Memo - Readings for Sept. 28 - Jim Cullen, ed., Popular Culture in American History, chap. 2, 4, 5 I have added a link on our course webpage to the libary resources webpage customized for us by David Langenberg. (The link is called Library Resources and appears in the list of links in the middle of the page, below the header and picture.) You won't possibly use all of the resources it has information about, but you should look it over at least, to have an idea what's there. For example, in addition to the databases about books and articles, it also has a link to the very cool RLG Cultural Materials database, which has a huge range of photographs and other images. There are two assignments for this week. The first consists of three chapters from Popular Culture in American History, a reader designed for courses exactly like ours. After several weeks of looking at "popular culture" and "history" in abstact and theoretical terms, this week's readings present us with popular culture "in action." By that, I mean that we will turn our attention more toward people, the culture they made, and the way that historians have analyzed that culture. Each chapter combines an essay by a historian about some topic of popular culture (actually, they are all excerpts from longer works) and a sample primary source.  The essay in Chap. 2 comes from a book discussed in John Storey's Inventing Popular Culture, which many of you commented on. It's about Shakespeare in the nineteenth century as popular, not elite, culture. Chap. 4 is about "dime novels" in late-nineteenth century America, which people consumed in much the same way as television shows today, i.e. they were often considered "junk" culture. Chap. 5 explores the culture that young, working-class women made for themselves at the turn of the twentieth century, especially through dance halls. Each chapter has its own introduction (which you are expected to read, as well as the timeline), so I'll leave it at that. A few questions: The works included in this book are by some of the most innovative and influential historians of American popular culture. One thing you might ask yourself is why this historian or this work would be a particularly big deal? What issues are raised by reading these three chapters together? Do they overlap in any ways? A few weeks ago we talked about popular culture as a kind of "struggle." Do you see that in these readings? How? Over what? What is at stake? The second assignment for this week is to read the three sample papers I post on the course webpage. These will be posted by mid-afternoon on Monday.