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Course Conclusion: Trends in American Cultural Formation, 1830-1919

Course Conclusion: Trends in American Cultural Formation, 1830-1919. Industrialization, urbanization, middle-class emergence liminality, rites of passage, mutability of class-based identity categories Changes in print culture, commerce Visions of nature, visions of culture

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Course Conclusion: Trends in American Cultural Formation, 1830-1919

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  1. Course Conclusion: Trends in American Cultural Formation, 1830-1919

  2. Industrialization, urbanization, middle-class emergence liminality, rites of passage, mutability of class-based identity categories Changes in print culture, commerce Visions of nature, visions of culture Canon of domesticity and the relationship of public and private Antebellum: The Four Seasons of Life: Middle Age Lithograph by Currier and Ives, New York, 1868

  3. Antebellum popular culture • Blackface minstrelsy • Cultural conflict: the Bowery versus Astor Place

  4. Individual and collective identity • self-made manhood and true womanhood • antebellum reform spirit (temperance, abolition, etc.) Thomas Cole, "The Falls Of Kaaterskill,“ 1825

  5. Civil War • technologies of representation: photography and lithography

  6. Plantation tales and nostalgia for pre-Civil War past African-American self-representation: Washington and DuBois Race, manhood, and the vanishing frontier Turn-of-the-century visions of empire Orientalism in art, literature, and popular culture Late 19th century -- Race and nationhood

  7. Gilded Age labor conflict Urban geography of class, Progressive reform, and technologies of representation Riis versus Ashcan School The leisure class and the ethnic poor Shift from producer ideology to a culture of consumption Capitalism and Culture, 1880-present

  8. Consumer Culture • When do we first see the emergence of consumer culture? • What are its most salient forms at the turn of the century? • Department stores, chain stores, and mail-order catalogs • Amusement parks • Variety theater and sheet music • Sound recordings and motion pictures

  9. Consumer Culture, continued • What are its consequences for identities grounded in class, race, ethnicity, age, and gender? • How does the shift from a producer-oriented society to a consumer-oriented society change popular perceptions of democracy, the good life, and the American dream?

  10. Final Observation • All culture is contested. • Culture is not epiphenomenal, but is rather a crucial ground on which battles between socially and politically disparate groups are waged. • Film becomes such a battleground in the first decades of the 20th century

  11. The “American Picture Palaces” website quotes William Leach: [The advent of consumer culture] was far from liberating, as it "raised to the fore only one vision of the good life and pushed out all others...[it] denied American people access to insight into other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture with real democracy." As older grounds for American democracy like ownership of property and control of work eroded, brokers of consumerism substituted an "inviting vision of their society as one of icon equality...freedom of choice came to be perceived as a freedom more significantly exercised in the marketplace than in the political arena."(21)

  12. Early Popular Film and the Utopian Vision of Consumer Plenty Let’s discuss the following images and text

  13. [T]he movie palaces are . . . part of a larger story -- the rise of a pervasive culture of consumerism which dramatically altered the way Americans worked, played, and thought about their relationships to other citizens. . . . Movie palaces perfectly demonstrate the anxieties, exhilarations, and pitfalls of the culture of consumerism. . . .

  14. Colonial Theatre, Wichita, Kansas, 1910. 1913 view

  15. D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915),and the inscription of inequality in American consumer culture

  16. Mighty Spectacle The dawn of a new art! The Fiery Cross of the Ku Klux Klan!

  17. Plot summary from imdb.com: Edith Hardy uses charity funds for Wall Street investments in hopes of buying some new gowns. She loses all the money and borrows from wealthy oriental Tori. When her husband gives her the amount she borrowed, Tori won't take it back, branding her shoulder with a Japanese sign of his ownership. She shoots him. Her husband takes the blame. In court Edith reveals all to an angry mob.

  18. Tori signs a check for Edith Hardy

  19. Tori prepares to brand Edith with branding iron to assert his sexual ownership over her.

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