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Kammen is a demon researcher who seems to have mined his nuggets from the entire corpus of American cultural history. . . . Insightful and sardonic.\"-\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eIn this groundbreaking, panoramic work of American cultural history, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eA Machine That Would Go of Itself\u003c\/i\u003e examines a central paradox of our national identity. How did \"the land of the future\" acquire a past? And to what extent has our collective memory of that past-as embodied in our traditions-been distorted, or even manufactured? 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Kammen also describes and analyzes changing perceptions of the differences and similarities between the British and American constitutions; turn-of-the-century debates about states' rights versus national authority; and disagreements about how easy or difficult it ought to be to amend the Constitution. Moving into the twentieth century, he notes the development of a cult of the Constitution following World War I, and the conflict over policy issues that persisted despite a shared commitment to the Constitution.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51024823845137,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51024827285777,"sku":"NIN9781412805834","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52134815138065,"sku":"NLS9781412805834","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/141280583X.jpg?v=1750954468"},{"product_id":"robert-gwathmey-book-michael-kammen-9780807824955","title":"Robert Gwathmey","description":"American artist Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) was a leading member of the Social Realist movement that flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s. 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Using Gwathmey's FBI file, along with numerous interviews and archival records, Michael Kammen crafts a portrait of an engaging American painter in the midst of dramatic social and political change.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51096260968721,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51096261984529,"sku":"CIN080782495XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807847798_b295710c-51be-41c2-ad60-1b174df22a4a.jpg?v=1764162390"},{"product_id":"lively-arts-book-michael-kammen-9780195098686","title":"The Lively Arts","description":"He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald--and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played a leading role in the \"liquidation of genteel culture in America.\" Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses Seldes's life as a lens through which to bring into sharp focus the dramatic shifts in American culture that occurred in the half-century after World War I. Born in 1893, Seldes saw in his lifetime an astonishing series of innovations in popular and mass culture: silent films and talkies, the phonograph and the radio, the coming of television, and the proliferation of journalism aimed at mainstream America in such venues as Vanity Fair, The Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire. (His monthly column in Esquire was called \"The Lively Arts.\") Seldes was more than a witness to these changes, however; he was the leading champion of popular culture in his time, and a skilled practitioner as well. Kammen, the first scholar to enjoy access to Seldes's unpublished papers, illuminates his immense influence as the earliest cultural critic to insist that the lively arts--vaudeville, musical revues, film, jazz, and the comics--should be taken just as seriously as grand opera, the legitimate theatre, and other manifestations of high culture. As he traces Seldes's remarkable evolution from an acknowledged aesthete and highbrow to a cultural democrat with a passion for the popular arts, Kammen recaptures the critic's prescience, wit, and generosity for a newly expanded audience. We witness Seldes's triumphs and travails as managing editor of The Dial, the most influential literary magazine of its time, and read of New York's endlessly feuding publications and literary rivalries. Kammen offers wonderfully detailed accounts of The Dial's introduction of \"The Wasteland\" in its November 1922 issue; Seldes's review of Ulysses for The Nation, one of the first (if not the very first) to appear in the U.S.; and the complete story of the writing, publication, and critical reception of The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes's most influential book. And Kammen also covers Seldes's astonishingly versatile later career as a freelance writer (on every conceivable subject), historian, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, radio scriptwriter, the first program director for CBS Television, and the founding dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. One of popular culture's earliest and most eloquent champions, Seldes was nonetheless publicly worried as early as 1937 that the popularity of radio, film, and television would mean the demise of the \"private art of reading.\" By 1957 he was warning that \"with the shift of all entertainment into the area of big business, we are being engulfed into a mass-produced mediocrity.\" At a time when many thoughtful Americans despair of popular culture, The Lively Arts revisits the opening salvos in the ongoing debate over \"democratization\" versus \"dumbing down\" of the arts. It offers a penetrating and timely analysis of Gilbert Seldes's pioneering conviction that the popular and the great arts must not only co-exist but enrich one another if we are to realize the innovation and intensity of American culture at its best.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51481146327313,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51481146818833,"sku":"CIN0195098684G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52089195856145,"sku":"NLS9780195098686","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195098684.jpg?v=1750812237"},{"product_id":"digging-up-the-dead-book-michael-kammen-9780226423302","title":"Digging Up the Dead","description":"Reveals a gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites, this title explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51689591144721,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51689591275793,"sku":"CIN0226423301VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51705302712593,"sku":"CIN0226423301G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226423301.jpg?v=1751356946"},{"product_id":"time-to-every-purpose-book-michael-kammen-9780807828366","title":"A Time to Every Purpose","description":"In artworks from a mosaic by Marc Chagall to schoolchildren's paintings, in writings from Susan Fenimore Cooper to Annie Dillard, and in diverse print sources from family genealogical registers to seed catalogs, the four seasons appear and reappear as a theme in American culture. In this richly illustrated book, Michael Kammen traces the appeal of the four seasons motif in American popular culture and fine arts from the seventeenth century to the present. Its symbolism has evolved through the years, Kammen explains, serving as a metaphor for the human life cycle or religious faith, expressing nostalgia for rural life, and sometimes praising seasonal beauty in the diverse American landscape as the most spectacular in the world. Kammen also highlights artists' and writers' shift in attention from the glories of seasonal peaks to the dynamics of seasonal transitions as American life continued to accelerate and change through the twentieth century. Few symbols have been as pervasive, meaningful, and symptomatic in the human experience as the four seasons, and as Kammen shows, in its American context the annual cycle has been an abundant and abiding source of inspiration in the nation's cultural history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51830413230353,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51830413328657,"sku":"GOR014416232","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53373855695121,"sku":"CIN080782836XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780807828366.jpg?v=1752823440"},{"product_id":"spheres-of-liberty-book-michael-kammen-9781578063949","title":"Spheres of Liberty","description":"Liberty, one of the most consequential words in our language, is one of the most treasured concepts in American thought--and one of the most intensely debated. Its meaning is constantly shifting, changing not only from one culture to another but also, over time, within the same culture. No two definitions of liberty seem alike.  In this subtle and illuminating work Michael Kammen traces the evolving concept of liberty throughout American history and provides a solid framework for understanding the meaning of the term today. He shows that by the early seventeenth century a tension between liberty and authority was well recognized. Throughout the eighteenth century and especially during the American Revolution a bond between liberty and property was asserted. By the end of the eighteenth century this concept of liberty was so well established that it remained dominant throughout the nineteenth. By the early twentieth century, as the notion of social justice gained prominence, liberty and justice were paired frequently, and by midcentury the two had become allied to general American values. Since the 1960s the union of liberty and equality has been the prevailing notion, and achieving them has proved a major objective.  In a lively and learned manner Kammen also shows that Americans have subscribed to different definitions of liberty concurrently. Above all, there has been a steady expansion of what is embraced by the concept of liberty. This expansion has created difficulties in public discourse, causing groups to misunderstand one another. On the other hand, interpretations of liberty have broadened to include such concepts as constraints on authority, a right to privacy, and the protection of personal freedoms.  In a new preface for this Banner Books edition Kammen responds to evaluations of earlier editions and places his views within the context of more recent studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52148964786449,"sku":"NLS9781578063949","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781578063949.jpg?v=1758794734"},{"product_id":"machine-that-would-go-of-itself-book-michael-kammen-9781138518391","title":"A Machine That Would Go of Itself","description":"In this volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen explores the U.S. Constitution's place in the public consciousness and its role as a symbol in American life, from ratification in 1788 to our own time.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52678227362065,"sku":"NLS9781138518391","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781138518391.jpg?v=1762307604"},{"product_id":"season-of-youth-book-michael-kammen-9780801495267","title":"A Season of Youth","description":"\u003cp\u003eStrange, zany and at times downright baffling, \u003cem\u003eFoster s Historical Irish Oddities\u003c\/em\u003e is a quirky compendium of true stories from all over Ireland. It is essential reading for anyone who loves to entertain friends and family with a good yarn or who needs further proof that Ireland is indeed a country with a unique cast of characters.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the Lismore man who rode to Fermoy in a tub pulled by a pig, a badger, two cats, a goose and a hedgehog to the tornado that ripped through Limerick in 1851, Foster s stories may not be found in the history books but they certainly provide an entertaining and addictive read \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52930105508113,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52930105966865,"sku":"CIN0801495261G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780801495267.jpg?v=1765754464"},{"product_id":"people-of-paradox-book-michael-kammen-9780195028034","title":"People of Paradox","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom the beginning, what has given our culture its distinctive texture, pattern, and thrust, according to Michael Kammen, is the dynamic interaction of the imported and the indigenous. 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Puritanical and hedonistic, idealistic and materialistic, peace-loving and war-mongering: these opposing strands go back to the genesis of our history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53345112129809,"sku":"GOR014863120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53352668266769,"sku":"GOR014869522","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780195028034.jpg?v=1774522448"},{"product_id":"machine-go-itself-v600-book-michael-kammen-9780394756004","title":"Machine Go Itself-V600","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53500743745809,"sku":"CIN0394756002G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780394756004.jpg?v=1778022052"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-michael-kammen.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}