| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 283 words from this article are provided below; about 528 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Conolly-Smith. Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. 2004. Pp. ix, 414. $22.95.
This book describes the vertiginous collapse of German-American Kultur in New York City between 1895 and 1918. Once hailed by anxious WASPs and pompous Germans alike as the measure of vitality and vision—of all that was missing from Anglo-American arts and letters—by the end of World War I Kultur had succumbed to the crushing assimilative force of an emergent popular media. Author Peter Conolly-Smith emphasizes that the war only completed a process already under way. The anti-German hysteria that war unleashed in the United States would have been negligible without the medium to transmit it. In a city rent by language differences, new cartoons, comics, films, and theater delivered visual messages that any immigrant could understand: look and act like them and you'll have a rough go of it here. Better to look and act like us.	1
Kultur did not yield to pop culture overnight. It did so as the result of a quarter-century-long process of social mediation that Conolly-Smith calls "translation." Translation is really a form of negotiation. In literature, the translator negotiates between languages; in turn-of-the-century New York, translators negotiated between cultural communities. There are many fascinating characters in this book, but few villains. The imagery Conolly-Smith examines emerged as the product of artistic agency, audience participation, economic imperative, and social prejudice. The author has a sharp eye for partly-intended consequences. For example, he tells the story of one German-American cartoonist who so thoroughly Americanized his audience that he translated himself right out of a job.	. . .

There are about 528 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.