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Book Review
| Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918. By Peter Conolly-Smith. (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2004. x, 414 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-58834-167-4.)
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| Peter Conolly-Smith's book is a closely focused study of the German American press in New York City from the turn of the nineteenth century to the end of World War I. The author's ambition is to "explain the emergence of ... visually oriented mass culture and chart its development and aim of transforming immigrant communities" (p. 9). But much of the book is focused on the printed word. The core of the study is a detailed analysis of the culture pages of three German American newspapers: the venerable and bourgeois New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung, and William Randolph Hearst's attempt to break into the New York ethnic market, the New Yorker Morgen Journal. The most interesting part of this book lies in its detailed discussions of topics relating sometimes (but not always) to mass culture: movies, women's changing roles, classical music, and fashion. |
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