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The supernatural--psychic phenomena (telepathy, clairvoyance, or ESP), communicating with the dead, and the sighting and tracking of ghosts--has played an integral role in American culture across the last century. In fact, attention and interest in the supernatural has increased, despite our society's reliance upon and enthusiasm for science and technology. Even some top scholars, officials from the military and police, and public figures in places as high as the Oval Office have believed in at least some aspects of the supernatural.

"Supernatural America: A Cultural History" is the...

The middle class is often viewed as the heart of American society, the key to the country s democracy and prosperity. Most Americans believe they belong to this group, and few politicians can hope to be elected without promising to serve the middle class. Yet today the American middle class is increasingly seen as under threat. In "The American Middle Class: A Cultural History," Lawrence R. Samuel charts the rise and fall of this most definitive American population, from its triumphant emergence in the post-World War II years to the struggles of the present day.

Between the 1920s and...

Aging is a preoccupation shared by beauty bloggers, serious journalists, scientists, doctors, celebrities--arguably all of adult America, given the pervasiveness of the crusade against it in popular culture and the media. We take our youth-oriented culture as a given but, as Lawrence R. Samuel argues, this was not always the case. Old age was revered in early America, in part because it was so rare. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s, according to Samuel, that the story of aging in America became the one we are most familiar with today: aging is a disease that science will one day cure,...

Psychology has stepped down from the university chair into the marketplace was how the New York Times put it in 1926. Another commentator in 1929 was more biting. Psychoanalysis, he said, had over a generation, converted the human scene into a neurotic. Freud first used the word around 1895, and by the 1920s psychoanalysis was a phenomenon to be reckoned with in the United States. How it gained such purchase, taking hold in virtually every aspect of American culture, is the story Lawrence R. Samuel tells in Shrink, the first comprehensive popular history of psychoanalysis in...