Editor’s Note
The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture is an extensive reference source on popular culture in
the United States, covering film, television, music, radio, theater, dance, comedy, art, books,
magazines, sports, social life, and other subject areas. Originally published in 2000, the encyclopedia,
now in its second edition, includes more than 2,700 updated entries and more than 300 new entries.
Each entry describes a topic in popular culture and, when appropriate, its relevance to the broader
American culture. The entry on MTV, for example, discusses the channel’s rise to popularity and the
relationship between MTV, youth culture, and consumerism. The entry on John Ford, outlining the
film director’s long career, also discusses the influence Ford’s films have had on Western movies and
on Americans’ perceptions of the West.
The encyclopedia’s introduction, “The Art of Everyday Life,” was updated for the second edition
by Jim Cullen, author or editor of many books on history and popular culture, including Popular
Culture in the United States (2000). The introduction provides a broad historical overview of
American popular culture and explains the growing importance of popular culture as an academic
topic in the United States.
ORGANIZATION
The 3,034 topics are arranged alphabetically and divided into five volumes. The entries, ranging from
about 75 to 3,000 words, often include subheads, intended to help readers find information more
easily. Each entry ends with a list of articles or books for further reading on the topic, as well as crossreferences to other, related entries. The entries are illustrated with more than a thousand color and
black-and-white photographs.
The encyclopedia has two indexes: a time-frame index, which lists the topics by decade from
1900 to the present; and a comprehensive subject index. Also included is a reading list of works on
popular culture in the United States, which is intended to supplement the bibliographies in the
entries.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people were involved in the revision of the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. Douglas
Dentino and Carol Schwartz, project manager and senior editor, respectively, at Gale, planned the
early stages of the project. Carol Schwartz also managed the in-house production of the encyclopedia,
and I am grateful for her wisdom, patience, and attention to detail.
Hundreds of scholars and writers, listed in the “Notes on Advisers and Contributors,” prepared
and reviewed entries in the second edition of the encyclopedia. The entry topics in both the first and
second editions were selected by a board of advisers, including scholars, teachers, librarians, and
archivists.
Much credit for the revision of the encyclopedia goes to Joseph Campana, the project editor
overseeing the writers, and Mary Beth Curran, the senior editor in charge of the editing process.
Their ability to manage scores of writers and editors to create and prepare thousands of entries was
remarkable. Mariko Fujinaka, Jacob Schmitt, David Hayes, and Theodore McDermott also made essential contributions as staff members on the project. Finally, I would like to thank the many line editors for the encyclopedia, including Robert Anderson, Yvette Charboneau, Cheryl Collins, Tony
Craine, Steve Davis, Holli Fort, Laura Gabler, Irene Goldman, Harrabeth Haidusek, Ellen Henderson, Joan Hibler, Paul Kelly, Judson MacLaury, Jill Oldham, Donna Polydoros, Natalie Ruppert,
Kathleen Thompson, Will Wagner, Tom Wilkens, and Kelly Wright.
Thomas Riggs
Editor
VII
Introduction
THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Sometimes when I’m wandering in an art museum looking at the relics of an ancient civilization, I
find myself wondering how a future society would represent a defunct American culture. What
objects would be chosen—or would survive—to be placed on display? Would I agree with a curator’s
choices? Were I to choose the items that some future American Museum of Art should exhibit to
represent modern American culture, here are some I would name: an Elvis Presley record, a Currier &
Ives print, a movie still from Casablanca, a smartphone. To put it a different way, my priority would
not be to exhibit fragments of an urban cathedral, a painted landscape, or a formal costume. I
wouldn't deny such objects could be important artifacts of American culture, or that they belong in a
gallery. But in my avowedly biased opinion, the most vivid documents of American life—the documents that embody its possibilities and limits—are typically found in its popular culture.
Popular culture, of course, is not an American invention, and it has a vibrant life in many
contemporary societies. But in few, if any, of those societies has it been as central to a notion of
national character at home as well as abroad. For better or worse, it is through icons such as McDonald's (the quintessential American cuisine), the Western (a uniquely American narrative genre),
and Oprah Winfrey (a classic late-twentieth century embodiment of the American Dream) that this
society is known—and is likely to be remembered.
It has sometimes been remarked that unlike nations whose identities are rooted in geography,
religion, language, blood, or history, the United States was founded on a democratic ideal—a notion
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness elaborated in the Declaration of Independence. That ideal
has been notoriously difficult to realize, and one need only take a cursory look at many aspects of
American life—its justice system, electoral politics, residential patterns, public schools, and labor
force—to see how far short it has fallen.
American popular culture is a special case. To be sure, it evinces plenty of the defects apparent in
other areas of our national life, among them blatant racism and crass commercialism. If nothing else,
such flaws can be taken as evidence of just how truly representative it is. There is nevertheless an
openness and vitality about pop culture—its appeal across demographic lines, its interplay of
individual voices and shared communal experience, the relatively low access barriers for people
otherwise marginalized in U.S. society—that give it real legitimacy as the art of democracy. Like it or
hate it, few dispute its centrality.
This sense of openness and inclusion—as well as the affection and scorn it generated—has been
apparent from the very beginning. In the prologue of the 1787 play The Contrast (whose title refers
to the disparity between sturdy republican ideals and effete monarchical dissipation), American
playwright Royall Tyler invoked a cultural sensibility in which "proud titles of 'My Lord! Your
Grace'/To the humble 'Mr.' and plain 'Sir' give place." Tyler, a Harvard graduate, Revolutionary War
officer, and chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, was in some sense an unlikely prophet of
popular culture. But the sensibility he voiced—notably in his beloved character Jonathan, a prototype
for characters from Davy Crockett to John Wayne—proved durable for centuries to come.
For much of early American history, however, artists and critics continued to define aesthetic
success on European terms, typically invoking elite ideals of order, balance, and civilization. It was
largely taken for granted that the most talented practitioners of fine arts, such as painters Benjamin
West and John Singleton Copley, would have to go abroad to train, produce, and exhibit their most
important work. To the extent that newer cultural forms—such as the novel, whose very name suggests its place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western civilization—were noted at all,
it was usually in disparaging terms. This was especially true of novels written and read by women,
such as Susanna Rowson's widely read Charlotte Temple (1791). Sermons against novels were common; Harvard devoted its principal commencement address in 1803 to the dangers of fiction.
IX
Introduction
The industrialization of the United States has long been considered a watershed development in
many realms of American life, and popular culture is no exception. Indeed, its importance is suggested in the very definition of popular culture coined by cultural historian Lawrence Levine: "the
folklore of industrial society." Industrialization allowed the mass reproduction and dissemination of
formerly local traditions, stories, and art forms across the continent, greatly intensifying the spread—
and development—of culture by, for, and of the people. At a time when North America remained
geographically and politically fragmented, magazines, sheet music, dime novels, lithographs, and other
print media stitched it together.
This culture had a characteristic pattern. Alexis de Tocqueville devoted eleven chapters of his
classic 1835−1840 masterpiece Democracy in America to the art, literature, and language of the United
States, arguing that they reflected a democratic ethos that required new standards of evaluation. "The
inhabitants of the United States have, at present, properly speaking, no literature," he wrote. This
judgment, he made clear, arose from a definition of literature that came from aristocratic societies like
his own. In its stead, he explained, Americans sought books "which may be easily procured, quickly
read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for beauties self-proffered
and easily enjoyed; above all they must have what is unexpected and new." As in so many other ways,
this description of American literature, which paralleled what Tocqueville saw in other arts, proved
not only vivid but prophetic.
The paradox of American democracy, of course, is that the freedom Euro-Americans endlessly
celebrated coexisted with—some might say depended on—the enslavement of African Americans. It is
therefore one of the great ironies of popular culture that the contributions of black culture (a term
here meant to encompass African, American, and amalgamations between the two) proved so decisive.
In another sense, however, it seems entirely appropriate that popular culture, which has always
skewed its orientation toward the lower end of a demographic spectrum, would draw on the most
marginalized groups in American society. It is, in any event, difficult to imagine that U.S. popular
culture would have had anywhere near the vitality and influence it has without slave stories, song, and
dance. To cite merely one example: every American musical idiom from country music to rap has
drawn on, if not actually rested upon, African American cultural foundations, whether in its use of
the banjo (originally an African instrument) or its emphasis on the beat (drumming was an important
form of slave communication). This heritage has often been overlooked, disparaged, and even
satirized. The most notable example of such racism was the minstrel show, a wildly popular
nineteenth-century form of theater in which white actors blackened their faces with burnt cork and
mocked slave life. Yet even the most savage parodies could not help but reveal an engagement with,
and even a secret admiration for, the cultural world the African Americans made in conditions of
severe adversity, whether on plantations, on tenant farms, or in ghettos.
Meanwhile, the accelerating pace of technological innovation began having a dramatic impact on
the form as well as the content of popular culture. The first major landmark was the development of
photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Initially a mechanically complex and thus inaccessible
medium, it quickly captured American imaginations, particularly by representing the drama and horror of the Civil War. The subsequent proliferation of family portraits, postcards, and pictures in
metropolitan newspapers began a process of orienting popular culture around visual imagery that
continues unabated to this day.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, sound recording, radio transmission, and motion pictures were all developed in rapid succession. But it would not be until well after 1900 that
their potential as popular cultural media would be fully exploited and recognizable in a modern sense
(radio, for example, was originally developed and valued for its nautical and military applications).
Still, even if it was not entirely clear how, many people at the time believed these new media would
have a tremendous impact on American life, and they were embraced with unusual ardor by those
Americans, particularly immigrants, who were able to appreciate the pleasures and possibilities afforded by movies, records, and radio.
Many of the patterns established during the advent of these media repeated themselves as new
ones evolved. The Internet, for example, was also first developed for its military applications. But by
the 1990s it had become a major means of commerce in American life. And by the turn of the
twenty-first century it had become a major cultural medium as well, incorporating older ones, such as
print journalism and video, in the course of developing distinctive forms such as websites and blogs
that had never been seen before. Although the Internet remains in its infancy—it is useful to
remember that almost thirty years separate the first films on Kinetosocopes and the sound movies—it
is now well established as the major mass medium of our time. As such, it has been hailed as the
apogee of modernity. But it has also been criticized on a variety of fronts, ranging from a loss of
privacy to a coarsening of public discourse.
Such complaints are nothing new. For much of the last century, the mass appeal of popular
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Introduction
culture was viewed as a problem. "What is the jass [sic] music, and therefore the jass band?" asked an
irritated New Orleans writer in 1918. "As well as ask why the dime novel or the grease-dripping
doughnut. All are manifestations of a low stream in man’s taste that has not come out in civilization’s
wash." However one may feel about this contemptuous dismissal of jazz, now viewed as one of the
great achievements of American civilization, this writer was clearly correct to suggest the demographic,
technological, and cultural links between the "lower" sorts of people in American life and the media
and forms of expression they used.
Indeed, because education and research have traditionally been considered the province of the
"higher" sorts of people in American life, popular culture was not considered a subject that should
even be discussed, much less studied. Nevertheless, there have always been those willing to continue
what might be termed the "Tocquevillian" tradition of treating popular culture with intellectual
seriousness and respect (if not always approval). In his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts and in much
of his journalism, critic Gilbert Seldes found in silent movies, cartoons, and pop music themes and
motifs fully worthy of sustained exploration. Amid the worldwide crisis of the 1930s and 1940s,
folklorist Constance Rourke described the origins of an indigenous popular culture in such books as
American Humor (1931) and The Roots of American Culture (1942). And with the rise of the Cold
War underlining the differences between democratic and totalitarian societies, sociologists David Riesman and Reuel Denney evaluated the social currents animating popular culture in Denney's The
Astonished Muse (1957), for which Riesman, who showed a particular interest in popular music, wrote
the introduction.
European scholars were also pivotal in shaping the field. Johan Huizing's Homo Ludens (1938),
Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957), and Antonio Gramsci's prison letters (written in the 1920s and
1930s but not published until the 1970s) have proved among the most influential works in defining
the boundaries, strategies, and meanings of popular culture. While none of these works focused on
American popular culture specifically, their focus on the flotsam and jetsam of daily life since the
medieval period proved enormously suggestive in an American context.
It has only been since the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that the study of
popular culture has come into its own. To a great extent, this development is a legacy of the 1960s.
The end of a formal system of racial segregation, the impact of affirmative action and governmentfunded financial aid, and the end of single-sex education at many long-established universities
dramatically transformed the composition of student bodies and faculties. These developments, in
turn, began having an impact on the nature and parameters of academic study. While one should not
exaggerate the impact of these developments—either in terms of their numbers or their effect on an
academy that in some ways has simply replaced older forms of insularity and complacency with new
ones—it nevertheless seems fair to say that a bona fide democratization of higher education occurred
in the last third of the twentieth century, paving the way for the creation of a formal scholarly
infrastructure for popular culture.
Once again, it was foreign scholars who were pivotal in the elaboration of this infrastructure.
The work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and others at Britain’s Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies in the 1950s and 1960s drew on Marxist and psychoanalytic ideas to explain, and in
many cases justify, the importance of popular culture. Although not always specifically concerned
with popular culture, a panoply of French theorists—particularly Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser,
and Michel Foucault—also proved highly influential. At its best, this scholarship illuminated unexamined assumptions and highly revealing (and in many cases, damning) patterns in the most seemingly
ordinary documents. At its worst, it lapsed into an arcane jargon that belied the directness of popular
culture and suggested an elitist disdain toward the audiences it presumably sought to understand.
Like their European counterparts, American scholars of popular culture have come from a
variety of disciplines. Many were trained in literature, among them Henry Nash Smith, whose Virgin
Land (1950) pioneered the study of the Western, and Leslie Fiedler, who applied critical talents first
developed to study classic American literature to popular fiction such as Gone with the Wind. But
much important work in the field has also been done by historians, particularly social historians who
began their careers by focusing on labor history but became increasingly interested in the ways
American workers spent their free time. Following the tradition of the great British historian E. P.
Thompson, scholars such as Herbert Gutman and Lawrence Levine have uncovered and described the
art and leisure practices of African Americans in particular with flair and insight. Feminist scholars of
a variety of stripes (and sexual orientations) have supplied a great deal of the intellectual energy in the
study of popular culture, among them Ann Douglas, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Jane Tompkins.
Indeed, the strongly interdisciplinary flavor of popular culture scholarship—along with the rise of
such institutions as the Popular Press and the Popular Culture Association, both based at Bowling
Green State University—suggests the way the field has been at the forefront of an ongoing process of
redrawing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities.
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Introduction
By the 1980s the stream of scholarship on popular culture had become a flood. In the 1990s the
field became less of a quixotic enterprise than a growing presence in the educational curriculum as a
whole. Courses devoted to the subject, whether housed in communications programs or in traditional
academic departments, became increasingly common in colleges and universities—and, perhaps more
importantly, have become integrated into the fabric of basic surveys of history, literature, and other
fields. Political scientists, librarians, and curators have begun to consider it part of their domain.
In the twenty-first century the sharp cultural distinctions between popular and elite culture have
faded and blurred. A lot of the same people who read Toni Morrison also read Stephen King (whose
reputation is undergoing a long-term positive reappraisal) or John Grisham; Mozart fans are as likely
to be Beatles fans as they are Beyoncé fans. To be sure, there are discrete tastes that sometimes correspond to factors such as age, gender, region, race, and class. But, if anything, the American elite
today is defined by its eclecticism, not by a once carefully cultivated snobbery.
Even if we assume, however, that the distinction between high and low culture is becoming a
thing of the past, that is all the more reason to make it a subject of intellectual scrutiny and inquiry.
Only in understanding that the world we live in was not always so can we begin to grasp the nature
and reality of change over time. History needs a sense of relevance to come to life, but it becomes
flat, even meaningless, when we think of everyone as just like us. That is why trips to museums—or
encyclopedias such as this one—are so useful and important. In pausing to think about the art of
everyday life, we can begin to see just how unusual, and valuable, it really is.
FURTHER READING
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. 1957. Reprint. New York: Noonday
Press, 1972.
Cullen, Jim. The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States, 2nd ed.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York Routledge, 2010.
Levine, Lawrence. The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic
Books, 2004.
Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1993.
Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth
Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Jim Cullen
Revised for the second edition, 2013
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