Book description
In the United States today many people are as likely to identify
themselves by their ethnicity or region as by their nationality. In
this country with its diversity and inequalities, can there be a
shared public culture? Is there an unbridgeable gap between cultural
variety and civic unity, or can public forms of expression provide an
opportunity for Americans to come together as a people?
In Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the
United States, an interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses
these questions while considering the state of American public culture
over the past one hundred years. From medicine shows to the Internet,
from the Los Angeles Plaza to the Las Vegas Strip, from the
commemoration of the Oklahoma City bombing to television programming
after 9/11, public sights and scenes provide ways to negotiate new
forms of belonging in a diverse, postmodern community. By analyzing
these cultural phenomena, the essays in this volume reveal how mass
media, consumerism, increased privatization of space, and growing
political polarization have transformed public culture and the very
notion of the American public.
Focusing on four central themes-public action, public image,
public space, and public identity-and approaching shared culture from
a range of disciplines-including mass communication, history,
sociology, urban studies, ethnic studies, and cultural
studies-Public Culture offers refreshing perspectives on a
subject of perennial significance.
"An excellent dissection of the tension between common
experience and societal plurality. . . . The final valuable insight
that this book may evoke for readers is that civic culture of the kind
Robert Putnam lamented is not necessarily endangered. . . . but that
'public culture' is and always has been contested by a variety of
actors; and to understand how Americans engage one another in the
public realm requires asking difficult questions about power, wealth,
gender, and race."-Reviews in American History
Marguerite S. Shaffer is Associate Professor of American History and
American Studies at Miami University and author of See America First:
Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940.
