The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History.

This collection of essays provides an excellent introduction to the recent scholarship associated with a vaguely defined but increasingly popular subfield: the "new cultural history." While their approaches vary, the authors are linked by their belief that culture shapes rather than reflects relations of power. Reasserting the centrality of ideas to historical explanation, they argue that through its ability to confer meaning on events, artifacts, and institutions, culture creates the context in which behavior is encouraged or restrained. In their examination of the politics of cultural expression they have drawn on the methods of other disciplines--most notably linguistics, literary criticism, and anthropology--and have expanded their focus to include the "common" and the extraordinary mind, the artifacts of popular and elite cultures, and the dynamics of cultural diffusion and resistance. The result is a fascinating exploration of the complex relationship between thought and action, mental constructs and material conditions.

Concentrating on the professional and private lives of Sherwood Anderson, for example, Jackson Lears sheds light on the modern artist's rejection of mass culture and his quest for "unmediated" experience in early 20th-century America. Attempting to resist the effeminizing tendencies of consumer culture, Anderson tried to recreate a "discourse of authenticity"--forms of expression in which individuals speak their own words instead of those written by others--that he believed existed in the folk cultures of the preindustrial past.

The search for "authentic" cultural forms is also examined in Christopher Wilson's discussion of the difficulty of recovering "meaning" from a text. Focusing on Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties--a novel begun in 1932 and rediscovered by Olsen and published in 1974--Wilson notes that critics simultaneously celebrated it as a work of art and as an artifact. By questioning how it could be considered both a product of individual genius that transcends the historical moment of its creation and a proletarian novel that represents the experiences of a specific time and social group, Wilson raises fundamental questions about the role of cultural artifacts as repositories of memory, their ability to give voice to those who have been "dispossessed of words," and the reader's ability to recover both memory and voice.

Writing a cultural history of horror Karen Halttunen describes changes in the ways murder has been understood and experienced. By 1750, reflecting the emergence of a new liberal humanitarian culture, the New England minister's execution sermon was replaced by other literary forms--such as trial reports and the Gothic horror novel--which explored the killer's motives within a secular rather than a theological framework. Gauging the impact of the new murder literature, she argues that its goal was not only to horrify its readers by presenting them with criminal acts that could no longer be rationally explained; it also allowed them to revel in a "pornography of pain" and experience sensations now forbidden by the new humanitarian impatience with cruelty and suffering.

Large scale changes in moral sensibility are also explored in Richard Fox's examination of the 1875 Beecher-Tilton trial. Viewing the event as a "text," he examines the ways in which Henry Ward Beecher's pursuit of a "spiritual romance" was presented in the courtroom, represented in the press, and responded to by the public. While intimacy was put on trial in order to reaffirm Victorian moral values, Fox concludes, press reports created "dramatic narratives" that allowed readers to escape from the emotional restrictions they prescribed, ultimately undermining their commitment to them.

In an essay that explores popular resistance to cultural change, Lizabeth Cohen challenges the idea that the development of a hegemonic culture of consumption in the 1920s and 1930s created a classless society of undifferentiated consumers. Examining not only the efforts of businessmen and advertising agencies to shape the consciousness of working class consumers but also the meaning these workers attached to their participation in the emerging consumer culture, Cohen discovers that even though they were drawn into the institutions of mass consumption and were influenced by the media that popularized them, these experiences strengthened rather than weakened their distinct ethnic and class identities.

Defending the efforts of academics and entrepreneurs to democratize access to the "classic" works of Western civilization in the early 20th century, Joan Rubin describes the role played by "middlebrow" culture in the shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality. Calling for a more complex understanding of this event, she rejects the view that by 1917 the "genteel tradition" had lost its power to define aesthetic standards in American culture. Focusing on the careers of Stuart Sherman and John Erskine she demonstrates how they adapted the genteel tradition to consumer culture by formulating an "ideology of reading" that merged the Victorian emphasis on self- discipline, sincerity, and self-reliance with the modernist search for "real life" through emotional self-expression.

The power of ideas to shape political practices and institutions is revealed in Robert Westbrook's examination of "popular political theory"--expressed in magazine ads, movies, radio programs, and government propaganda--that justified America's entry into World War II. Concentrating on the political uses of Norman Rockwell's series of paintings, The Four Freedoms, Westbrook argues that the average American's sense of political obligation was inspired by a commitment to families, friends and a future filled with well stocked pantries and tract homes rather than an allegiance to the state or abstract political beliefs.

In an imaginative exploration of the history of technology and its impact on popular perception, Michael Smith examines the techno-utopian image of the future embedded in the rides and exhibits of the 1964 New York World's Fair that celebrated the endless power of American technology to control the forces of nature and, implicitly, the forces of man. By providing a "closed" image of the future--the view that the technological progress it envisioned was inevitable table and desirable--the exhibits at the fair ignored the social consequences of progress and prevented viewers from imagining alternatives to the "corporate futurism" they portrayed.

Finally, demonstrating the difficulty of creating a public art that reflects a common understanding of public life in a modern industrial society, Casey Blake examines efforts to remove Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, a commissioned piece of sculpture, from the Federal Plaza in Manhattan in the 1980s. After a close reading of the dialogue between its critics and defenders, which he characterizes as a discourse between elites that precluded a democratic dialogue on the nature of public art, Blake concludes that what was at issue was not the relative merits of competing aesthetic visions but the power to define the symbols that represent communal ideals.

Without exception, these thought provoking essays demonstrate the value of a cultural approach to history. Open ended in scope, they reveal that activities once thought to be irrelevant are filled with meaning. The authors remind us, as Sherwood Anderson wrote, that "every gesture, every word of the people carries significance." Further, by examining a variety of cultural artifacts from the perspectives provided by ethnographic and reader/response analysis, they are able to bring to light the mental and emotional worlds of men and women who left no written record of their existence. While there are dangers inherent in the approaches associated with the new cultural history, such as the problem of reading in too much or attributing thoughts to people they may not have held, the authors clearly illustrate that these pitfalls are minor in comparison with the texture they add to the historian's portrait of the past and the interpretative power they bring to explanations of change over time.

Jesse F. Battan California State University, Fullerton