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69 books match the query 'American Culture' and 3 start with r

cover of Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture

Real Men Don't Sing

Crooning in American Culture

Allison McCracken

Duke University Press, 2015

The crooner Rudy Vallée's soft, intimate, and sensual vocal delivery simultaneously captivated millions of adoring fans and drew harsh criticism from those threatened by his sensitive masculinity. Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.
 
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cover of Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture

Restoring the Faith

The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture

Edith L. Blumhofer

University of Illinois Press, 1993

American Pentecostalism began as a culturally isolated sect intent upon announcing the imminence of the world's end. The sect's early millenarian fervor gradually became muted in favor of flag-waving patriotism. At the end of the twentieth century it has become an affluent, worldwide movement thoroughly entrenched in popular culture.
Edith Blumhofer uses the Assemblies of God, the largest classical Pentecostal denomination in the world, as a lens through which to view the changing nature of Anglo Pentecostalism in the United States. She illustrates how the original mission to proclaim the end resulted in the development of Bible schools, the rise of the charismatic movement, and the popularity of such figures as Aimee Semple McPherson, Charles Fox Parham, and David Du Plessis. Blumhofer also examines the sect's use of radio and television and the creation of a parallel Christian culture
 
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cover of Risqué Business: Breastaurants in American Culture

Risqué Business

Breastaurants in American Culture

Ty Matejowsky

University of Alabama Press, 2025

Risqué Business serves up the breastaurant industry, where food service, sex appeal, identity, and gender politics mix.

Risqué Business explores the rise and ongoing cultural reckoning of “breastaurants”: sports bar–style restaurants like Hooters and Twin Peaks, which have long relied on the sexualized presentation of female servers to attract a mostly straight, male clientele. Ty Matejowsky, professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, is uniquely positioned in America’s foundational, breastaurant-saturated landscape. From this vantage, he offers a well-balanced account that draws on pop culture, media analysis, and contemporary gender politics. He delivers a smart, layered analysis of how breastaurants commodify youth and femininity, uphold retrograde masculinity, and serve as symbolic battlegrounds in today's highly charged political environments including America's deeply polarized Red State/Blue State divide.

With case studies, cultural critique, and a critical lens on labor and sexuality, Matejowsky reveals how these restaurants are more than just risqué marketing gimmicks. They reflect deeper anxieties about gender, identity, and the uneasy fusion of sex and service in American consumer culture. Risqué Business is a high-spirited study of an industry that thrives at the intersection of appetite and identity.

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