Creating the College Man

Creating the College Man
Author: Daniel A. Clark
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299235335

How did a college education become so vital to American notions of professional and personal advancement? Reared on the ideal of the self-made man, American men had long rejected the need for college. But in the early twentieth century this ideal began to change as white men born in the U.S. faced a barrage of new challenges, among them a stultifying bureaucracy and growing competition in the workplace from an influx of immigrants and women. At this point a college education appealed to young men as an attractive avenue to success in a dawning corporate age. Accessible at first almost exclusively to middle-class white males, college funneled these aspiring elites toward a more comfortable and certain future in a revamped construction of the American dream. In Creating the College Man Daniel A. Clark argues that the dominant mass media of the era—popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post—played an integral role in shaping the immediate and long-term goals of this select group of men. In editorials, articles, fiction, and advertising, magazines depicted the college man as simultaneously cultured and scientific, genteel and athletic, polished and tough. Such depictions underscored the college experience in powerful and attractive ways that neatly united the incongruous strains of American manhood and linked a college education to corporate success.

American Mass-Market Magazines

American Mass-Market Magazines
Author: Alan Nourie
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 632
Release: 1990-03-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This volume provides concise, in-depth histories of 106 of the most significant mass-market or general magazines in the United states--both active periodicals and those which have ceased publication. Included are magazines of wide audience appeal (e.g., People) as well as major tabloids, Sunday supplement magazines, regional magazines, and the most widely read publications devoted to specific audiences (e.g., Mechanix Illustrated) with a circulation of over 100,000. Emphasizes the modern mass-market periodical, but thirty-three titles have been included that were established or whose entire existence occurred in the 19th century. Profiles are arranged alphabetically by magazine title with cross references to title variations. In many instances, the history included here is the only source of information on the magazine covered. In others, large amounts of material written over the years have been consolidated, and along with accompanying bibliographies serve as a definitive source on the magazines in question. Locations have been provided in cases that might prove problematic. An indispensable resource for journalism students and researchers.

The Holiday Makers

The Holiday Makers
Author: Richard K. Popp
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2012-05-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0807142875

In mid-twentieth-century America, mass tourism became emblematic of the expanding horizons associated with an affluent, industrial society. Nowhere was the image of leisurely travel more visible than in the parade of glossy articles and advertisements that beckoned readers from the pages of popular magazines. In Richard K. Popp's The Holiday Makers, the magazine industry serves as a window into postwar media and consumer society, showing how the dynamics of market research and commercial print culture helped shape ideas about place, mobility, and leisure. Magazine publishers saw travel content as a way to connect audiences to a booming ad sector, while middlebrow editors believed sightseeing travel was a means of fostering a classless society at home and harmony abroad. Expanding transportation networks and free time lay at the heart of this idealized vision. Holiday magazine heralded nothing less than the dawn of a new era, calling it "the age of Mobile Man -- Man gifted, for the first time in history, with leisure and the means to enjoy distance on a global scale." For their part, advertisers understood that selling tourism meant turning "dreams into action," as ad executive David Ogilvy put it. Doing so involved everything from countering ugly stereotypes to tapping into desires for "authentic" places and self-actualization. Though tourism was publicly touted in egalitarian terms, publishers and advertisers privately came to see it as an easy way to segment the elite free spenders from the penny-pinching masses. Just as importantly, marketers identified correlations between an interest in travel and other consumer behavior. Ultimately, Popp contends, the selling of tourism in postwar America played an early, integral role in the shift toward lifestyle marketing, an experiential service economy, and contributed to escalating levels of social inequality.

Selling Culture

Selling Culture
Author: Richard Malin Ohmann
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 432
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781859849743

Surveys the new practices of advertising, mass distribution of goods, and the birth of the inexpensive mass-audience magazine at the end of the 19th century, and their role in the creation of the American professional-managerial class. Focuses on magazine publishing, careers of key personalities in the publishing world, and the role of fiction in the magazines. For students and general readers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

On Company Time

On Company Time
Author: Donal Harris
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-10-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231541341

American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism "like wet sox and gin before breakfast." It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from "serious" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that defined McClure's, The Crisis, Time, Life, Esquire, and others. On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Working across the borders of media history, the sociology of literature, print culture, and literary studies, Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture. Starting in the 1890s, a growing number of writers found steady paychecks and regular publishing opportunities as editors and reporters at big magazines. Often privileging innovative style over late-breaking content, these magazines prized novelists and poets for their innovation and attention to literary craft. In recounting this history, On Company Time challenges the narrative of decline that often accompanies modernism's incorporation into midcentury middlebrow culture. Its integrated account of literary and journalistic form shows American modernism evolving within as opposed to against mass print culture. Harris's work also provides an understanding of modernism that extends beyond narratives centered on little magazines and other "institutions of modernism" that served narrow audiences. And for the writers, the "double life" of working for these magazines shaped modernism's literary form and created new models of authorship.

Under Cover

Under Cover
Author: Thomas L. Bonn
Publisher: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York : Penguin Books
Total Pages: 1070
Release: 1982
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

A short history of the American paperback, includes a number of cover reproductions including several color sections. Nice history of paperbacks from its early beginnings up to the mid 1970s. Includes chapters on collecting.

History of the Mass Media in the United States

History of the Mass Media in the United States
Author: Margaret A. Blanchard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2118
Release: 2013-12-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135917493

The influence of the mass media on American history has been overwhelming. History of the Mass Media in the United States examines the ways in which the media both affects, and is affected by, U.S. society. From 1690, when the first American newspaper was founded, to 1995, this encyclopedia covers more than 300 years of mass media history. History of Mass Media in the United States contains more than 475 alphabetically arranged entries covering subjects ranging from key areas of newspaper history to broader topics such as media coverage of wars, major conflicts over press freedom, court cases and legislation, and the concerns and representation of ethnic and special interest groups. The editor and the 200 scholarly contributors to this work have taken particular care to examine the technological, legal, legislative, economic, and political developments that have affected the American media.

A Novel Marketplace

A Novel Marketplace
Author: Evan Brier
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2012-02-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812201442

As television transformed American culture in the 1950s, critics feared the influence of this newly pervasive mass medium on the nation's literature. While many studies have addressed the rhetorical response of artists and intellectuals to mid-twentieth-century mass culture, the relationship between the emergence of this culture and the production of novels has gone largely unexamined. In A Novel Marketplace, Evan Brier illuminates the complex ties between postwar mass culture and the making, marketing, and reception of American fiction. Between 1948, when television began its ascendancy, and 1959, when Random House became a publicly owned corporation, the way American novels were produced and distributed changed considerably. Analyzing a range of mid-century novels—including Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place—Brier reveals the specific strategies used to carve out cultural and economic space for the American novel just as it seemed most under threat. During this anxious historical moment, the book business underwent an improbable expansion, by capitalizing on an economic boom and a rising population of educated consumers and by forming institutional alliances with educators and cold warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good. A Novel Marketplace tells how the book trade and the novelists themselves successfully positioned their works as embattled holdouts against an oppressive mass culture, even as publishers formed partnerships with mass-culture institutions that foreshadowed the multimedia mergers to come in the 1960s. As a foil for and a partner to literary institutions, mass media corporations assisted in fostering the novel's development as both culture and commodity.

A Free and Responsible Press

A Free and Responsible Press
Author: Commission on Freedom of the Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 1947
Genre: Freedom of the press
ISBN: 0226471357

"The question of how much freedom the press should enjoy has been debated throughout American history. In 1942 an impartial commission was formed to study mass communication, evaluate the performance of the media, and make recommendations for possible regulation of the press. This book is the general report of that commission."--Book cover.

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society
Author: Debra L. Merskin
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 2169
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1483375528

The reference will discuss mass media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, and social media—and will describe the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society.