American History and Culture from the Explorers to Cable TV. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

This book grew from my university classes and the awareness that students needed general background in United States history and culture in order to understand fully the literary works assigned. Although United States history is required in high school, most students did not have the kind of working knowledge of events and historical forces necessary to give the appropriate contextual perspective for their reading.

Therefore, this book is intended to be a convenient starting place to historicize the study of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It provides background in American history for any general reader.

Think about this book as a long newspaper. It presents headline issues, that is, important national and public events involving war, peace, the government, and the election process. It also includes social protest and reform movements, labor unions and major strikes, and the ongoing histories of Native Americans, people of African origin, and immigrants.

In addition to the headlines, there are reports on foreign affairs, business and the economy, sports, entertainment, education, and lifestyle. It is a book designed to be effective whether read all the way through or consulted selectively with the aid of its detailed table of contents and extensive indexes. For example, the two dozen pages on sports give you a broad outline of commercial sports entertainment from horseracing in colonial times to Wayne Gretzky's domination of hockey in the last decade. If the economic system is your interest, you can trace American policy and practice from colonial mercantilism, to commercialism and yeoman farming in the early Republic, through various stages of capitalism, to the present economy, the diversity of which seems to break away from those traditions.

What touches people in their everyday lives is also presented; topics which might have been discussed at the tavern or over the telephone, such as, indoor plumbing, a sensational murder, the price of gasoline, the camcorder, hemlines.

To illustrate this book's scope, its second half is devoted to the twentieth century when headline-making events were frequent - the two world wars, the Depression and New Deal between them, and the long Cold War. But, as important as these events were, people were more insistently involved with the rise and proliferation of electricity, the automobile, radio and movies from the 1920s, and, especially in the 1950s, television. These are the technologies which transformed everyday life and helped create a nation-wide culture. They led to the interconnected media and computer-based culture of today.

I have not tried to tell "the story of America, " since I don't see a credible narrative line for a country as complex as this one. I have tried to present the many strands of conflicting situations and events with clarity, but I have not forced links among concurrent events. In 1919, the country experienced its most conscious and vicious period of political oppression, the Red Scare; a year later, it doubled the franchise by passing women's suffrage. Go figure!

One of the intriguing elements of history (or of any text), is that it can continue to be interpreted in different and often contradictory ways. Thus, one can, as many have, see the United States as a site for the growth of democracy, or as the failure of democracy to fulfill its promises. One can note the persistent differences between the North and the South (with or without the West as a third party), or between rural and urban cultures, or one can deplore the homogenization of America in the face of mass media.

In order to keep the book reasonably short, I have not presented individual cases or portraits, but rather have dealt with general social trends and public events. And there is where you come in: the logical extension of this book is to the particular and the individual, for you to find out how well these general ideas fit. Thus a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or an autobiography by one of his brain trusters like Harold Ickes or Frances Perkins, or John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, or the film based on it, or the WPA mural at your local post office, would extend and clarify what you read here about the New Deal.

Your part in this dialogue is to find examples - real or fictional, presidential or ordinary Jane - and see how and where they fit in.

University of Minnesota
URL: http://English.cla.umn.edu/FacultyProfiles/Ross/Abstract
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Last revised 16 September 2000

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