LeRoy Ashby

The Rising of Popular Culture:

A Historiographical Sketch

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I
n 1961, when history graduate student Bill Malone began research born into an age of rock and roll, and our outlooks on popular culture
on his PhD dissertation at the University of Texas, he quickly dis- were formed indelibly by the fact that we liked mass-mediated forms
covered that almost no academic work ever touched upon the of entertainment (4). Against that backdrop of social and intellectual
subject of country music. He could have made the same observation upheaval, studies of low amusements and their larger cultural con-
about all forms of American popular culture. Despite a few studies texts took shape.
such as Constance Rourkes classic American Humor (1931), the his- The developing discipline of American studies helped point the
tory of amusements only rarely received attention in books and class- way. In 1950, Henry Nash Smith published Virgin Land: The West in
rooms (1). The few intellectuals Myth and Reality, suggesting
who commented on popular how subjects such as dime nov-
culture typically did so unfavor- els and Wild West shows yielded
ably. One of the most authori- significant insights into the
tative assessments came from American imagination. In the
Theodor W. Adorno, a mem- late 1960s, the rapidly growing
ber of the influential Frankfurt American studies movement
School, composed of scholarly prompted the formation of the
refugees from Nazi Germany. Popular Culture Association.
In the 1940s, from a leftist Ray B. Browne, the associa-
perspective, Adorno critiqued tions founder, later described
the culture industry through his battles with other academics
which corporate producers exer- who viewed the study of popu-
cised control from the top down, lar culture as trivial. He had the
undercutting any hope that cul- support of Russel Nye, an estab-
ture arises spontaneously from lished historian of pre-Civil War
the masses themselves (2). The politics, who, in 1970, published
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr a sweeping study, The Unembar-
also worried about modern en- rassed Muse: The Popular Arts in
tertainment. Television, he Americaan impressive exami-
wrote in 1952, may represent a nation of entertainments since
threat to our culture analogous In 1958, a white youth in Little Rock, Arkansas must learn the metric system at colonial times, from the the-
to the threat of atomic weapons homewith the help of the new mass medium of televisionafter Arkansas Gov- ater to pulp magazines, comics,
ernor Orval Faubus orders the closing of the citys public schools, rather than allow
to our civilization (3). popular music, radio, television,
African Americans to bring about racial integration. The rights revolution of the
1950s and 60s, as well as new mass-mediated forms of entertainment, provided the and movies. Popular art con-
Rights Revolution backdrop for a younger generation of scholars coming of age in those decades to pur- firms the experience of the ma-
During the 1960s and es- sue an expanding interest in the history of common people and low amusements. jority, Nye argued. It has been
pecially the 1970s, however, a (Courtesy of Library of Congress) an unusually sensitive and ac-
number of excellent histories curate reflector of the attitudes
of entertainment emerged. The transition reflected an expanding in- and concerns of the society for which it is produced. Nye believed that
terest in the experiences of common people, as opposed to powerful popular culture reinforces the familiarunlike elite art, which tends
institutions or individuals. Crucial in this respect was the eras social to explore the new. Indeed, popular entertainment seeks less to pro-
ferment and rights revolution, which sharpened awareness of his- vide a new experience than to validate an older one (5).
tory from the bottom up, or the experiences of anonymous Ameri-
cans. The writings of British historians such as E. P. Thompson, who Pulse of the Masses
examined the lives of the English working class, were also influential. Even before Nye published his book, a small group of younger
Meanwhile, a generational shift among scholars was underway. As the historians had begun to explore popular culture. Among them was
historian Susan Smulyan recalled, Many of us were television kids, Lawrence Levine, who in 1965 started researching his book on African

Copyright Organization of American Historians All Rights Reserved <http://www.oah.org/magazine/> OAH Magazine of History April 2010 11
American folk culture. Drawing on his experiences in the civil rights ing a mass medium, middle-class literary women helped to construct
movement, he was increasingly concerned about which eventsand a culture that seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mothers Day.
which peopleshould constitute the focus of the historians study. In the process of doing so, Douglas argued, they ironically did the
By using such sources as the blues, he accelerated what he later de- dirty work of their society, assisting the continuation of male hege-
scribed as the most important intellectual breakthrough by histori- mony in different guises (10).
ans: a changed attitude toward the folk whom they now began to see Levines Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
not as inarticulate, impotent, irrelevant historical ciphers continually Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977) articulated a dominant theme
processed by forces over which they in the increasing number of books
had no control. In the late 1960s and essays on popular culture: the
and early 1970s, however, as Levine need to recognize ways in which less
pushed off from traditional histo- powerful groups have actively cre-
ries, he felt quite lonely and vulner- ated their own cultures, often in op-
able (6). position to dominant powers. Levine
The few other historians who documented how African Americans

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were beginning to examine popu- had built a rich culture from a variety
lar culture shared Levines convic- of sources, including music and folk
tion that amusements measured heroes such as boxer Joe Louis. Hu-
the pulse of the masses in unique man beings, he wrote, are more re-
ways. David Grimsted, Neil Har- silient, less malleable, and less able
ris, Robert C. Toll, and Ann Doug- to live without some sense of cultural
las illuminated new dimensions cohesion, individual autonomy, and
of nineteenth-century America, self-worth than a number of recent
while Robert Sklar probed cultural, scholars have maintained (11).
political, and economic power in Subsequently, in Highbrow/
the motion picture business. The Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
movies, wrote Sklar, were the first Hierarchy in America (1988), Levine
medium of entertainment and cul- dissected the process by which rul-
tural information to be controlled ing classes co-opted important seg-
by men who did not share the eth- ments of mass entertainmentthe
nic or religious backgrounds of plays of William Shakespeare, for
the traditional cultural elites (7). instanceand separated cultural
Grimsted believed the antebellum spaces into exclusive regions for so-
theater was popular because of its phisticated and aesthetically superi-
ability to tap common ideals and or groups while leaving vulgar en-
lives. Harris used P. T. Barnums tertainments to the great unwashed.
life as a prism through which to In a later collection of essays, Levine
view a variety of changes and sug- discussed other examples from enter-
gested that the popular arts looked tainment, including jazz and Depres-
not simply backward but also tried sion-era movies (12).
to make sense of the major trans- From the mid-1970s into the
formations in American society (8). 1990s, literature on popular cul-
Toll provided a refreshing look ture proliferated rapidly, suggesting
at minstrel shows, one of the nine- ways in which studies of entertain-
teenth centurys most popular Minstrelsy was one of the nineteenth centurys most popular forms of en- ment can open up new areas of in-
forms of entertainment. He dis- tertainment. The racist appeal of the early shows, which featured white quiry. Among the leading scholars
cussed minstrelsys racist appeal men in blackface, shaped white audience members misunderstandings were Warren Susman and Richard
of black life and the South. This poster is an advertisement of the Morris
and its role in shaping white audi- Brothers Minstrels, a well established minstrel troupe founded in 1857 that Slotkin. Susman admitted that au-
ence members misunderstandings owned the Continental Theatre on Washington Street in Boston. (Courtesy diences typically laughed when he
of black life and the South; but, by of Library of Congress) insisted, for example, that Mickey
examining as well the roles of Af- Mouse was as important for under-
rican American performers who standing the Great Depression as
blacked up, he also underlined the complexities of the minstrel phe- was Franklin Roosevelt. He nevertheless firmly held that, if we want
nomenon. In 1976, Toll published On With the Show! The First Cen- to know how people experienced the world, FDR had his role but so
tury of Show Business in America (1976), a wonderfully illustrated book did Mickey Mouse (13). Between 1973 and 1992, Slotkin authored a
about a wide range of nineteenth-century entertainments (9). distinguished trilogy focusing on the myth of the frontier as it played
By exploring what she described as the feminization of American out in Horatio Alger stories, Buffalo Bills Wild West Show, movie
culture, Douglas took issue with historians whoas if in fear of Westerns, and television. Myth, as Slotkin explained, is a way of both
contaminationhad ignored why the female writers of sentimental personal and social remembering. It employs a set of symbols that
fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe were so popular. Through best- is apparently simple yet capable of varied and complex uses on the
selling fiction and magazines, which were in the process of becom- part of competing political ideologies. Slotkin effectively mixed theo-
ry and narrative (14).

12 OAH Magazine of History April 2010 Copyright Organization of American Historians All Rights Reserved <http://www.oah.org/magazine/>
 Theoretical Turn
By the 1980s, some scholars wanted to move in more theoretical
directions. Influenced by trends in American studies and the emerg-
ing discipline of cultural studies, they looked to the writings of such
theorists as Michel Foucault (15). A prominent assumption among this
interpretive school has been that groups and identities are social con-
structs of the dominant society. The very process of studying them
necessarily imposes outside values and expectations on them. As the
British cultural critic Stuart Hall asserted: The fact is, black has
never been just there either; it is something constructed . . . not sim-
ply found. A problem with using examples from African American
acts in vaudeville to understand black culture would thus be that black
performers typically worked within a white racist framework (16).
From such an interpretive perspective, historians like Levine could
seem naive, unable to distinguish between, say, black consciousness
and power. This theoretical turn in scholarship reduced dramati-
cally the cultural maneuvering room that a number of writers found
among subjugated or non-dominant groups. Whereas historians like
Levine preferred, as one person explained, to treat their subjects as
creators of culture, the discursive historians tended to treat them as crea-
tures of culture, imprisoned in an endless web of representations (17).
For scholars such as Levine, an additional problem was when
theory becomes the subject, when the discussion of theorists be-
comes more important than the subject matter. I am not a theory-
theory guy, he said, although he dealt implicitly with interpretive
concepts such as acculturation. Its an idea. Its a hypothesis. Its a
way of beginning to sort out factswhat facts you want in and what
you dont (18).
Contested Terrain
Armed with ideas, hypotheses, and ambivalence about how much
to accentuate theory, an impressive number of scholars by the 1990s
were looking anew at a broad range of amusements such as minstrel-
sy, the penny press, burlesque, amusement parks, vaudeville, music,
radio, movies, and sports (19). Issues of class, race, and gender increas-
ingly characterized this emerging literature, which typically viewed
popular entertainment as a contested terrain, a field of cultural con-
flict, in the words of Michael Denning. In his study of dime novels,
Denning rejected interpretations of entertainments as either manip-
ulative forms of elite social control or as expressions of a genuine
peoples culture, opposing and resisting the dominant culture (20).
George Lipsitz has struck a similar balance in his studies of en-
tertainment. He regrets that the ever expanding influence, reach,
and scope of the mass media has worked insidiously to legitimate ex-
ploitative social hierarchies, to colonize the body as a site of capital
accumulation, and to inculcate within us the idea that consumer de-
sire is the logical center of human existence, yet he also believes that
people act in the arenas open to them. Popular culture can surprise.
It is thus possible to find terrains of conflict and struggle in the most
unexpected places and allies in the most improbable individuals (21).
Recently, however, as James W. Cook has pointed out, the long-
running scholarly debates between bottom-up audience choice and
top-down culture industry control show a renewed awareness of the
culture industrys power. Interpretations that simply document the
struggles between audiences and producers can posit a kind of equity
that does not really exist, leaving the equation lopsided, as Susan
Smulyan has argued. Moreover, media messages, even those with a
populist bent, are rarely hostile to the world of free enterprise: Capi-
talism and the consumer society come out largely uncontested, Todd
Gitlin writes in his examination of network television (22).
Copyright Organization of American Historians All Rights Reserved <http://www.oah.org/magazine/>
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In the 1990s, an impressive number of scholars were looking anew at a broad
range of popular entertainment, including amusement parks such as Luna Park,
which opened in 1903 in Coney Island, New York. Rides like the Shoot-the-Chute
pictured here offered a fantastical escape for Americans of all ages. (Courtesy of
Library of Congress)
Such studies provide important reminders of the need to follow
the money and machinations of dominant groups. They typically re-
sist easy conclusions that the development of the culture industry has
been smooth or that audiences and other entertainment consumers
have been mere ciphers, easily manipulated and voiceless. Televi-
sions development was notably staggered and uneven, argues Victo-
ria Johnson. According to Cooks important study of P. T. Barnum and
other practitioners of the arts of deception, neither the producers
nor the consumers of this culture maintained complete control (23).
David Suismans recent examination of the musical segment of
the culture industry echoes that point: Tin Pan Alleys songs did not
come from the people at all. Rather, the songs were crafted specifically,
deliberately, and essentially as commercial products. Yet, Suisman
emphasizes, the music industry could not create a market . . . without
the active approval and participation of consumers. The result has
been a balance struck between producer-planned consumption and
consumer-influenced production. For Suisman, the great paradox
has been that the genuine democratization of audiences developed in
tandem with the increasingly centralized, highly managed structure
of cultural production. The music industry was never monolithic, its
impact never totalizing or static (24).
Over the past several decades, popular culture scholars have thus
emphasized the complexity of interactions, processes, and competing
values and beliefs. The rapidly accumulating scholarship shows that
popular cultures development has been anything but trivial. Instead,
the development comprises a hugely complicated and layered story
about evolving technologies; varied entertainment forms; competing
companies; censorship; politics; laws and public policies; the concept
of celebrity; altered demographics; shifting audiences; changing pub-
lic tastes; fresh talent; and issues of race, class, and gender (25). It can,
in other words, tell us much about U.S. history as a whole. q
OAH Magazine of History April 2010 13
 Endnotes
1. Bill C. Malone, Country Music and the Academy: A Thirty Year
Professional Odyssey, in Daniel W. Patterson, ed., Sounds of the South
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 41.
2. See James W. Cook, The Return of the Culture Industry, in James W.
Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael OMalley, The Cultural Turn
in U.S. History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 291317 for
an insightful treatment of the culture industry. Adorno quotation is on
p. 291. Adorno, as Cook shows, later softened his position.
3. Quoted in Brian Urquhart, What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr,
New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009, 22.
4. Susan Smulyan, Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 6.
5. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New
York: Dial Press, 1970).
6. Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American
Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 57.
7. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: How the Movies Changed American
Life (New York: Random House, 1975), vi. Other early efforts to place
entertainment in its historical context include Erik Barnouw, History
of Broadcasting in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966, 1968, and 1970); John Cawelti, The Six Gun Mystique (Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1970);
and Andrew Bergman, Were in the Money: Depression America and Its
Films (New York: New York University Press, 1971). Although hardly
sympathetic to popular culture, Daniel Boorstins The Image: or, What
Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1961) and The
Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973)
were packed with insights.
8. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture,
18001850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Neil
Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1973).
9. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
10. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf,
1977), 6, 8, 11, 13.
11. Nan Enstad has characterized such perspectives as constituting a
visionary cultural history of subalterns. See her On Grief and
Complicity, in Cook et al., Cultural Turn, 321.
12. Levine, Unpredictable Past.
13. In 1984, Susman compiled his leading essays in Culture as History: The
Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Pantheon, 1984). Quotation is on p. 103.
14. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the
American Frontier, 16001860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1973); Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in
the Age of Industrialization, 18001890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985);
Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 45.
15. For an example of the use of theory, see the collection of essays by a
leading cultural studies scholar, Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of
Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1997).
16. See Enstad, On Grief and Complicity, 32122, 32630. Hall is quoted
on p. 327.
17. Karen Haltunnen, The Art of Listening, in Cook et al., Cultural
Turn, 418.
14 OAH Magazine of History April 2010 Copyright Organization of American Historians All Rights Reserved <http://www.oah.org/magazine/>
18. Ann Lage, An Interview with Lawrence W. Levine, Journal of American
History 93 (December 2006): 800801.
19. A very select listing would include Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface
Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels
and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); W. T.
Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert C. Allen, Horrible
Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991); Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues:
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African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices:
American Broadcasting, 19221952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997); and Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age
of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Englehart, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1983), which Rader has revised several times. In 1990, the University of
California Press published the first three volumes of its ongoing History
of the American Cinema series, edited by Charles Harpole. A few years
earlier, in 1986, the University of Illinois Press launched a series on Sport
and Society, edited by Rader and Randy Roberts.
20. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class
Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987); also Cook, The Return of
the Culture Industry, Cook et al., Cultural Turn, 293.
21. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), vii, xiv.
22. James W. Cook, Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 274n56; Smulyan,
Popular Ideologies, 4, 9, 10; Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (1983; reprint,
New York: Pantheon, 1985), 269.
23. Victoria Johnson, Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for
U. S. Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 7; James W.
Cook, Arts of Deception, 264, 308n11.
24. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American
Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 11, 51, 52,
60, 242, 275.
25. A very select list would include Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture
and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002); Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American
Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003); Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, America on Film:
Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies (Malden,
Mass.: Blackwell, 2004); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the
American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999); Elana Levine,
Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of the 1970s American Television
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); Karen Sotiropoulos,
Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Linda Mizejewski, Hardboiled
& High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (New York:
Routledge, 2004); John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man:
The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New
York: Hill & Wang, 2001); and Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and
Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
LeRoy Ashby is Regents Professor Emeritus at Washington State Universi-
ty. His most recent book is With Amusement for All: A History of Amer-
ican Popular Culture Since 1830 (University Press of Kentucky, 2006).