Vance Packard And American Social Criticism

Author : Daniel Horowitz
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807862118
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vance Packard and American Social Criticism written by Daniel Horowitz and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vance Packard's bestselling books--Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960)--taught the generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) was a journalist who played an important role in the nation's transition from the largely complacent 1950s to the tumultuous 1960s. He was also one of the first social critics to benefit from and foster the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard left magazine writing to author his most famous works of social criticism. Horowitz traces the influence of Packard's education and early years in rural Pennsylvania, providing a deeper understanding of his thought and his later books. Packard's life, Horowitz contends, illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation. His career also expands our understanding of how one era shaped the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Author : Daniel Horowitz
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vance Packard & American Social Criticism written by Daniel Horowitz and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Vance Packard
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Social Classes in the 1950s written by Vance Packard and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an abridgment of The Status Seekers, Vance Packard's influential and popular study of social status and stratification in 1950s America. An introductory essay places Packard and his book in their historical context and discusses the role that social criticism played during the nation's transition from '50s complacency to '60s turbulence. Also included are an album of cartoons, a chronology, question for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.

Author : David Haney
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 1592137156
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Americanization of Social Science written by David Haney and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-28 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.

Author : Douglas Charles Rossinow
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231110570
Total Pages : 514 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Politics of Authenticity written by Douglas Charles Rossinow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism.

Author : John S. Gilkeson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139491180
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 written by John S. Gilkeson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.

Author : Giles Slade
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674043758
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Made to Break written by Giles Slade and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Author : Lawrence R. Samuel
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812204875
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Freud on Madison Avenue written by Lawrence R. Samuel and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do consumers really want? In the mid-twentieth century, many marketing executives sought to answer this question by looking to the theories of Sigmund Freud and his followers. By the 1950s, Freudian psychology had become the adman's most powerful new tool, promising to plumb the depths of shoppers' subconscious minds to access the irrational desires beneath their buying decisions. That the unconscious was the key to consumer behavior was a new idea in the field of advertising, and its impact was felt beyond the commercial realm. Centered on the fascinating lives of the brilliant men and women who brought psychoanalytic theories and practices from Europe to Madison Avenue and, ultimately, to Main Street, Freud on Madison Avenue tells the story of how midcentury advertisers changed American culture. Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, James Vicary, Alfred Politz, Pierre Martineau, and the father of motivation research, Viennese-trained psychologist Ernest Dichter, adapted techniques from sociology, anthropology, and psychology to help their clients market consumer goods. Many of these researchers had fled the Nazis in the 1930s, and their decidedly Continental and intellectual perspectives on secret desires and inner urges sent shockwaves through WASP-dominated postwar American culture and commerce. Though popular, these qualitative research and persuasion tactics were not without critics in their time. Some of the tools the motivation researchers introduced, such as the focus group, are still in use, with "consumer insights" and "account planning" direct descendants of Freudian psychological techniques. Looking back, author Lawrence R. Samuel implicates Dichter's positive spin on the pleasure principle in the hedonism of the Baby Boomer generation, and he connects the acceptance of psychoanalysis in marketing culture to the rise of therapeutic culture in the United States.

Author : Susan Strasser
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0805065121
Total Pages : 367 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Waste and Want written by Susan Strasser and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the importance of trash in American social history describes the virtual nonexistence of trash before the twentieth century during a time when every scrap had a use and discusses the rise of the culture of disposability and its long-term implications. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Author : Olivier Zunz
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226994611
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why the American Century? written by Olivier Zunz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-11-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface: "The New Colossus"Pt. 1: Making the Century AmericanCh. 1: Producers, Brokers, and Users of Knowledge Ch. 2: Defining Tools of Social Intelligence Ch. 3: Inventing the Average American Pt. 2: The Social Contract of the MarketCh. 4: Turning out Consumers Ch. 5: Deradicalizing Class Pt. 3: Embattled IdentitiesCh. 6: From Voluntarism to Pluralism Ch. 7: Enlarging the Polity Pt. 4: Exporting American Principles Ch. 8: Individualism and Modernization Ch. 9: The Power of Uncertainty Acknowledgments Notes Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.