Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890-1918 Tapa dura - 2004

Información de la editorial

Translating America focuses on one of the thorniest questions in American history: how do immigrants assimilate into American culture? And, how does American culture change with the their arrival? yet 50 years later social scientists were hard-pressed to find a trace of German culture. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated. In Translating America Connolly-Smith offers a significantly different analysis: that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. culture did not disappear overnight; rather it merged with new forms of American popular culture. Connolly-Smith posits that the lure and appeal of dance halls, vaudeville, nickelodeons, the films of D.W. Griffith, the music of John Philip Sousa, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, and even baseball games all helped German Americans to assimilate and become German-Americans.