The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080145249X ISBN 13: 9780801452499

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2015

Synopsis

In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

About this title

About the Author

Brooke L. Blower is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. She is the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars. Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Vietnam at War and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 and coeditor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives and Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights.

Review

"Warmly recommended to both skeptics and avid practitioners of transnational American Studies who will inevitably catch themselves pondering which other American icons and artifacts might lend themselves for a rereading in a transnational framework."

(Amerikastudien)

"Reading The Familiar Made Strange feels like taking a walk through a well-signposted museum with halls that twist through different eras, types of archives and source material, and analytic approaches.... Students and scholars alike will be inspired by its lively prose, experimental tone, and frequent reminder that there remain 'different paths to blaze and more icons to reimagine from other angles and scales' (p. 8)."

(Shanon Fitzpatrick Journal of American History)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 080145249X
• ISBN 13: 9780801452499
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Blower Brooke L., Bradley Mark Philip