![]() With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity - bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were. W.A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (W.Norton in 2014, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America, tells the story of Shirley Temple’s career as America’s most adored-and commercialized-child during a pivotal decade in American history. Professor Kasson’s forthcoming book continues the investigations of the origins of modern commercial culture and its attendant new structures of feeling. ![]() Several books have emerged from this work. His research has been persistently concerned with the rich variety of American cultural expression in a dynamic society. John Kasson is a cultural historian, a field that encompasses a rich variety of materials, both “high” and “low,” as well as disciplines ranging from literature and the visual arts to psychology and anthropology. ![]() PhD Yale University, 1971 Research Interests ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |