The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future

This volume, dedicated to the historian Lawrence W. Levine, was, in the words of its authors, ‘born of our belief that the time is ripe for a broad assessment of U.S. cultural history’. It grew out of a conference held in September 2005 in honour of Levine, who before his death had established himself as one of the leading voices in the cultural history of the United States.(1) The volume contains 14 essays by contributors among whom are some of the most distinguished practitioners in this field.

These chapters follow an introduction of over 50 pages which constitutes an ambitious summation of the state of the field by two of the volume’s editors. In a scholarly tour de force, Cook and Glickman survey the field, its historiographical antecedents, and its lateral connections to give an overview of the current state and prospects of cultural history. This summary alone makes the volume worthy of the attention of anyone interested in US history – and, given the intellectual cross-fertilization between cultural history in the European and US contexts, of those engaged in the study of other national histories besides.

Setting out the state of the field necessarily involves confronting one of the conundrums of cultural history: a definition of a component of its object of knowledge, ‘culture’. Here, as the authors affirm, a number of meanings contend: for example, culture defined as artistic expression (whether of the ‘high’ or ‘low’ varieties whose intersections Levine explored); culture in the anthropological sense, i.e., a common set of customs, beliefs or rituals, culture as a ‘way of life’; and culture as a phenomenon encompassing the products purveyed by Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘culture industries’ along with the set of institutional arrangements and relationships that sustain those products’ circulation. These three examples do not exhaust the definitions that the authors enumerate, and the multiplicity of the alternate definitions poses a problem for anyone attempting to take stock of the sub-discipline: it is difficult to draw a boundary around and populate the interior of a field whose outline and contents alter depending on which definition one employs, or to determine what the practitioners of all the various kinds of cultural history have in common with one another.

Given the prolixity of the field, the editors’ introduction wisely does not attempt to draw anything like a unitary map. Instead, it sets out a number of propositions that delineate certain intellectual genealogies, traceries of scholarly interconnections, and career trajectories, pathways that are not mutually exclusive and can be superimposed or can sit alongside one another. These characterizations of U.S. cultural history describe its methods, defining questions, and objects of knowledge, illustrating them by exemplary texts; they point to the various sources on which some practitioners draw (for example, the work of Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault, the ‘myth and symbol’ school of American Studies, cultural studies of the Birmingham School, social history and labour history) and, in a fascinating account, the routes by which a number of cultural historians ‘avant la lettre’ arrived at the ‘cultural turn’.

From a variety of starting points – labour history, intellectual history, social history, political history, and women’s history – these historians became dissatisfied with the ‘tools of quantitative social science’ and sought an analytical register ‘more sensitive to the contingencies of individual perception, language, imagery, and day-to-day experience’ (p. 16). As one of that number explains, they began to feel dissatisfied with the social historian’s emphasis on public life and institutional structures and began instead to seek a more ‘experiential component’ – ‘shared systems of signs or symbolic languages rooted in, and expressive of, social relationships and social experiences’ (p. 17). Later, describing other works, the editors argue that ‘social history’s emphasis on quantitative categories and material conditions had become inadequate for explaining the deep subtleties of human experience and localized meaning-making’ (p. 35). The ‘new cultural history’ addressed these ‘blind spots’ and emerged as a corrective to the rigid ‘determinisms’ and ‘totalizing logics’ of 1970s social science.

The editors point out, though, that a new generation of historians emerged around the end of the 1980s who ‘came to culture not through some other rubric . . . but as a more explicit starting point’ (pp. 24–5). Among the differences of emphasis and narrative style among practitioners with different starting points (temporal and theoretical), they point to a challenge that some of the new generation of scholars posed to their predecessors: Robin Kelley, for one, asked whether historians like Levine were too ‘celebratory’ of the act of ‘mak[ing] meaning out of popular culture’. Kelley suggested that one should not go too far in this direction: after all, ‘popular culture can simultaneously subvert and reproduce hegemony [emphasis added]’ (p. 28).(2) The introduction demonstrates that cultural history is animated by productive tensions, the debate between Levine and his critics being a marker of the intellectual tradition his work helped to form, and an indication of the continuing vitality of the field.

Following the introduction comes a section titled ‘Practicing Cultural History’, including versions of the papers presented at the 2005 conference. O’Malley’s introduction to this section says that its eight essays, presented in approximately the chronological sequence of the histories they describe, demonstrate the tension between two approaches in cultural history: the attempt to form an empathic bond with the past, indicative of the concern for the lives of the less powerful and subaltern groups exemplified in Levine’s own work and rooted in the ‘new social history’ and the New Left; and a more discursive approach introduced by post-modernism and cultural studies in the 1980s, which was suspicious of attempts to ‘recover’ others’ voices or ‘speak for’ the subaltern.(3)

Ann Fabian’s ‘A Native among the Headhunters’ examines the life of William Brooks/Stumamu, a member of the Chinook Native American tribe who converted to Christianity, moved to Philadelphia, and began an association with various white men who were interested in the young man for various reasons: whereas a missionary wanted the Christian convert to assist with fundraising; a craniologist and a phrenologist were fascinated by the Native American’s skull, flattened according to his people’s custom. Records of Brooks’/Stumamu’s words allow us to see him observing and critiquing the white society just as they were observing him.

O’Malley’s ‘Rags, Blacking, and Paper Soldiers: Money and Race in the Civil War’ examines notions of the ‘authentic and ‘counterfeit’ bound up in two of the Union side’s measures during the Civil War: financing the war by printing paper money, and enlisting African Americans in the Union armies. The essay traces the intersections between two discursive systems, the languages of race and money, evident, for example, in popular songs that regarded the enlistment of African American soldiers (initially considered even by Lincoln as being inferior to whites in martial qualities) as somehow akin to the use of debased currency.

‘The Envelope, Please,’ by Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, is based on early 20th-century court records in New York’s Municipal Archives which document con tricks perpetrated by black confidence men against their almost invariably African American victims. The con tricks lead beyond the historians’ ‘conventional emphasis on black elites and respectable behavior’ to the world of the streets (p. 128) – and this evidence points to practices of meaning-making through the belief in magic, fortune telling, and supernatural powers. The sums of money involved also indicate the amount that working-class Harlemites were able to save. The evidence, and the authors’ attempt to make sense of it, reminds one of Levine’s interpretation of the trickster tales of slavery times, but the resulting interpretation seems more tenuous than this earlier historiography. This is partly the result of the incompleteness of the evidentiary record: the court documents are suggestive, but there is also something frustrating about the rapidity with which some individuals disappear from them – we can discern discursive patterns but not terribly much about how the discursive strategies – and criminal conduct – operated over time in people’s lives. Perhaps when this material is pieced together with additional sources from the authors’ study of the ‘Black Metropolis’ of Harlem and other relevant scholarship, the interpretation of Harlem life it evokes will become more convincing and complete.

Elliott J. Gorn’s ‘Re-membering John Dillinger’ deals with the mythology surrounding the Depression-era bank robber Dillinger. The word ­re-member wittily refers to the legend that Dillinger’s sexual organ, heroically magnified in the myth, was preserved somewhere in the Smithsonian Institution’s museums. Gorn grapples with how and why Americans remember the Dillinger lore. ‘Why do parts of it get retold, forgotten, changed (p. 166)?’ As the interpretation unfolds, Dillinger’s story is a venue where ideas about economic fairness and social justice were rehearsed, onto which ideas about authority and crime fighting were projected. And, in a satisfying conclusion to his informative and diverting narrative, Gorn makes sense of the fantasies about Dillinger’s sexual endowment, in relation to the ‘vernacular of the culture’.(4)

John Kasson’s ‘Behind Shirley Temple’s Smile: Children, Emotional Labor, and the Great Depression’ reveals the way in which the work of child performers such as Shirley Temple operated at the intersection of two economies, financial and emotional. Although her movie-struck mother said that acting was ‘simply part of her play life’, Temple recalled the words of a film director who used to threaten and punish – Kasson says torture – uncooperative child actors: ‘This isn’t playtime, kids ... It’s work’ (pp. 192, 203). Through her cheery smile and her projection of childhood innocence, mingled with vulnerability, emotional directness, and flirtatiousness, Temple repeatedly taught adults – the movie characters in her films, and presumably the audience beyond – lessons that helped equip them for their familial responsibilities and for the social entailments of living in Depression America. It is difficult to do justice to the intricacy of Kasson’s argument but suffice it to say that it is gratifying to see a historian at the top of his game producing a complex and persuasive analysis.

Elaine Tyler May’s ‘Gimme Shelter: Do-It-Yourself Defense and the Politics of Fear’ demonstrates the connections among the various social panics in different phases of post–Second World War US history and the impact that changing notions of risk and security had on individual and family life. During the cold war, government leaders preferred privatised civil defence measures to ‘the “communistic” idea of public shelters’ (p. 221). Simultaneously, the nuclear family was seen as a psychological bulwark against un-American or collectivist ideas: at its best, it supposedly raised emotionally healthy and self-reliant citizens whose freedom from neuroses was the best defence against alien creeds. This theme of vigilance born during the cold war was adapted into later manifestations of law and order and crime-fighting. As confidence in government dropped to its nadir following Watergate, Americans armed themselves with personal firearms in a do-it-yourself effort to achieve security. After the decline of the nuclear family, which held demographic dominance until the late 1960s, some Americans sought security by living in gated communities. A celebration of ‘free-market capitalism, private consumerism … , and muscular patriotism grounded in martial citizenship’ arose in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, fueling a ‘quasi-cold war revival’ (p. 238).

‘“Be Real Black for Me”: Representation, Authenticity, and the Cultural Politics of Black Power’, by Waldo E. Martin Jr., concentrates on a song recorded by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway in 1972, co-written by them and Charles Mann. In Martin’s analysis, the song engaged with the ‘Black is Beautiful’ sensibility that characterised the Black Power era and in so doing helps to reveal something about what Martin terms ‘black cultural politics’. The chapter addresses the tradition of church music that helped form Flack and Hathaway’s compositional and performing style, which merged with a Black Power consciousness to produce an ‘emotion-drenched and compelling secular hymn’ (p. 250). The close analysis of the song’s lyrics shows how it engages with hot-button issues such as intraracial gender and sexual relations, and the politicised valorisation of dark skin and crinkly hair. The notion of ‘real blackness’ also feeds into the essentialist/anti-essentialist debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the politics of identity. Thus, beginning with a song that seems to assert an authentic – ‘real’ – blackness, the essay destabilises and interrogates that concept and proffers an alternative definition involving Geertzian ‘webs of meaning’ (p. 260).

Eric Avila’s ‘Turning Structure into Culture: Reclaiming the Freeway in San Diego’s Chicano Park’ recounts the history of the formation of ‘Chicano Park’, an initially unhospitable parcel of land dotted with the concrete freeway pylons now vivified and made beautiful by murals that celebrate Chicano history and MesoAmerican civilisations. A relatively disempowered community that was being pushed aside by the imperatives of urban renewal and military-industrial development (San Diego being host to major, and expanding, military bases) resisted and, after an occupation of the site, forced the city government to designate it as a park. One member of the community imagined it, with the setting sun visible under the freeway, as a ‘cathedral’. Another compared it to a forest: ‘the area is cement, so the pillars are our trees’ (p. 275). Avila sees the park as expressing the cultural values of a group under siege, and as a ‘vision of urban modernity that did not demand the sacrifice of neighbourhood vitality, communal solidarity, and cultural integrity’ (p. 281).

The third section, titled ‘agendas for cultural history’ includes four essays by authors who, as O’Malley’s introduction tells us, represent different generational cohorts. The four essays are quite different from one another, although all either exemplify or explicitly address questions of theory and method.

James W. Cook’s ‘The Return of the Culture Industry’ addresses Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of mass culture articulated in The Dialectic of Enlightenment and elaborated in Adorno’s essay ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’. Addressing a number of forms of entertainment and performance on both sides of the Atlantic, Cook interrogates concepts such as ‘mass’ versus ‘popular’ and ‘vernacular’ culture and points to the analytical advantage of the term culture industry over mass culture. Referring to a number of recent works that use the phrase ‘the culture industry/ies’ Cook shows that it has been subtly reconfigured to connote something other than simple manipulation or ideological domination; instead these works see culture itself as an arena of conflict and contestation, and perceive that audiences do not simply consume cultural-industrial products but appropriate them for their own purposes or annex and subvert them. His point is more than simply that most culture industry products are ideologically contradictory, simultaneously shaped by producers and consumers. He suggests rather that producers and audiences changed over time, as an evolving form of ‘knowingness’ made it possible for producers to comment on their own creative effects even as audiences became increasingly competent at seeing through them while suspending their own scepticism in pursuit of the pleasures of diversion: as P. T. Barnum put it, ‘the public appears disposed to be amused, even when it is conscious of being deceived’ (p. 307).

Nan Enstad’s ‘On Grief and Complicity: Notes toward a Visionary Cultural History’ begins with a vivid tableau: an art installation titled the Tobacco Project by a Chinese-born artist, involving slides projected onto the Duke Homestead, birthplace of one of North Carolina’s tobacco industry magnates, and accompanied by an audio tape. The slides were the medical charts of the artist’s father, dying of cancer. This scene prompts a meditation on the state of cultural history and cultural studies, and a questioning of the place of grief in inspiring a newly visionary activist history. The essay evokes a time of crisis, with fascism on the rise, and takes on weighty themes of trauma, vulnerability, and death.

However, this chapter did not work for me. For one, I thought the connection between the opening scene and the remainder of the essay was artificial and forced. For another, the essay differs from the others in being less sure-footed in its command of historical detail and in the precision of its language, and the editors were less exacting than they might, and perhaps ought to, have been. The author drops a clanger in her reference to the International (not, as it should be, the Industrial) Workers of the World, which might be insignificant were it not in the midst of a discussion of the labour activist and musician Joe Hill. In that context, it raises doubts about her command of the relevant history. The author insists on using the word corroboration when she means something like complicity or collusion. One of the endnotes complains about her readers’ misunderstanding her analysis of the ‘opposition between corroboration [sic] with power and resistance’ in one of her previous works, a failure of communication for which they can hardly be blamed; another note contains a rather gratuitous swipe at the limited historical understanding of the author’s own students.

The essay is conceptually hobbled by a set of binary oppositions, without apparently recognising the way that many historical subjects occupy intermediate positions or negotiate the space between polar terms such as oppression or resistance. The author calls resistance ‘utopian’, but we must be living in dark times indeed if resisting oppression, rather than ending oppression, is regarded as such; this seems to signify a failure of historical imagination inconsistent with the aspiration to a ‘visionary’ history. The author does not consider some obvious questions, which I would have supposed a cultural historian would find irresistible, about the relationship between the artist and the North Carolina Tobacco Museum, of which the Duke Homestead is part: was his installation approved by the museum? How did this event play out in the relationship between the museum and the agrarian-industrial enterprises whose history it records and, to judge by its Web site, appears to celebrate?(5)

Philip Deloria’s ‘From Nation to Neighborhood: Land, Policy, Culture, Colonialism, and Empire in U.S.-Indian Relations’ also begins with a vignette: the author describes buying a book of postage stamps using a 20 dollar bill. The bill carries the image of Andrew Jackson, a leading proponent of Indian Removal, and the stamps are loaded with nationalist imagery, but among the change the machine issues come dollar coins carrying the likeness of an American Indian woman, Sacajawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their voyage of discovery which helped open up the West to white American explorers, settlers, and commercial interests. Deloria describes the buying of the stamps as ‘an act of culture’, the ‘stuff of cultural analysis’ (p. 344). Beginning with the circulation of Sacajawea’s image, Deloria embarks on an account of the genealogies of ideology, subjectivity, and power that can be traced in the encounter of groups of people in America under conditions of struggle. After a brief outline of the emergence of the field of Native American studies, Deloria sets out four phases of the imperial relationship between white Americans and Indians. The chapter establishes the indispensability of an understanding of political developments, such as laws, treaties and warfare, in order to situate and understand the cultural history with which they interact.

Jean-Christophe Agnew’s ‘Capitalism, Culture, and Catastrophe’ places Levine’s body of work in the context of the development of American cultural history, and takes stock of the current state of and challenges in the field. Agnew revisits Levine’s first book, a study of the populist leader William Jennings Bryan (6), to discover the threads that ran through the rest of his work. Agnew associates the ‘democratic opening’ already evident in his rendering of Bryan’s last decade with a ‘low or demotic modernism’ axiomatic for a generation of American cultural historians (pp. 386, 389). Levine’s subjects were creators as well as creatures of culture. As Agnew explains, after quoting Levine’s essay from the 1992 AHR forum referred to above (reprinted in a collection of his essays), ‘The slaves did not submit to the slaveholder’s Bible, nor did Depression audiences necessarily buy the Hollywood ending. American culture, American cultures, are at every point hybrid, creolized, coauthored’ (p. 388). Agnew compares Levine’s account of African Americans’ forging and nurturing of a culture on the rock of exploitation and injustice to other formulations of the effects of catastrophic experiences: E. P. Thompson’s analysis of the making of the English working classes, and especially Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.(7) He describes the work of scholars who, following Levine, tried to capture the experiences of people enduring, and forming their own solidarities, in the face of various kinds of dislocation and dispossession, discovering the common bond of humanism that runs between Levine’s work and that of later generations of historians.

In the final part of the book, titled ‘Epilogue’, Karen Halttunen’s chapter ‘The Art of Listening’ recalls the emergence of Levine’s work on African Americans’ history in the context of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and then recapitulates some of the themes of the book to which this review has alluded: the distinction between the empathic and discursive approaches to cultural history; the definition of the concept of culture; the notion of human subjects as creators as well as creatures of culture; the debate between practitioners of ethnographic listening and ‘discursive purists’ who saw problems in historians’ giving voice to subaltern groups. The essay then provides a useful summary of the themes of the preceding chapters.

In their introduction, the editors of the volume point to a problem arising from the very success of cultural history, whose borders were always fuzzy, and which has now expanded into virtually every other field of history: ‘this pattern of expansion has led some commentators to suggest the field’s impending obsolescence. If “we are all culturalists now” (as one recent formulation has it), why bother with a dedicated field called cultural history’ (p. 38)? The essays in this volume provide one answer to the question, by illustrating the productiveness of the scholarship that goes on under the rubric of cultural history (whatever the official disciplinary designation of the posts its practitioners fill).

There is, however, another problem equally troubling for the subdiscipline that runs through the book: if the editors of this volume had based a definition of ‘culture’ not on a broad survey of all that has been written in the field, but on the chapters in this volume alone, they would have found numerous quite distinct concepts jostling together. Some of the authors demonstrate their critical awareness of the diverse meanings of the term and raise this as an intellectual issue, but others seem to use the term willy nilly. In one essay, we see a reference to an ‘enlightened intellectual culture’, i.e., an environment populated by the learned (p. 64), as well as a reference to the contrast between nature and culture, which implies an entirely different meaning (p. 68). A later essay refers variously to popular culture, American culture, a culture of crime, and the previously referenced ‘vernacular of the culture’ (pp. 156, 169, 176). Still another essay mentions cultural inheritance, cultural fallout, cultural norms, a culture of fear, and domestic culture (pp. 217–219, 238). Philip Deloria, acknowledging that ‘a rigorous definition of “culture” is far beyond the scope of this chapter’ (p. 372n 1), proceeds to use the phrases American culture, cultural practice, material culture, cultural transformation, culturally mixed individuals, cultural brokers, contemporary Native cultural life, and social or cultural commensurability (pp. 343, 348, 358, 359, Cf. p. 373n 4). This multiplicity of uses points to a certain semantic embarrassment. A disciplinary subfield can accommodate many different specialisms, but a problem arises when its core designation has so many competing and inconsistent meanings. If culture seems to mean whatever the historian wants it to, the resulting problem is not just that it is hard to tell where ‘cultural history’ begins and ends. A more serious problem arises if the ready availability of such a labile term too conveniently substitutes it for the hard work of drawing, rather than implying or assuming, connections among ways of seeing, modes of expression, ethnic or group identities, traditions, ways of life, and emotional or intellectual dispositions. Because they can all be smooshed together in the word culture, the overuse of an under-theorised term may preclude the rigorous examination of some of the most challenging problems in history – say, for example, that of causation. Even if one sees things in terms of mutual shaping or reciprocal effects, rather than uni-linear causal relationships, the point is that one has to distinguish concepts or phenomena, not lump them together, in order to discern their relationships. Culture’s capacity to accommodate within itself all the things we might want to link together may make it an attractive term for the same reason that it is a deeply problematic one. The notion of culture may not offer any help in moving beyond fixed positions in debates such as the one involving the orientation to empathy or discourse, leaving the historian, and the field of study, at an impasse. If, as Agnew says, we are ‘already looking “beyond” the cultural turn to discover what we should “bring back in”’ (p. 405), one of the answers may be an issue that has never really gone away: a continued alertness to the fact that culture can obscure as well as reveal, and that the capaciousness of its meaning poses a problem not only to those who want to define the field, but also to those who practice within it.

The editors declined to respond to this review

Notes

1. Because of his significance as a seminal figure in the field of cultural history, as well as the one to whom the book is dedicated, it is worth touching on Levine’s own works, including the path-breaking Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977); Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988); The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York, 1993); and The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston, MA, 1996).. (Levine’s first book is discussed in Jean-Cristophe Agnew’s contribution to this volume, and is cited in note six, below.) In the first of the works listed here, Levine analysed materials such as trickster narratives to introduce complexity and ambiguity into an interpretation of enslaved African Americans’ lives. Too often, Levine observed, the slaves emerged from historians’ works ‘as docile, accepting beings or as alienated prisoners on the edge of rebellion’ (p. 114). Levine’s analysis showed them not to be so brutalized as to be denied all culture except that imposed on them by the white master class, nor to be deprived of all agency; instead they were people adapting to the realities of existence in a society dominated by the master class, living in a world animated by their hopes and faith, albeit one ‘dominated by malevolence, injustice, arbitrary judgment, and paradox’ (p. 134). In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine showed how the bifurcation of ‘culture’ into ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms was not a matter of the intrinsic qualities of culture products nor of the natural segregation of social classes who pursued entertainments proper to their station: after all, for American audiences in nineteenth-century America, ‘Shakespeare waspopular entertainment’ (p. 21). Cultural hierarchy was an historical and cultural artefact, the result of a process in which middle-class audiences were schooled in tastes and public comportment that allowed them to distinguish themselves from the lower orders.

   As one who took a doctoral field examination in American social history at a major East-Coast research university in 1990, I can testify that these works were immensely influential on those of my peers who studied popular and expressive culture and African American history, and who attempted to understand the lives and beliefs of people other than those in politically dominant and economically advantaged groups. The third of these works, containing essays on a variety of topics, challenges historians’ attempts to arrive at a single, synthetic narrative, and, demonstrates an effort to complicate the picture, ‘finding intricacies where before we had certainties, turning unity into multiplicity, clarity into ambiguity’ (p. 12).Back to (1)

2. A key reference point is the exchange among Lawrence Levine, Robin D. G. Kelley, Natalie Davis, and T. J. Jackson Lears in a forum on ‘the folklore of industrial society: popular culture and its audiences’ in American Historical Review 97, 5 (December 1992), 1369–1430. In response to Kelley and a related criticism by Lears, Levine wrote, ‘If we become too obsessed with power, we risk losing sight of the culture itself ... until we do the requisite research into the culture, the institutions, and the audiences, we will not begin to know the exact results of these [power shifts], no matter what our respective ideologies tell us about the putative state of cultural hegemony’ (p. 1429).Back to (2)
3. References to the ‘subaltern’ groups refer to the field of ‘subaltern studies’ connecting ultimately to the work of Antonio Gramscsi; in relation to the issue of ‘speaking for’ the subaltern, an important reference is Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL, 1988).Back to (3)
4. A monograph has since appeared: Elliott J. Gorn, Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year that Made America’s Public Enemy Number One (New York, NY, 2009).Back to (4)
5. The museum’s calendar of events includes activities such as planting a tobacco seedling and participating in a festival including the harvest, stringing and curing of tobacco plants by costumed interpreters. See <Back to (5)
6. Lawrence W. Levine, Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915–1925 (New York, NY, 1965).Back to (6)
7. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr., Boston, MA, 1957).Back to (7)