The work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict did much to popularize the notion that accepted American standards of behavior were not found universally in other cultures. Traditional gender norms therefore were culturally and historically determined rather than derived from nature. In the following Collier's article from 1952, Dr. Judson T. and Mary G. Landis invoked Mead's work to investigate contradictory assessments of the "typical" American male as either dominant and aggressive or blundering and dependent. The authors examined findings of social scientists that compared male and female survival rates, achievement, and sexual performance. They argued that while men were, in fact, the "weaker" sex biologically, their struggle to conform to cultural ideals of superiority and dominance often led to failure and difficulties in relationships. Their conclusion--that "in most families the man is, and has to be, the 'stronger,' he has to be the bulwark for the family" because of greater fluctuations in "endocrinological functioning" of women than in men--shows the power that ideas of biological determinism held even in the social science community.

With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade. Good Housekeeping printed menus, offering housewives directions for preparing tasty meals that met conservation standards. Contributed by readers, this "month's worth of recipes" printed in August 1917 demonstrated conservation in action, as well as women's ingenuity in redesigning menus to observe rationing guidelines.

Religious leaders, civic groups, educators, the press, and government officials have voiced concern since the 19th century over supposed deleterious effects on children of popular culture, from dime novels and motion pictures to comic books, and television. Anxiety over comic books grew as the pulp fiction crime and horror genre developed at the end of World War II. In 1948, psychologist Fredric Wertham advocated the prohibition of comic books to children under the age of 16, claiming that all of the delinquent children he studied had read them. Although the industry's trade organization devised a Code that year to regulate content, only one-third of the publishers subscribed to it. During the next few years many states debated, but did not adopt, bills to ban or regulate comic books, in part because of a 1948 Supreme Court decision that overturned a state statute banning the sale or distribution of crime literature. After the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency conducted hearings on comic books in 1954, the industry formed a new trade association and formulated a new Code to self-censor content. The Code symbol subsequently appeared on approved comic books, curtailing the crime and horror genre. In the following excerpts from the Subcommittee's report, Congress warned the industry that if self-regulation did not prove to be effective, "other ways and means" would be found to protect children. The Code, refined in 1971 and 1989, remains a regulatory instrument for association members.

Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be).

Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways—cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on.

In 1913, an "International Exhibition of Modern Art," eventually seen by a half million people, rocked the American art world. First mounted at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, it became known as the Armory Show, and its self-consciously "modern" approach challenged the dominance of conservative, staid styles of European art. Two-thirds of the 1,600 works were by Americans, and the Europeans whose works were exhibited--Picasso, Matisse, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gaughin, and Duchamp among them--were far from the conservatives that Americans were used to. Most critics took extreme positions, either praising or damning the show. In his "A Layman's View of an Art Exhibition," published in the March 29, 1913, issue of Outlook, Theodore Roosevelt took a moderate approach, lauding the unconventional spirit of the Armory Show while casually dismissing the work of such "European extremists" as the Cubists and the Futurists.

The massive strike of 1877 shook the very foundations of the political and economic order. Begun with a spontaneous railroad strike in West Virginia, the "Great Uprising" spread rapidly across the country, as the entire working populations of many cities went out on strike. Workers across the country along with sympathizers in their communities were galvanized by official violence, as state and federal troops fired on protesters in several cities. As this 1878 cartoon from the New York Daily Graphic indicated, in the aftermath of the strike Indians, trade unionists, immigrants, and tramps were increasingly grouped together in the press as symbols of disorder and opposition to the nation's progress.

Moving to the Great Plains meant building a home on broad, flat, and treeless prairies. Borrowing from the Plains Indians and earlier pioneers in Kansas, Mattie Oblinger and other homesteaders built sod houses. They cut the prairie sod deep and wide, laid it up like giant bricks, and fit the bricks together snugly without mortar. Mattie and her husband Uriah obtained their land through the Homestead Act of 1862, claiming and improving their 160 acres over five years. Other lands for farmers became available from the vast acreages of public land given to the railroad companies as subsidies. The Oblingers and other settlers formed communities of young families with a rough social equality and common concerns about crops, religion, and social isolation. They faced a series of hardships on the land in the 1870s: blizzards, droughts, and grasshoppers, as well as low crop prices. Mattie died in childbirth at the age of thirty-six.

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was one of a constellation of federal agencies that made up President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program to help Americans recover from the Great Depression. Established in 1933 in an effort to spur industrial recovery, the NRA sought to use government power to restrain competition and end the downward cycle of wage cuts and price reductions, without abolishing the free market. The administration asked businesses, labor, and consumers to help write new codes for hour limits, minimum wages, and production standards. To encourage voluntary adoption of these new codes, participating businesses were allowed to display a blue eagle logo, and consumers were urged to spend money only where the symbol was displayed. This photograph captures three unlikely spots for the display of the otherwise ubiquitous NRA eagle.

The advent of "talkies"in the early 20th century had an impact felt far from Hollywood. Immigrants made up a significant portion of the movie-going audience during the silent film era because the lack of (English) speech beckoned immigrants unable to comprehend the many facets of American life: a picture that didn't talk was particularly appealing to people who didn't speak or read English. In this oral history, recorded by Roy Rosenzweig in 1978, Italian immigrant Fred Fedeli recalled his experiences owning and operating a movie theater in an immigrant working-class neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts.

When 25-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh set down his monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, at Le Bourget Aerodrome in Paris on May 21, 1927, he instantly became the leading hero of a decade of American heroes and celebrities. Lindbergh had not expected any welcome in France, but word of his arrival spread through Paris, and twenty-five thousand people surrounded the plane even before he stopped taxiing. The frenzy continued when Lindbergh returned to the United States on June 11, 1927, where President Calvin Coolidge and his wife welcomed him at a Washington Monument stand specially built for the occasion. Coolidge's welcome and Lindbergh's brief response were broadcast nationwide. Coolidge lavished praise on the aviator in a very serious voice, and Lindbergh responded humorously. Beneath the joking about a battleship being sent for him, however, was perhaps a serious concern about becoming a prisoner of his sudden fame.

The New Deal tried to end the Depression by spending government money to employ the jobless. One of its most ambitious efforts, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943, mostly on projects that required manual labor, but also on projects for artists, writers, actors, and musicians. At its peak, the Federal Writers Project employed about 6,500 men and women, some of whom later became famous. In the late 1930s the project's writers began a series of "life histories," recording the experiences of diverse Americans from Florida to Alaska. Sometimes they recorded people's words verbatim; other times they rewrote them into narratives. In this example, Berta Ballard Manning recalled meeting the famous outlaw "Billy the Kid" as a child in New Mexico. He was unassuming and gentle, with good manners, but she also remembered him as a bandit and killer who kept their county in turmoil

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. One exception was this description by Al Waxman, editor of the Eastside Journal, an East Los Angeles community newspaper.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, the poem coincided with the beginning of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty that placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the "White Man's burden" became a euphemism for imperialism, and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction to the phrase.

The founders of the great libraries of the 19th century were often ambivalent about whether their goal was to disseminate or conserve knowledge. They were also uncertain about the intended audience. John Cotton Dana of the Newark Public Library was atypical in his populist stance that "it is a proper function of a library to amuse." He argued that a "shallow mind" was better than an "empty one." Other librarians preferred to see themselves as cultivators of public taste and their buildings as uplifting houses of culture. The stuffiness and remoteness of late nineteenth-century libraries provoked this humorous sketch, published in Life magazine in 1884, which satirized the closed-door practices of the theoretically "public" library donated by wealthy James Lenox to New York City.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held hearings in 1947 on Communist activity in Hollywood. Under J. Parnell Thomas, who became chairman after the Republican Party gained control of Congress in 1947, HUAC not only sought to identify so-called "subversives" in the industry, but also to investigate whether the Roosevelt administration had encouraged the production of pro-Soviet films during World War II. In the following testimony, three "friendly" witnesses--studio heads Jack L. Warner of Warner Bros. and Louis B. Mayer of M-G-M, and Russian-born novelist, screenwriter, and ideologue Ayn Rand--commented on specific wartime films. Mission to Moscow (1943), based on a memoir by Joseph E. Davies, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1936-1938, had been widely criticized for glorifying Stalin and for offering rationalizations for the Moscow purge trials and the non-aggression pact with Hitler. Song of Russia (1944), with a screenplay by "unfriendly" witnesses Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins, had undergone significant revisions due to complaints that it was too pro-Stalinist. Following the 1947 hearings, ten screenwriters and directors, who refused to cooperate with the Committee, were cited for contempt of Congress. After studio heads blacklisted the ten--who later served prison terms following the Supreme Court's refusal to hear their appeal--HUAC agreed to stop investigating studios and the content of films, and limited their inquiries to personnel. The subject matter of films, however, continued to be affected by the chilled Cold War climate to which HUAC contributed.

Although many Northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, initially hoped to prosecute the war without interfering with slavery as it existed, pressure from slaves who fled to Union lines, abolitionist sentiment in the North, and a deteriorating military situation pushed Lincoln to consider abolishing slavery. In September 1862 Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He signed the final edict on January 1, 1863. In this caricature by Baltimore pro-South Democrat Adalbert Johann Volck, an inebriated Lincoln, surrounded by symbols of Satanism and paintings honoring John Brown and slave rebellions, trod on the Constitution as he drafted the proclamation.

"The theater must grow up," declared Hallie Flanagan, director of the New Deal-era Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which provided employment for actors, directors, and technicians during the Depression. By the 1930s, theater was rapidly losing its audiences to movies, and Flanagan sought to win audiences back by revitalizing drama with the excitement and conflict of contemporary life and politics. Her energy and sense of urgency came through in this talk on theater as social action, entitled "First Federal Summer Theatre: A Report." She borrowed the rhetoric of the militant labor movement as she summarized the work of a 1937 summer project that gathered FTP workers from around the country.

Many African-American witnesses subpoenaed to testify at the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings in the 1950s were asked to denounce Paul Robeson (1888-1976) in order to obtain future employment. Robeson, an All-American football player and recipient of a Phi Beta Kappa key at Rutgers, received a law degree at Columbia. He became an internationally acclaimed concert performer and actor as well as a persuasive political speaker. In 1949, Robeson was the subject of controversy after newspapers reports of public statements that African Americans would not fight in "an imperialist war." In 1950, his passport was revoked. Several years later, Robeson refused to sign an affidavit stating that he was not a Communist and initiated an unsuccessful lawsuit. In the following testimony to a HUAC hearing, ostensibly convened to gain information regarding his passport suit, Robeson refused to answer questions concerning his political activities and lectured bigoted Committee members Gordon H. Scherer and Chairman Francis E.Walter about African-American history and civil rights. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that a citizen's right to travel could not be taken away without due process and Robeson' passport was returned.

In the 1950s, parents, educators, religious leaders, and moralists expressed intense concern over the perceived harmful effects of modern life on the nation's youth. This concern was not new, however. Fears of corrupting influences on youth have periodically flooded the public discourse, from child-rearing tomes of the antebellum period to congressional hearings in the 1950s on media and juvenile delinquency. The following editorial from 1950, in the popular magazine Collier's, offered one perspective on the potential harm of such youthful indiscretions as radio programs, phonograph records, Western movies, and comic books and advocated tolerance for youth-oriented popular culture.