Public culture
Subtitle: diversity, democracy, and community in the United States
By: edited by Marguerite S. Shaffer.
Contributors: Shaffer, Marguerite S.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 376
ISBN-13: 9780812240818
Subjects: Popular culture -- United States -- Congresses; Political culture -- United States -- Congresses; Pluralism (Social sciences) -- United States -- Congresses; Democracy -- United States -- Congresses; Community life -- United States -- Congresses; Public spaces -- United States -- Congresses; National characteristics, American -- Congresses; United States -- Civilization -- Congresses; United States -- Social conditions -- Congresses
Genres: Congresses.
Description: In the United States today many people are as likely to identify themselves by their ethnicity or region as by their nationality. In this country with its diversity and inequalities, can there be a shared public culture? Is there an unbridgeable gap between cultural variety and civic unity, or can public forms of expression provide an opportunity for Americans to come together as a people? In Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, an interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses these questions while considering the state of American public culture over the past one hundred years. From medicine shows to the Internet, from the Los Angeles Plaza to the Las Vegas Strip, from the commemoration of the Oklahoma City bombing to television programming after 9/11, public sights and scenes provide ways to negotiate new forms of belonging in a diverse, postmodern community. By analyzing these cultural phenomena, the essays in this volume reveal how mass media, consumerism, increased privatization of space, and growing political polarization have transformed public culture and the very notion of the American public. -- Publisher description.
Notes: "This book grew out of a conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in March 2003, entitled "The Transformation of Public Culture : Assessing the Politics of Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, 1890 to the Present"--Pref.

Includes bibliographical references and index.