A brief history of american culture download

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A brief history of American culture Item Preview. Preview — American Ways by Benjamin G. Themes of individualism and community are emphasized throughout, providing a map by which to understand and interpret America's cultural and social history.

Get A Copy. Paperback , pages. Published August 1st by Wadsworth Publishing Company. More Details Original Title. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about American Ways , please sign up.

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Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Mar 09, Will rated it did not like it Shelves: american-history. This book is about pages long, so its defects can be excused only but so much in calling it A Brief History. It isn't that Crunden is overly conservative in his taste he is , but that he seems unread in what he doesn't appreciate. One example: three pages after he dismisses Charles Brockden Brown as a William Godwin imitator, he praises Washington Irving as the first American writer to use unreliable narrators.

Actually Brockden Brown who came decades before Irving wrote all of his novels This book is about pages long, so its defects can be excused only but so much in calling it A Brief History.

Actually Brockden Brown who came decades before Irving wrote all of his novels with unreliable narrators, which Crunden would have known had he bothered to read them.

Other problems? The book was published shortly after the height of the AIDS epidemic , yet that goes unmentioned, as does Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize the prior year. Instead T. Boyle is credited as being the best writer of her generation, while Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and John Updike also go unmentioned. No Salinger or Vonnegut either. Faulkner yes, but Flannery O'Connor no.

For postwar American literature, Josephine Hendin's Vulnerable People is not only the best guide, but it predates this book by over 15 years. I'm being picky about the literary coverage of the 20th century because the author emphasizes it: he rushes through the 18th and 19th centuries in pages, then devotes nearly to this one century.

As for the other arts: drama and sculpture go entirely unnoticed. Photography, cinema, dance, musicals, and journalism are respectively represented by only Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Robeson, Merce Cunningham, George Gershwin and Tom Wolfe what a weird bunch.

Wells, H. Mencken, Hunter S. He actually skips not only the Ashcan School and all of American realism, but modernism too, plus the Harlem Renaissance!

What about the first indigenous modern-art movement in the United States? No Precisionism. And true to Crunden's knowledge being exclusive to only two periods colonial and midth , he includes Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg all three of Tom Wolfe's "Cultureburg" fame , but not Bernard Berenson, the first American art historian of any importance.

Louis Armstrong is here, but not Duke Ellington. As for intellectuals, B. Skinner is mentioned, but not Noam Chomsky.