Blower, Brooke. Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

== Summary ==
This
book overturns the old American clichés about “Gay Paree“ and the “free
mingling” of Americans (black and white) in Paris and offers a darker and more
nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of
Paris between the wars, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern
American political culture. 'Americans in Paris encountered a complex terrain',
which forced them to grapple with pressing questions about being American as
well as Americans’ relationship to the world. “American-ness” emerged as an
“international concept during the first half of the twentieth century” as French and Americans turned to the other to define themselves. (3)  America became a potent symbolic in transatlantic political culture
during the decades prior to WWII. Along with the more famous American artists
and novelists that lived in Paris after WWI, there was also a larger American
community made up of journalists, scholars, students, and businessmen, all of
which created a distinct American community within Paris (Chicago Texas Inn and
Boy Scout Clubs). This community interacted with
a growing immigrant community (Paris had the highest percentage), dealt with
the detrimental effects of WWI (debt, coal rationing, government polarization –
largest concentration of communists/”Red Belt”), and felt the effects of salient international politics. Thus, Blower writes,
“Here, at the intersection of European and American history, where the fluid
sweep of international networks meets the rooted context of an urban landscape,
a new story emerges about how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics
of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape American
political culture.” (13)
Example: The Sacco-Vanzetti Trial in the United States impacted French-Parisian views of Americans. In particular, Left-Parisians attacked Americans and their establishments as the trial developed. Americans and their businesses were political symbols (cultural politics).
See also: Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Vritues