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

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801479118 ISBN 13: 9780801479113

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:

"In this smart, exuberant, and often provocative set of essays, a renowned group of historians set themselves the task of making transnationalism work. I was struck by how often a transnational lens also required truly interdisciplinary approaches―artistic analysis, economics, cultural history, and international affairs are necessarily cohabiting here. For scholars, students, and teachers, this offers a capacious sense of possibility. It is a priceless collection."

(Melani McAlister, author of Epic Encounters)

"The Familiar Made Strange arises from a most original idea: take familiar texts we accept as self-evidently 'American' and expose their complex transnational histories, thus obliging the reader to view them with new eyes. The result is thought-provoking, lively, and quite simply a pleasure to read."

(Marilyn Young, New York University, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0801479118
• ISBN 13: 9780801479113
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Blower Brooke L., Bradley Mark Philip