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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...

From April to October in 1964 and 1965, some 52 million people from around the world flocked to the New York World s Fair, an experience that lives on in the memory of many individuals and in America s collective consciousness. Taking a perceptive look back at "the last of the great world s fairs," Lawrence R. Samuel offers a thought-provoking portrait of this seminal event and of the cultural climate that surrounded it. Compared to its predecessors the fair was, he suggests, "the ugly duckling of global expositions." Sheer attendance made it one of the most popular of these fairs, but its...

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...

The graying of America is undeniable, with an estimated 10,000 boomers turning 65 every day. But to dismiss the baby boomer generation as a group no longer worth marketing to would be foolish. According to the Census Bureau, in 2029--the year when the last boomer will have turned 65--there will still be more than 61 million boomers, roughly 17 percent of the projected population of the United States. Boomers will still be the wealthiest generation in the United States until at least 2030, according to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services, with their share of net household wealth to...

What do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm.

Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men...

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,...