He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played a leading role in the "liquidation of genteel culture in America." Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses...
He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H....
Today, New York stands as the capital of American culture, business, and cosmopolitanism. Its size, influence, and multicultural composition mark it as a corner-stone of our country. The rich and varied history of early New York would seem to present a fertile topic for investigation to those interested colonial America. Yet, there has never been a modern history of old New York--until this lively and detailed account by Michael Kammen. Gracefully written and comprehensive in scope, Colonial New York includes all of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects of New...
Today, New York stands as the capital of American culture, business, and cosmopolitanism. Its size, influence, and multicultural composition mark it a...
Michael Kammen is widely regarded as one of our most important--and most diversely talented--cultural historians. David Brion Davis has said, "No other historian of his] generation has such a broad and concrete grasp of 'American culture' in all its manifestations, from constitutional law to formal painting and popular culture." This engaging volume stands as rich and compelling evidence of that assertion. In the Past Lane collects writings from a span of more than ten years, covering the broad spectrum of Kammen's recent interests. Essay topics include the role of the historian,...
Michael Kammen is widely regarded as one of our most important--and most diversely talented--cultural historians. David Brion Davis has said, "No othe...
In American Culture, American Tastes, Michael Kammen leads us on an entertaining, thought-provoking tour of America's changing tastes, uses of leisure, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them throughout our nation's history. Starting at the point in time that late-nineteenth-century popular culture began to evolve into post-WWII mass culture, Kammen charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the relationship between "high" and "low" art; the...
In American Culture, American Tastes, Michael Kammen leads us on an entertaining, thought-provoking tour of America's changing tastes, uses of leisure...
In this volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen explores the U.S. Constitution's place in the public consciousness and its role as a symbol in American life, from ratification in 1788 to our own time. As he examines what the Constitution has meant to the American people (perceptions and misperceptions, uses and abuses, knowledge and ignorance), Kammen shows that although there are recurrent declarations of reverence most of us neither know nor fully understand our Constitution. How did this gap between ideal and reality come about? To explain it, Kammen examines the complex...
In this volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen explores the U.S. Constitution's place in the public consciousness and its role as a s...
With "Digging Up the Dead," Pulitzer Prize winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures....
With "Digging Up the Dead," Pulitzer Prize winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally g...
"History painting," for many people, conjures up Washington Crossing the Delaware and other paintings of heroic historical events. But history has made its way into considerably more American art than such obvious examples, in the view of Michael Kammen. In three thought-provoking and innovative essays, Kammen ranges from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, from central Europe to the western United States, and from elegant oil painting to folk sculpture to show the transformations of Old World icons of time into New World images of social memory and tradition.
In the first...
"History painting," for many people, conjures up Washington Crossing the Delaware and other paintings of heroic historical events. But history has ...
From the beginning, what has given our culture its distinctive texture, pattern, and thrust, according to Michael Kammen, is the dynamic interaction of the imported and the indigenous. He shows how, during the years of colonization, some ideas and institutions were transferred virtually intact from Britain, while, simultaneously, others were being transformed in the New World. As he unravels the tangled origins of our culture, he makes us see that unresolved contradictions in the American experience have created our national style. Puritanical and hedonistic, idealistic and...
From the beginning, what has given our culture its distinctive texture, pattern, and thrust, according to Michael Kammen, is the dynamic inter...
