Benjamin L. Alpers's Books

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

By: Benjamin L. Alpers

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Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

By: Benjamin L. Alpers

Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the late 1920s through the early years of the Cold War. During the early 1930s, most Americans' conception of dictatorship focused on the dictator. Whether viewed as heroic or horrific, the dictator was represented as a figure of great, masculine power and effectiveness. As the Great Depression gripped the United States, a few people--including conservative members of the press and some Hollywood filmmakers--even dared to suggest that dictatorship might be the answer to America's social problems. In the late 1930s, American explanations of dictatorship shifted focus from individual leaders to the movements that empowered them. Totalitarianism became the image against which a view of democracy emphasizing tolerance and pluralism and disparaging mass movements developed. First used to describe dictatorships of both right and left, the term "totalitarianism" fell out of use upon the U.S. entry into World War II. With the war's end and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, however, concerns about totalitarianism lay the foundation for the emerging Cold War.

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Page Count

418

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807861227

ISBN 13

9780807861226

Happy Days

Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

By: Benjamin L. Alpers

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Happy Days

Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America

By: Benjamin L. Alpers

After the techno-futurism of the 1950s and the utopian 1960s vision of a “great society,” the 1970s saw Americans turning to the past as a source for both nostalgic escapism and serious reflection on the nation’s history. While some popular works like Grease presented the relatively recent past as a more innocent time, far away from the nation’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise, others like Roots used America’s bicentennial as an occasion for deep soul-searching. Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past but often offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Even the figure of the greaser, once an icon of juvenile delinquency, was made family-friendly by Henry Winkler’s Fonzie at the same time that he was being appropriated in more threatening ways by punk and gay subcultures. The cultural historian Benjamin Alpers discovers similar levels of ambivalence toward the past in 1970s neo-noir films, representations of America’s founding, and neo-slave narratives by Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. By exploring how Americans used the 1970s to construct divergent representations of their shared history, he identifies it as a pivotal moment in the nation’s ideological fracturing.

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Page Count

147

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1978830556

ISBN 13

9781978830554

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

By: Benjamin Leontief Alpers

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Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s

By: Benjamin Leontief Alpers

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Page Count

422

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807854166

ISBN 13

9780807854167

Book's by Benjamin L. Alpers

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Happy Days

Happy Days

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture

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