“The Kind of People who Make Good Americans”: Nationalism and Life's Family Ideal

Kozol, Wendy

doi:10.1002/9780470774885.ch7

Cited by 2 publications

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“…'In so doing, this imagined community also functioned to regulate social forms and deny diversity at a time when anti-Communist campaigns made differences politically dangerous.' 37 The Saturday Evening Post and True Story also relied on the consensus view for articulating America as a united homefront during the Second World War. 'To dramatize a conflict taking place on foreign soil,' Honey argues, 'propagandists found in women the personification of vulnerability they were looking for to concretize and make real the message that civilians must help soldiers protect American interests.'…”

Section: Popular Culture Place and National Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distillations of something larger: the local scale and American national identity

Appleton

2002

cultural geographies

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This paper examines the role of the local scale in popular cultural constructions of American nationhood between 1942 and 1969. By local scale, I refer to a geographical, sociological and psychological space that is limited to face-to-face experiences, but is the manifestation of constantly changing relations of interdependence between social, political, economic and cultural processes operating at scales smaller and larger than the local. Drawing upon empirical material from the Saturday Evening Post, it illustrates how the local scale operates as a medium through which shifting notions of American identities are articulated. It argues that throughout this period the Post promoted the image of a united America, and the local scale provided tangible links with the nation that attempted to integrate readers into a sense of national community. The local scale was used to define the United States as a nation that was united by subsuming internal differences, but, in time, the local came to articulate a nation where unity was expressed through a shared political creed of democracy in which difference and diversity were celebrated. The paper also traces the changing meaning and significance of the local scale for mediating the nation. The paper shows that the meaning of the local scale shifted between notions of community, locality, neighbourhood and territory. The metonymic value of the local scale also changed and the paper argues that while the local scale was useful for defining an integrated nation during and after World War II that relied on an inward-looking perspective, by the late 1950s that perspective had become less introspective and more outward looking. By the 1960s, the paper shows how the significance of the local scale as a metonym of the nation had diminished, but instead was used as a means of attracting readers in a rapidly changing social and economic climate. The result is a deeper understanding of the way the media articulate the nation through imagined places to render it accessible for readers, and how this is inherently tied to the economic climate of the magazine.

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Section: Popular Culture Place and National Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distillations of something larger: the local scale and American national identity

Appleton

2002

cultural geographies

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“…52 Kozol contends, "What is at stake in news photographs is the ability to visualize social identities, to privilege some, to ridicule others, and to deny the existence of yet others." 53 As I will demonstrate in my reading of Gilliat's photographs, even those that seemingly captured the complexity of Inuit identity were flattened and fixed once they entered the published realm. In visualizing the Other, the popular press simultaneously privileged the social identities of Euro-Canadian society.…”

Section: Williams and Brock Silversides Have Written About How Photomentioning

confidence: 94%

“…In visual culture theorist Wendy Kozol's words, "Photography's ideological power lies in the immediacy and accessibility of its visualization of the world." 35 It is in excessive detail, such as facial expressions or gesture, that photography's intention of fixity is unsettled and negotiated. It is these very moments, which incite rich readings of images that structure this thesis.…”

Section: Before Setting Off Gilliat Secured Assignments From the Beamentioning

confidence: 99%

Photographic Encounters in the North: Rosemary Gilliat Eaton's 1960 Trip to the Eastern Canadian Arctic

Siemens¹

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“The Kind of People who Make Good Americans”: Nationalism and Life's Family Ideal

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Distillations of something larger: the local scale and American national identity

Distillations of something larger: the local scale and American national identity

Photographic Encounters in the North: Rosemary Gilliat Eaton's 1960 Trip to the Eastern Canadian Arctic

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