Category: Cultural History

Annie McClanahan. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017) ix + 235pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Any discussion of twenty-first-century debt and economic crisis in the United States will necessarily involve some very large numbers. As Annie McClanahan notes, there were 8.2 million mortgage foreclosures during the Great Recession…

Ina Bergmann and Stefan Hippler, eds., Cultures of Solitude: Loneliness – Limitation – Liberation (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2017), 330 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Cultures of Solitude is not only a collection of 17 essays that focus on the implications of solitude in American culture with a particular emphasis on loneliness, limitation, and…

Monika Sauter, Devoted! Frauen in der evangelikalen Populärkultur der USA (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 204 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 In Devoted!, American studies scholar Monika Sauter introduces the reader to an eclectic selection of contemporary published and broadcasted materials—from novels, self-help books, fitness guides, films, and documentaries to the homepage of a chastity organization—which…

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America (Oxford UP, 2017), 304 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 The 2013 NSA scandal triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden intensified fears that new technologies and government surveillance had ushered in an era of “post-privacy,”[1] the age of the “surveillance society.”[2]…

Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016), 360 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 When Samuel Porter Putnam sat down at the end of the nineteenth century to write his history of atheism, he faced some tough editorial choices. Who to include under…

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 (Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2014), 273 pp. Starting from her personal childhood experiences in Denver, Colorado, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg takes up the challenge of writing an environmental history of childhood of the past 150 years for the American Midwest.…

Heike Bungert, Festkultur und Gedächtnis: Die Konstruktion einer deutschamerikanischen Ethnizität 1848-1914 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2016), 637 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 German immigrants in the United States held on to their customs and traditions, replicating many of them in the New World. This included numerous festivities, often conducted by one of the many German-American associations…

Mehring, Frank, The Democratic Gap: Transcultural Confrontations of German Immigrants and the Promise of American Democracy (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 403 pp. European Views of the United States 5. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Frank Mehring’s award-winning study is a much-welcomed addition to several areas of American Studies: It provides an original contribution to the cultural…

Sabine N. Meyer, We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2015), 288 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 Man sollte meinen, über die amerikanische Temperenzbewegung des langen 19. Jahrhunderts sei auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks schon hinreichend viel geforscht und geschrieben worden. Es sei nur an die…

Kevin Slack, Benjamin Franklin, Natural Right, and the Art of Virtue (Rochester: Rochester UP, 2017), 305 pp. Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.4 This erudite study reconstructs Benjamin Franklin’s political philosophy from the rich wealth of his essays written before 1760. Claiming that Franklin’s “science of virtue” was fully developed before the process of the American…