The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

The World Turned Inside Out explores American thought and culture in the formative moment of the late twentieth century in the aftermath of the fabled Sixties. The overall argument here is that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that earlier moment of upheaval decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices--from the all-volunteer Army to the cartoon politics of Disney movies--in the 1980s and 90s. By this accounting, the so-called Reagan Revolution was not only, or even mainly, a conservative event. By the same accounting, the Left, having seized the commanding heights of higher education, was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars. At the end of the twentieth century, the argument goes, the United States was much less conservative than it had been in 1975. The book takes supply-side economics and South Park equally seriously. It treats Freddy Krueger, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ronald Reagan as comparable cultural icons.

Pendergast traces the shift in US periodicals from Victorian masculinity--which valued character, integrity, hard work, and duty--to modern masculinity--which valued personality, self- realization, and image. Arguing that the rise of mass consumer culture was a key factor in the change, he describes how such magazines as American Magazine, Esquire, and True presented masculinity in ways that reflected the magazines' relationship to advertisers, contributors and readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Caught in the Crossfire reveals how the United States has been gradually changing from a society that celebrates childhood into one that is hostile to and afraid of its own children. Today kids are often seen as a threat to our social and moral values. In schools, some behavior is criminalized, and growing numbers of kids find themselves in penal and psychiatric confinement. This breakdown is often too readily attributed to bad parenting, the crisis of the family, or the greed of capitalism. Grossberg offers a new and original understanding of the changes transforming contemporary America, and of the choices Americans face about their future. He documents the relations between economic ideologies and economic realities and explores what is going on in the "culture wars" as well as on the Internet and other new media. Caught in the Crossfire argues that all of these changes and tn struggles, including those involving the state of kids, only make sense as integral parts of a larger transformation to define America's uniqueness and to develop its own sense of modern culture. Part of the Cultural Politics and the Promise of Democracy Series.

This book, first published in 2001, is a comprehensive history of the most powerful group in the nineteenth-century United States: New York City's economic elite. This small and diverse group of Americans accumulated unprecedented economic, social, and political power, and decisively put their mark on the age. Professor Beckert explores how capital-owning New Yorkers overcame their distinct antebellum identities to forge dense social networks, create powerful social institutions, and articulate an increasingly coherent view of the world and their place within it. Actively engaging in a rapidly changing economic, social, and political environment, these merchants, industrialists, bankers, and professionals metamorphosed into a social class. In the process, these upper-class New Yorkers put their stamp on the major political conflicts of the day - ranging from the Civil War to municipal elections. Employing the methods of social history, The Monied Metropolis explores the big issues of nineteenth-century social change.

Combining archival research, critical theory, and gender- and disability-analysis, Nate Holdren argues that Progressive Era reform to employee injury law created new employment discrimination against disabled people and a new injury culture that treated employees and their injuries instrumentally.