Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890–1915 (Studies in American Thought and Culture)

Clark, Daniel A.

ISBN 10: 0299235343 / ISBN 13: 9780299235345

Published by University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

About this Item

In English.

Seller Inventory # ria9780299235345_new

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890?1915 (Studies in American Thought and Culture)
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299235343
• ISBN 13: 9780299235345
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

How did a college education become so vital to American notions of professional and personal advancement? Reared on the ideal of the self-made man, American men had long rejected the need for college. But in the early twentieth century this ideal began to change as white men born in the U.S. faced a barrage of new challenges, among them a stultifying bureaucracy and growing competition in the workplace from an influx of immigrants and women. At this point a college education appealed to young men as an attractive avenue to success in a dawning corporate age. Accessible at first almost exclusively to middle-class white males, college funneled these aspiring elites toward a more comfortable and certain future in a revamped construction of the American dream.
    In Creating the College Man Daniel A. Clark argues that the dominant mass media of the era—popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post—played an integral role in shaping the immediate and long-term goals of this select group of men. In editorials, articles, fiction, and advertising, magazines depicted the college man as simultaneously cultured and scientific, genteel and athletic, polished and tough. Such depictions underscored the college experience in powerful and attractive ways that neatly united the incongruous strains of American manhood and linked a college education to corporate success.

About the Author

Daniel A. Clark is assistant professor of history at Indiana State University.