AMST 2010 - [Popular Culture in the United States, 1900 - 1945]

(HA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

Next offered 2014-2015.

G. Altschuler.

AMST 2010 deals with American popular culture in the period between 1900 and the end of World War II. As we examine best-sellers, films, sports and television, radio, ads, newspapers, magazines, and music, the goal is to better understand the ways in which popular culture as “contested terrain,” the place where social classes, racial and ethnic groups, women and men, the powerful and the ess powerful, seek to “control” images and themes. Topics include the Western; Cultural Heroes and the Cult of Individualism in the 1920s; The Hays Code and the Black Sox scandal; Mae West and the “New Women”: Advertising in an Age of Consumption; Gangsters and G-Men; and Jackie Robinson and the American Dilemma. (HI)