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Summer 2006
 LeRoy Ashby
For LeRoy Ashby, Washington State University Regents Professor
of History, the public outcry that ensued from Janet Jackson's
wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl was simply the most
visible recent skirmish in a battle over popular culture that dates
back to the beginning of mass entertainment in the early 19th
century.
For Ashby, American popular culture isn't a distraction from the
serious issues of our time. It is inseparable from them, and always
has been. He makes the case that popular culture is both a mirror
and a shaper of our times in a 648-page meticulously researched
volume titled, With Amusement for All: A History of American
Popular Culture Since 1830, published May 2006 by University of
Kentucky Press.
A starred citation in Library Journal notes that Ashby's
account of the development of popular culture includes discussion
of "such critical perspectives as the immigrant experience, race,
gender, technological advances, politics and economics." He
demonstrates, for instance, how 19th-century Wild West shows
reinforced the politics of expansionism and how the once-criticized
music of ragtime ultimately advanced not only popular music but
also multiculturalism.
"This is the first book that attempts a systematic overview of
popular culture since its emergence in the 1830s," says John Kicza,
chair of the WSU history department. "Other books on the subject
have limited themselves to just one or two aspects of popular
culture. Only Ashby's book attempts sincerely to be
comprehensive."
Instead of dismissing those Americans who know more about Kelly
Clarkston than they do about Lewis and Clark, Ashby writes about
popular culture as a democratic art form that represents competing
ideologies or ways of looking at the world. As such, there is no
single story line, but multiple, interwoven strands that reveal
myriad ways in which mass entertainment has reflected, changed, or
reinforced American values.
"I'm willing to concede there's an awful lot wrong with popular
culture--its cult of celebrity, its often unflattering stereotypes,
its emphasis on the acquisition of things, its power to render
important ideas and movements meaningless, its capacity to mute
civic engagement," Ashby says. "But, I would still defend it as an
important source of ideals, diversity, tolerance, and
inclusion."
The citation in Library Journal also notes, "No single
author has tackled popular culture with so much breadth and depth
and managed to strike a balance between the popular and scholarly
approaches."
Ashby's previous books include Fighting the Odds: The Life of
Senator Frank Church and Endangered Children: Dependency,
Neglect and Abuse in American History. He is the Claudius O.
and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor of History at WSU, where
he has been on the faculty since 1972.
Click here for more
information about With Amusement for All.
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