| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles L. Ponce de Leon. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. x, 325. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
This book deals not so much with the modern culture of celebrity as with the crucial role that the mass-circulation media, particularly popular magazines and newspapers, played in the emergence of celebrity as "a particular kind of public visibility" (p. 5). Although Charles L. Ponce de Leon counts himself as a critic of much in today's celebrity culture, his aim is to deepen understanding of it by providing the precision and complexity missing from critiques by Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman, and Neal Gabler. Focusing on the period between 1890 and the early 1940s, he argues that the central rhetorical strategies and practices of celebrity journalism were already in place before the rise of electronic media. Since then, its fundamental mission has continued to be "the illumination and exposure of the subject's 'real self'" (p. 7).	1
Building on Leo Braudy's work, Ponce de Leon argues that celebrity as a "unique way of thinking about public figures" developed along with a market economy and democratic and individualistic values, which in combination eroded the "hagiographic discourse of fame" that had reinforced traditional authorities (p. 4). From the first days of the American nation, upwardly mobile individuals attempted to cultivate public reputations by displaying exemplary virtues and telling the stories of their lives. At the same time, defenders of republican values, skeptical of the official personas displayed by businessmen and politicians, sought access to their "real" selves. Assuming that these were only revealed in private, the new mass-circulation press depicted prominent people at home. In the twentieth century, interest in the inside story was buttressed by psychological theories emphasizing that the self was shaped by a complex interaction of unconscious instincts and interpersonal relations.	. . .

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