Michael G. Kammen

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Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture

Michael G. Kammen

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Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture

Michael G. Kammen

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Other editions: Softcover - 1989, Hardcover - 1986

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Robert Gwathmey the Life and Art of a Passionate Observer: The Life and Art of Robert Gwathmey

Michael G. Kammen

American artist Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) was a leading member of the Social Realist movement that flourished from the 1930s through the 1950s. Like his fellow Social Realists, Gwathmey used his art to expose privilege and pretense, demand social justice, and call for major changes in the prevailing socioeconomic system. Gwathmey was an eighth-generation Virginian, and throughout his life his main artistic themes were race relations and his native South. He is perhaps best remembered as the first white American painter to depict African Americans in an unromanticized, respectful manner. Using a unique style that combined a deliberate two-dimensional flatness with deep and vivid colors, Gwathmey illuminated the inherent dignity of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were his subjects. As a lifelong activist against injustice, Gwathmey was kept under surveillance by the FBI for nearly thirty years. Using Gwathmey's FBI file, along with numerous interviews and archival records, Michael Kammen crafts a compelling portrait of an engaging American painter in the midst of dramatic social and political change. The publication of this book coincides with the first major retrospective of Gwathmey's work, which will open in September at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. In November, the exhibition will move to the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it will then travel to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Augusta, Georgia, and the Museum of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1999

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Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth

Michael G. Kammen; Beth Venn; Andrew Wyeth; Adam D. Weinberg; Whitney Museum of American Art

Venn reveals Wyeth's love of painting as process and material, underscores his technical prowess, and examines the abstract modernist underpinnings of his landscape compositions. 160 illustrations, 125 in color.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1998

Carolyn Plochmann: Fantasies and Realities

Michael G. Kammen; Carolyn Gassan Plochmann; Kennedy Galleries

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The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States

Michael G. Kammen

He was a friend of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Irving Berlin, and F. Scott Fitzgerald - and the enemy of Ezra Pound, H.L. Mencken, and Ernest Hemingway. He was so influential a critic that Edmund Wilson declared that he had played a leading role in the "liquidation of genteel culture in America". Yet today many students of American culture would not recognize his name. He was Gilbert Seldes, and in this brilliant biographical study, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen recreates a singularly American life of letters. Equally important, Kammen uses Seldes's life as a lens through which to bring into sharp focus the dramatic shifts in American culture that occurred in the half-century after World War I. As he traces Seldes's remarkable evolution from an acknowledged aesthete and highbrow to a cultural democrat with a passion for the popular arts, Kammen recaptures the critic's prescience, wit, and generosity for a newly expanded audience. We witness Seldes's triumphs and travails as managing editor of The Dial, the most influential literary magazine of its time, and read of New York's endlessly feuding publications and literary rivalries. Kammen offers wonderfully detailed accounts of The Dial's introduction of "The Wasteland" in its November 1922 issue; Seldes's review of Ulysses for The Nation, one of the first (if not the very first) to appear in the U.S.; and the complete story of the writing, publication, and critical reception of The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes's most influential book. And Kammen also covers Seldes's astonishingly versatile later career as a freelance writer (on every conceivable subject), historian, novelist, playwright,filmmaker, radio scriptwriter, the first program director for CBS Television, and the founding dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

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A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture

Michael G. Kammen; Hayden

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Other editions: Softcover - 1987, Hardcover - 1986

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The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture

Michael G. Kammen

With the same exacting scholarship, brilliant cultural analysis, and stylish prose that won him a Pulitzer Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself, Kammen examines the paradox of American tradition. How, he asks, did the" land of the future" acquire a past? And how has our collective memory of that past been distorted--and, at times, manufactured? 145 photos.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1991

Selvages and Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture

Michael G. Kammen

Michael Kammen here addresses three closely related themes concerning the state of historical inquiry in America-how history as a professional discipline has changed over the past century; the significance of historiography as a measure of cultural change; and the necessity for new approaches to American cultural history, and to state and local history as well.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1987

A Season of Youth: The American Revolution & the Historical Imaginative

Michael G. Kammen

"Its methodological freshness-the use of literature and art as historical artifacts, its focus on the popular as a subject for study, the introduction of anthropological tools--alone warrants attention, and its substantive contribution to our understanding of the meaning of the Revolution for American culture is large. Kammen's book will continue to inform us for many years."-Catherine L. Albanese, New York History

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A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination

Michael G. Kammen

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Other editions: 1978

The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States

Michael G. Kammen

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Politics and Society on Colonial America

Michael G. Kammen

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From Abundance to Scarcity: Implications for the American Tradition

Michael G. Kammen; Kenneth Ewart Boulding; Seymour Martin Lipset

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Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York

Michael G. Kammen; Jack P. Greene; Richard L. Bushman; Richard M. Jellison

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Other editions: 1976

A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution

Michael G. Kammen

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People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization

Michael G. Kammen

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1972