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Reviews
| Culture and Customs of the United States, edited by Benjamin F. Shearer. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. 440 pages. $95.00, cloth in two volumes.
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| Between 1935 and 1942, the Federal Writers' Project, under the auspices of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), produced an ambitious series of state guides that aimed to illustrate the history and culture of the United States. Written by local authors yet orchestrated from Washington, the WPA guides highlighted the diversity of American life within the comforting framework of national identity. Seventy years later, six historians return to this seemingly impossible task of offering a "glimpse into contemporary U.S. culture and a context through which to understand it." A reference book for high school students, Culture and Customs of the United States organizes American life into categories remarkably similar to the WPA guides: the land and the people; religion and thought; gender, marriage, family, and education; holidays and leisure; cuisine and fashion; literature; media and cinema; the performing arts; and art, architecture, and housing. The two volumes reveal an impressive breadth of knowledge with sections on topics as assorted as American religious history and recent television shows such as Extreme Makeover. Even within categories such as literature, the authors provide a rich and varied portrait with topics such as the literary canon throughout American history and the emergence of slam poetry in recent decades. |
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Although Culture and Customs of the United States begins with a historical overview, students of history will discover that the historical snapshots are brief and weighed heavily toward the twentieth century. The first chapter dedicates more words to Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct as president than such topics as the Louisiana Purchase, the Red Scare, or the energy crisis of the 1970s. The focus is on the present and, if one can get past such contemporary trivia as the fact that the average American consumes over thirty pounds of cheese per year, students will find a valuable cultural complement to more traditional historical surveys. Although history teachers will have to connect the past and the present for students, such material could be beneficial considering that teachers often fail to address recent history and critics often point out that American history textbooks avoid relevant, albeit politically risky, references to contemporary life. |
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Historian Christine Bold, author of The WPA Guides: Mapping America (1999), argues that the state guides of the thirties relied on the authority of the federal government and a documentary literary style to mask the inherent contradiction between national identity and American diversity. One can imagine that adolescent readers will also miss this problematic tension within Culture and Customs of the United States. On the one hand, the authors stress early and often that "diversity is the hallmark of this nation of immigrants" and organize chapters on such topics as food and music around regional diversity. On the other hand, the book is replete with generalizations about "American character" and culture that echo the now laughable metanarrative more common in government propaganda from the 1950s. While the authors acknowledge diversity, the book's assumption is that one can still identify a monolithic "American way" and that "Americans believe" in certain ideas or behaviors. The authors state that Americans, presumably all Americans, are "pragmatic" or have a "preoccupation" with certain phenomena such as a singular "American Dream" or fast food. Sometimes this delicate balancing act exists in the same paragraph. For example, an excerpt from the chapter on gender, marriage, and family reminds us that "American life is an odd melding of liberal freedoms and social conservatism" involving "entirely different viewpoints" on such issues. However, in the next sentence, as if to suggest that such rich complexity in American society is unacceptable in a reference book, the author declares that "one thing is constant: Americans pride themselves on their independence." |
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While claims of a "distinctly American" culture are hardly new, it is also surprising that the book provides students with so little sense of an increasingly globalized American culture. United States history textbooks increasingly place the American past within a global history and scholars frame their exploration of American culture around assumptions about how a global culture both reflects and shapes a fluid American society. With a few exceptions, such as the chapter on holidays and leisure, the book discusses such topics as religion, art, architecture, fashion, film, and music with little hint as to how Americans might approach these issues compared to neighbors near and far. Such a perspective fails to explore one of the more significant differences between the cultural landscape of the Great Depression and the global village that today's students will inherit. |
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| Utah State University |
Richard Hughes |
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