Cultural History

The history of Christmas has always been an ambiguous meld of sacred thoughts and worldly actions— as well as a fascinating reflection of our changing society. This book captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday. In colonial times, it was celebrated either as an utterly solemn or a wildly social event—if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted. City dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations. Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. As times changed, Christmas changed—and grew in popularity. In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as“'Twas the Night Before Christmas,” virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors, and an enterprising printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the 19th century a fully-fledged national holiday had materialized. In the 20th century, Christmas seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions.

This book is a collection of essays that unwraps the complex world of consumption under communism in postwar Eastern Europe. Its editors have carefully compiled, analyzed, and contextualized new work by both American and European scholars writing from variety of disciplinary perspectives. The result is a fresh look at everyday life under communism that explores the ways people shopped, ate, drank, smoked, cooked, acquired, exchanged and assessed goods. These phenomena, the editors argue, were central to the way that communism was lived and experienced in its widely varied contexts in the region. Consumption pervaded everyday life far more than most other political and social phenomena. From design, to production, to retail sales and black market exchange, the book follows communist goods from producer to consumer, tracing their circuitous routes. In the communist world this journey was rife with its own meanings, shaped by the special political and social circumstances of these societies. In examining consumption behind the Iron Curtain, this volume builds on a new field of study. It brings dimension and nuance to our understanding of the communist period and a new perspective to our current analyses of consumerism.

George Schuyler, a black journalist, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 1940s she graced the pages of Time magazine and The New Yorker. Philippa soon became the inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she dropped out of sight. Philippa had been rejected by the American classical music elite and was forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a performer and composer. She traveled widely, performing for kings, queens, and presidents and took on a second career as an author and foreign correspondent. But behind the glamour Philippa was an outcast, “I am a beauty—but I'm half colored … so I'm always destined to be an outsider,” she wrote in her diary. In a last attempt to reclaim an identity, she began to “pass” as Caucasian. At the age of thirty five Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis but, on 9 May 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, she died in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam. This book is the first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler and it draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries.

This book is an account of Old Regime Europe that explores the cultural revolution that transformed 18th-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV’s Versailles was pushed from the centre to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space — the public sphere. The book shows how many of the world’s most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics. For the established order this new force was to prove both a challenge and an opportunity and the book’s comparative study of power and culture shows how regimes sought to keep their balance as the ground moved beneath their feet. In the process the book explains, among other things, why Britain won the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ against France, how Prussia rose to become the dominant power in German-speaking Europe, and why the French monarchy collapsed.

This book, filled with insults through the ages, is the full history of scurrilous political speech. Giving a voice to those gossips, rumourmongers and traitors, usually left out of history, this book examines the speech of ordinary people, who spoke scornfully of monarchs. The book reveals the lost conversations and expressions that got people into trouble, as well as unveiling moments when private words had public consequence. Although the proverb reads, ‘words were but wind’, tongues caused social damage, words challenged political authority, and treasonous speech imperilled the crown. Royals monitored talk they deemed dangerous in various ways: policing and surveillance, judicial intervention, political propaganda, and the crafting of new law. In early Tudor times, to speak ill of the monarch could risk execution, whereas by the end of the Stuart era, similar words could be dismissed with a shrug. This book traces the development of free speech across five centuries of popular political culture, and demonstrates how formerly treasonable talk, finally gained protection as ‘the birthright of an Englishman’.

This book explores the underground history of jazz in Adolf Hitler's Germany. It offers a frightening and fascinating look at life and popular culture during the Third Reich, showing that for the Nazis, jazz was an especially threatening form of expression. Not only were its creators at the very bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, but the very essence of jazz — spontaneity, improvisation, and, above all, individuality — represented a direct challenge to the repetitive, simple, uniform pulse of German march music and indeed everyday life. The fact that many of the most talented European jazz artists were Jewish only made the music more objectionable. The book looks at groups such as the Weintraub Syncopators, Germany's best indigenous jazz band; the Harlem Club of Frankfurt, whose male members wore their hair long in defiance of Nazi conventions; and the Hamburg Swings — the most daring radicals of all — who openly challenged the Gestapo with a series of mass dance rallies. More than once these demonstrations turned violent, with the Swings and the Hitler Youth fighting it out in the streets. In the end, jazz not only survived persecution, but became a powerful symbol of political disobedience — and even resistance — in wartime Germany. And as we witness the vacillations of the Nazi regime, we see that the myth of Nazi social control was, to a large degree, just that — Hitler's dictatorship never became as pure and effective a form of totalitarianism as we are sometimes led to believe.

Between 1939 and 1945, the British public was spellbound by the martial endeavours and dashing style of the young men of the RAF, especially those with silvery fabric wings sewn above the breast pocket of their glamorous slate-blue uniform. The author provides the first scholarly study of the place of ‘the flyer’ in British culture during the Second World War. Examining the lives of RAF personnel, and their popular representation in literary and cinematic texts, he illuminates broader issues of gender, social class, national and racial identities, emotional life, and the creation of a national myth in twentieth-century Britain. In particular, he argues that the flyer's relationship to fear, aggression, loss of his comrades, bodily dismemberment, and psychological breakdown reveals broader ambiguities surrounding the dominant understandings of masculinity in the middle decades of the century. Despite his star appeal, cultural representations of the flyer encompassed both the gentle, chivalrous warrior and the uncompromising agent of destruction. Paying particular attention to the romantic universe of wartime aircrew, Francis reveals the extraordinary contrasts of their daily lives: dicing with death in the sky one moment, before sitting down to lunch with wives and children in the next. Male and female experiences during the war were not polarized and antithetical, but were complementary and interrelated, a conclusion which has implications for the history of gender in modern Britain that reach well beyond either the specialized military culture of the wartime RAF or the chronological parameters of the Second World War.

“The Frontier Club” is Christine Bold’s name for the network of eastern aristocrats who created the western as we now most commonly know it. At the turn of the twentieth century, they yoked this most popular formula to their own elite causes—from big-game hunting to conservation, immigration restriction to Jim Crow segregation—and aligned themselves with cattle kings and “quality” publishers. This book tells the story of that cultural sleight-of-hand. It delves into institutional archives and personal papers to excavate the hidden social, political, and financial interests in the making of the modern western. It re-reads frontier club fiction in relation to the federal policies and cultural spaces (from exclusive gentlemen’s clubs to national parks to zoos) with which it was intimately connected; the centerpiece is Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian. It casts new light on nine key clubmen, both the famous and the forgotten—in addition to Wister, the network included Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Silas Weir Mitchell, Henry Cabot Lodge, Madison Grant, Caspar Whitney, Winthrop Chanler, and Frederic Remington—while recovering the women on whom these men depended and without whom this version of the popular West would not exist. Bold also considers some of the costs of the frontier club formula, in terms of its impact on Indigenous peoples and its marginalization of other popular voices, including western writings by African Americans, white women, and non-elite white men. The book ends by briefly charting the frontier club’s enduring impression on western movies.