horkheimer's, Adorno's, Ortega y Gasset's, and T. S. Eliot's elitist worries of 1930s that high culture was in jeopardy; that decade also saw great numbers of American advanced intellectuals as Philip Rahv called them (41), from all across political spectrum, struggling with problem that a twenty-nine-year-old Van Wyck Brooks had described as early as 1915. How could America reconcile division between what Brooks called (he actually coined terms) and create a cultural middle ground where the poetry of life should serve, in harnessing thought and action together, [to turn] life into a adventure (15)? For Brooks in 1915, such a disinterested adventure involved an individual expressing the better intuitions and of his age and place (18). This meant a close and well understood relationship between individual and some visible or invisible host about him, since mind is a flower that has an organic connection with soil from which it (18). By 1930s, as country reeled from cataclysmic war economic and technological boom deep depression, relationship between mind and soil from which it springs was not only infinitely more complex than even a thinker of Brooks's magnitude could fairly comprehend in 1915, but split between mind and world, along with various classes of society, seemed problematic at best, and perhaps unbridgeable at worst. For Brooks, solving political division between highbrow and lowbrow depended in large part on where highbrow intended position itself along a continuum of a number of key philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural issues: But certainly no true social revolution will ever be possible in America till a race of artists, profound and sincere, has brought us face face with our own experience and set working in that experience leaven of highest culture. For it is that give their validity revolutions, and take form only in souls. But has there ever been a time when masses of men have conceived these without leaders formulate them and press them home? (158-59) Himself a 1907 graduate of Harvard, such a position might be seen as coming naturally Brooks; but, as later thinkers were discover-from Frankfurt School of 1930s New York Intellectuals of 1950s New Left of 1960s-the American ethos does not take very kindly pronouncements of cultural mandarins. What Brooks described as an America of unconscious life, swept by ground-swells of half-conscious emotion and as a welter of life which has not been worked into an organism, into which values and standards of humane economy have not been introduced (78), could also be viewed as an America, at least by 1920s, so thoroughly steeped in guiding belief of consumer choice, that cultural strictures from above were likely be met-as they are today-with that deepest of fruitful American values, to each his own. In fact, as Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears point out (1983), it was very exalted desires of exalted souls for a life of greater intensity and personal fulfillment that helped create therapeutic megastate that Henry Adams, Thorstein Veblen, and others foresaw with horror at turn of century. With emergence of a commercial broadcasting system (recently explored with great skill by Robert McChesney), greater mobility, and a greater percentage of individuals working in salaried jobs and professions, individual pursuit of pleasure and fulfillment assumed hegemonic proportions in Gramscian sense of term. It mattered little whether such private pursuits involved high culture or nickelodeons, since underlying cultural principles had shifted from sacrifice, externality, and transcendence, comfort, self-absorption, and social adjustment. …

Leigh Culver. Review of "Sargent: The Late Landscapes" by Hilliard Goldfarb, Erica E. Hirshler, and T. J. Jackson Lears and "Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1909-1920" by Barbara J. MacAdam.

Leigh Culver. Review of "Sargent: The Late Landscapes" by Hilliard Goldfarb, Erica E. Hirshler, and T. J. Jackson Lears and "Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1909-1920" by Barbara J. MacAdam.

Leigh Culver. Review of "Sargent: The Late Landscapes" by Hilliard Goldfarb, Erica E. Hirshler, and T. J. Jackson Lears and "Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1909-1920" by Barbara J. MacAdam.

Leigh Culver. Review of "Sargent: The Late Landscapes" by Hilliard Goldfarb, Erica E. Hirshler, and T. J. Jackson Lears and "Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1909-1920" by Barbara J. MacAdam.

Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History

Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History. Edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 350. Illustrations. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.) Perhaps half the essays in this volume cover subjects that fall squarely under the rubric of the republic, even by the recently expanded definitions of SHEAR and this journal. Readers should not restrict themselves to those articles in this rich collection simply because the others stand outside the boundaries of specialized concern. Indeed, the clear implication of both authors and editors is that few significant problems in American history fit neatly into the chronological slots created for undergraduate courses or requested in job advertisements. To categorize them by particular subdisciplines-labor history, history of reform-is to miss the intricacy of their arguments and place them back in pigeonholes they try to escape. The best of these pieces provide fresh approaches for thinking about longstanding and difficult historical problems on several levels. Deviance, for example, has been a popular theme first in the 1960s among scholars seeking historical roots for contemporary social upheavals and later by those influenced by the works of Michel Foucault. Karen Halttunen's latest installment in her exploration of popular antebellum narrative forms and ideas about social discipline and Tamara Thornton's adroit consideration of left-handedness illuminate this idea as it is enacted and expressed in everyday life, articulated through prescriptive literature and other forms of popular publication. Anne C. Rose's thoughtful treatment of interfaith marriage sheds new perspective on identity by rejecting any deterministic assumptions about how a particular social or religious location would force her subjects into a particular line of action or thought. Although they cross chronological time barriers, several of the pieces stand in lively conversation with each other. Jonathan Glickstein's analysis of the meaning of hard work in the early republic enriches and is enriched by William Forbath's focus on the New Deal and issues of equality. Christine Stansell's account of the sexual avant-garde in the early twentieth century is, in some respects, the next chapter in Halttunen's discussion of the Gothic mystery genre and social expose. Stansell traces a change in social legitimation, religious and institutional to social and psychological, (283) that she discusses in the context of opinions about sex. Jackson Lears notes in his loosely organized (and occasionally confusing) essay What if History Was a Gambler? that anti-gambling thought had moved from the grounds of morality to pathology. These same transformations in social thought are explored in several of these works. Anne C. Loveland addresses this theme directly in her account of the use by military chaplains during the Vietnam era of secular methods drawn from a therapeutic culture (which several of these authors have discussed in other work). Notions of nationalism, group identity, and belonging are addressed in varied registers in useful and interesting contributions by Edward Ayers on the historiography and recent uses of the Civil War, Lewis Perry on the relationship of black abolitionists to ideas of civil disobedience, Amy Dru Stanley on the gender implications of possessive individualism, and Jonathan Sarna on the evolution of Jewish prayers for the United States government. …

Advertising Business, Advertising Culture

Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 287 and illustrations. Pamela Walker Laird. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University- Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 479 and illustrations. Roland Marchand. Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery m American Big Business. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 461. Considering the centrality of advertising to modern life, historians have barely scratched its surface. Perhaps the sheer volume of evidence and restricted access to private records have been deterrents, but the intersection of business and cultural history may also be awkward. The former looks for 'hard' data about organizational structures, technological processes, and capital investment; the latter sifts opaque 'texts' for ambiguities and contra- dictions. As the traditional compartmentalization of knowledge breaks down, it is not surprising advertising history is attracting more interest, although practitioners often have pronounced leanings toward one side of the juncture. In Pamela Laird's Advertising Progress, the business history component is much more central and satisfying. She begins with a simple question: why did the iconic mainstays of nineteenth-century advertising—smoking factories, bewhiskered industrialists, and sumptuous nudes—disappear in the twentieth century? Where Jackson Lears's Fables of Abundance (1994) emphasizes an ongoing tension in advertising between carnivalesque and rational impulses, Laird sees dramatic transformation, occurring primarily between 1870 and 1920. For her, there was no single or simple pattern to the metamorphosis. Advertising changed as retailers and manufacturers grappled with diverse problems of distribution brought on by industrialization.

‘Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt’: US advertising & its social critics

This paper examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Criticism of advertising was not new. Advertising had come under scrutiny during the Progressive era and the New Deal years. What made this wave of criticism novel was that it occurred during a period of economic affluence and relative social stability. Although recent academic scholarship from authors such as Michael Schudson (1984) and Jackson Lears (1994) has challenged the social critics, popular discourse in the English-speaking world concerning advertising's social impact still reflects the views of Vance Packard (1957) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1958). Likewise, the arguments put forward by leading advertising practitioners almost four decades ago are still found in public relations initiatives on behalf of the industry.

Marginalized in the Middle

Addressing volatile social issues such as gender, pornography, race, welfare, immigration, and schooling, Alan Wolfe examines the ills of American society in the 1990s. He shows that it is possible to be critical and fair at the same time, and concludes that social criticism does not lie within the boundaries of either left-wing or right-wing ideas, but rather is connected to a broad understanding of liberalism. This immensely readable book illustrates the power of social criticism to enlarge discussion of issues at the heart of democracy today.In applying a realist approach to controversies over immigration, pornography, race relations, and the apparent communications gap between the genders, Wolfe seeks to demonstrate the advantages of combining the insights of criticism and the tools of social science.-- Library Journal A plea for a return to liberal thinking, an insistence on the value of 'social criticism beyond politics.' -- Washington Post Book World [Wolfe] surveys contemporary public discourse on racial and sexual relations, welfare policy, immigration, pornography, education and cultural politics . . . he manages to bring some fresh thinking to most of these stale debates.--T. J. Jackson Lears, New York Times Book Review

Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.

Journal Article Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. By Jackson Lears. (New York: BasicBooks, 1994. xvi, 492 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-465-09076-1.) Get access Roland Marchand Roland Marchand University of California, Davis, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 82, Issue 3, December 1995, Pages 1176–1177, https://doi.org/10.2307/2945134 Published: 01 December 1995

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 492 pp. Cloth, $30.

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books, 1994. 492 pp. Cloth, $30.

Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. Jackson Lears

<i>Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America</i>. Jackson Lears

The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History.

We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in sensibility, and 'cultural' history is the rubric under which a massive doubting and refiguring of our most cherished historical assumptions is being conducted. Many historians are coming to suspect that the idea of culture has the power to restore order to the study of the past. Whatever its potency as an organizing theme, there is no doubt about the power of the term 'culture' to evoke and stand for the depth of the re- examination not taking place. At a time of deep intellectual disarray, 'culture' offers a provisional, nominalist version of coherence: whatever the fragmentation of knowledge, however centrifugal the spinning of the scholarly wheel, 'culture'-- which (even etymologically) conveys a sense of safe nurture, warm growth, budding or ever-present wholeness--will shelter us. PC buttons on historians' chests today stand not for 'politically correct' but 'positively cultural.'--from the Introduction More and more scholars are turning to cultural history in order to make sense of the American past. This volume brings together nine original essays by some leading practitioners in the field. essays aim to exhibit the promise of a cultural approach to understanding the range of American experiences from the seventeenth century to the present. Expanding on the editors' pathbreaking The Culture of Consumption, the contributors to this volume argue for a cultural history that attends closely to language and textuality without losing sight of broad configurations of power that social and political history at its best has always stressed. authors here freshly examine crucial topics in both private and public life. Takentogether, the essays shed new light on the power of culture in the lives of Americans past and present. Richard Wightman Fox is professor of history and director of American Studies at Boston University. He is the author of Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. T. J. Jackson Lears, professor of history at Rutgers University, is a contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, and Wilson Quarterly.

Book Reviews

Journal of American CultureVolume 17, Issue 3 p. 87-105 Book Reviews First published: September 1994 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1994.t01-1-00087.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market. Christin J. Mamiya Hail to the Candidate: Presidential Campaigns From Banners to Broadcasts. Keith Melder Domestic Novelists of the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture. Elizabeth Moss Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62. Donna DeSalvo, Paul Schimmel, et al The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, editors Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations. Archie Green Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising. Robert Gooding-Williams, editor Metapop: Self-Referentiality in American Popular Culture. Michael Dunne. Studies in Popular Culture; M. Thomas Inge, editor Fall From Grace: The Failed Crusade of the Christian Right. Michael D' Antonio Kentucky Bluegrass Country. R. Gerald Alvey Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema 1896 to the Present. Ally Acker The Cultural Geography of the United States. A Revised Edition. Wilbur Zelinsky Roadfood: The All-new, Updated and Expanded Edition of the Classic Guide to America's Best Diners, Small-town Cafes, BBQ Joints and Other Very Special Eateries Serving Great, Inexpensive Regional Food. Jane and Michael Stern Images of American Life: A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio and Television. Joel Spring Russian Eyes on American Literature. Sergei Chakovsky and M. Thomas Inge, editors American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services. Jessica Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, editors Immigrants and the American City. Thomas Muller Studies in the Western. 1.1, 1992-93 British English For American Readers: A Dictionary of the Language, Customs, and Places of British Life und Literature. David Grote Kenneth Wylie and Dennis Hickey. An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. John E. Kleber, Editor in Chief The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, An Indentured Servant. Edited with an Introduction and notes by Susan E. Klepp and Billy G. Smith Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944. James M. O'Toole The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, (1872-1958). Jack Beatty Discourse and Culture: The Creation of America. Alun Munslow Regional Studies: The Interplay of Land and People. Glen E. Lich, editor Pioneer Commercial Photography: The Burgert Brothers, Tampa, Florida. Robert E. Snyder and Jack B. Moore The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism. A. Gregory Schneider The Tragedy of Abundance: Myth Restoration in American Culture. Jerome O. Steffen Hard At Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940. Kathryn Grover, editor Baseball Between the Wars: Memories of the Game by the Men Who Played It. Eugene Murdock Volume17, Issue3September 1994Pages 87-105 RelatedInformation

The Power of Cultural History

IN THE POWER OF CULTURE: CRITICAL ESSAYS IN AMERICAN HIsToRY, RICHARD Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears discuss the development of U.S. cultural history during the last decade. They are well suited to the task. Separately and together, they have made important contributions to this varied and increasingly popular field. Their 1983 collection, The Culture of Consumption, contended that, between 1880 and 1980, American politics, society, and power relations became tied to a hegemonic culture of consumption.1 This work quickly set the standard for subsequent studies of consumer society and is still required reading for students of cultural history. A decade later, The Power of Culture virtually begs comparison with this earlier work. Fans of The Culture of Consumption may experience an odd sense of dejai vu when they read Fox and Lears's latest collaboration. Five (out of six) of the original contributors offer essays in the new volume. Both books deal primarily with white, middle-class Americans; both include essays focusing on technology, authorship, and the desperate search for authentic experience. Each book encourages readers to go

Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, editors. &lt;italic&gt;The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History&lt;/italic&gt;. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. Pp. vi, 292. Cloth $42.00, paper $13.95

Journal Article Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, editors. The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. Pp. vi, 292. Cloth $42.00, paper $13.95 Get access Fox Richard Wightman and Lears T. J. Jackson, editors. The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. Pp. vi, 292. Cloth $42.00, paper $13.95. George Lipsitz George Lipsitz University of California, San Diego Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 99, Issue 3, June 1994, Pages 957–958, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/99.3.957 Published: 01 June 1994

The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Richard Wightman Fox , T. J. Jackson Lears

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History. Richard Wightman Fox , T. J. Jackson LearsBarry ShankBarry Shank Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 28, Number 4Winter, 1993 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/496637 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Making Fun of Popular Culture

Journal Article Making Fun of Popular Culture Get access T. J. Jackson Lears T. J. Jackson Lears Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 97, Issue 5, December 1992, Pages 1417–1426, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/97.5.1417 Published: 01 December 1992

Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells.

in Chains is far more than a sensitive biography (though it is surely that); it is also a model of psychologically informed social and cultural history. Olsen recognizes that psychic conflicts often play themselves out on a higher plane, that psychic and intellectual history are intertwined. He presents a wonderful nuanced picture of Howells. --Jackson Lears,Rutgers University In this insightful study of the childhood and youth of William Dean Howells, Dancing in Chains demonstrates how the turbulent social and cultural changes of the early nineteenth century shaped the young Howells's emotional and intellectual life. His early diaries, letters, poetry, fiction, and newspaper columns are used to illustrate Olsen's argument, which also in turn throws light on the dominant tensions in antebellum America. Accepting the emergent middle-class ethos of civilized morality, with its new conceptions of child rearing and gender spheres, Howells's parents urged him to achieve self-control and individual success while also teaching him to seek the good of others rather than his own glory. For Howells the conflicts coalesced at the time of his leaving home, an increasing common rite of passage for antebellum youth. Trying to affirm his sense of literary vocation, he tested his aspirations against the family's Swedenborgian religious convictions and the antislavery commitments of his village while experimenting with competing literary ideologies in the process of meeting the demands of the new mass reading audience. For Howells the resulting tensions eased toward the end of his youth but reappeared in his more mature works of fiction and social criticism in later years. Portraying the ordeal of coming of age during a momentous period of American history, Dancing in Chains is a fascinating study with a broad appeal to general readers as well as scholars.

American Studies. Toward and beyond an Antihumanist Method: A Reply to Bruce Kuklick and T. J. Jackson Lears

American Studies. Toward and beyond an Antihumanist Method: A Reply to Bruce Kuklick and T. J. Jackson Lears

The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response

learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library. E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with powerful convictions about art, images, aesthetics, the art establishment, and especially the discipline of art history. It is animated by an extraordinary erudition. Arthur C. Danto, The Art Bulletin Freedberg's ethnographic and historical range is simply stunning. . . . The Power of Images is an extraordinary critical achievement, exhilarating in its polemic against aesthetic orthodoxy, endlessly fascinating in its details. . . . This is a powerful, disturbing book. T. J. Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly Freedberg helps us to see that one cannot do justice to the images of art unless one recognizes in them the entire range of human responses, from the lowly impulses prevailing in popular imagery to their refinement in the great visions of the ages. Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

The Future of the Humanities in Virginia Higher Education

ISCUSSION OF THE FUTURE of the humanities is presumptuous at best, futile and dangerous at worst. It is difficult even to understand their past except, perhaps, to conclude that the liberal arts and sciences as we know them today are not as old, not as pure, and not as stable as some persons engaged in the current discussion about their place in the curriculum appear to think. The great wisdom about the future has belonged to that eminent philosopher Casey Stengel, who observed that Planning is always difficult, but especially when it has to do with the future. But perhaps this wisdom is common to coaches and managers, for I read in the Richmond newspaper a few weeks ago that Terry Holland, Virginia's basketball coach and apparently a convert to the Stengel School of Philosophy and Rhetoric, observed that It's nice to have your future ahead of you. Considering the alternative, we probably would agree. To understand the humanities is to understand change in them. Indeed, it might be said that to understand the humanities is to understand change as a condition of human experience. This much is certain: if the humanities do not continue to change, their future will not be particularly interesting except perhaps to archaeologists. And this brings me to the central observation I wish to share with you this afternoon: There are strong forces both outside the academy and within that do not want the humanities to have an interesting future and that, therefore, do not want them to change. The historian Jackson Lears once observed, on the grounds of this very University, that Discontent with established truth is at the heart of the humanities' challenge to concentrated power. We might well debate the historical accuracy of this observation, but it is, in my judgment, profound and even formative. The rest of this brief paper is a meditation upon it. If the humanities challenge concentrated power and if they do so by calling into question the established truths officially sanctioned by that power, it seems to me quite understandable that the dominant