Vance Packard and American Social Criticism

Vance Packard and American Social Criticism PDF Author: Daniel Horowitz
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Vance Packard's bestselling books--Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960)--taught the generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) was a journalist who played an important role in the nation's transition from the largely complacent 1950s to the tumultuous 1960s. He was also one of the first social critics to benefit from and foster the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard left magazine writing to author his most famous works of social criticism. Horowitz traces the influence of Packard's education and early years in rural Pennsylvania, providing a deeper understanding of his thought and his later books. Packard's life, Horowitz contends, illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation. His career also expands our understanding of how one era shaped the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Vance Packard and American Social Criticism

Vance Packard and American Social Criticism PDF Author: Daniel Horowitz
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vance Packard's bestselling books--Hidden Persuaders (1957), Status Seekers (1959), and Waste Makers (1960)--taught the generation that came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s about the dangers posed by advertising, social climbing, and planned obsolescence. Like Betty Friedan and William H. Whyte, Jr., Packard (1914- ) was a journalist who played an important role in the nation's transition from the largely complacent 1950s to the tumultuous 1960s. He was also one of the first social critics to benefit from and foster the newly energized social and political consciousness of this period. Based in part on interviews with Packard, Daniel Horowitz's intellectual biography focuses on the period during which Packard left magazine writing to author his most famous works of social criticism. Horowitz traces the influence of Packard's education and early years in rural Pennsylvania, providing a deeper understanding of his thought and his later books. Packard's life, Horowitz contends, illuminates the dilemmas of a freelance social critic without inherited wealth or academic affiliation. His career also expands our understanding of how one era shaped the next, underscoring how the adversarial 1960s drew on the mass culture of the previous decade. Originally published in 1994. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Vance Packard & American Social Criticism

Vance Packard & American Social Criticism PDF Author: Daniel Horowitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Hidden Persuaders

The Hidden Persuaders PDF Author: Vance Packard
Publisher: Ig Publishing
ISBN: 9780978843106
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A discussion of how modern advertising attempts to control our thoughts and desires in order to make us buy the products it produces. Exploring the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including subliminal tactics, this book shows how advertisers secretly manipulate mass desire for consumer goods and products. In addition, Packard also discusses advertising in politics, predicting the way image and personality rapidly came to overshadow real issues in the televised age.

The Status Seekers

The Status Seekers PDF Author: Vance Packard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social classes
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description


American Social Classes in the 1950s

American Social Classes in the 1950s PDF Author: Vance Packard
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
ISBN: 9780312111809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This abridged edition of Vance Packard's 1959 The Status Seekers presents a picture of American society in the late 1950s that allows students to develop a more accurate and complex understanding of an often-caricatured era. Daniel Horowitz's introduction provides historical context, an assssment of the book's impact, and a discussion of its critical reception.

American Social Classes in the 1950s

American Social Classes in the 1950s PDF Author: Vance Packard
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN:
Category : Social classes
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This volume offers an abridgment of The Status Seekers, Vance Packard's influential and popular study of social status and stratification in 1950s America. An introductory essay places Packard and his book in their historical context and discusses the role that social criticism played during the nation's transition from '50s complacency to '60s turbulence. Also included are an album of cartoons, a chronology, question for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.

The Americanization of Social Science

The Americanization of Social Science PDF Author: David Haney
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592137156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.

Empire of Conspiracy

Empire of Conspiracy PDF Author: Timothy Melley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501713000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? In Empire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"—an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear—including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory—Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory. Empire of Conspiracy offers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders to recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.

The Politics of Authenticity

The Politics of Authenticity PDF Author: Douglas Charles Rossinow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231110570
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
In the 1960s a left-wing movement emerged in the United States that not only crusaded against social and economic exploitation, but also confronted the problem of personal alienation in everyday life. These new radicals - young, white, raised in relative affluence - struggled for peace, equality and social justice. Their struggle was cultural as well as political, a search for meaning and authenticity that marked a new phase in the long history of American radicalism.

Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency

Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency PDF Author: David Greenberg
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
“A brilliant, fast-moving narrative history of the leaders who have defined the modern American presidency.”—Bob Woodward In Republic of Spin—a vibrant history covering more than one hundred years of politics—presidential historian David Greenberg recounts the rise of the White House spin machine, from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama. His sweeping, startling narrative takes us behind the scenes to see how the tools and techniques of image making and message craft work. We meet Woodrow Wilson convening the first White House press conference, Franklin Roosevelt huddling with his private pollsters, Ronald Reagan’s aides crafting his nightly news sound bites, and George W. Bush staging his “Mission Accomplished” photo-op. We meet, too, the backstage visionaries who pioneered new ways of gauging public opinion and mastering the media—figures like George Cortelyou, TR’s brilliantly efficient press manager; 1920s ad whiz Bruce Barton; Robert Montgomery, Dwight Eisenhower’s canny TV coach; and of course the key spinmeisters of our own times, from Roger Ailes to David Axelrod. Greenberg also examines the profound debates Americans have waged over the effect of spin on our politics. Does spin help our leaders manipulate the citizenry? Or does it allow them to engage us more fully in the democratic project? Exploring the ideas of the century’s most incisive political critics, from Walter Lippmann and H. L. Mencken to Hannah Arendt and Stephen Colbert, Republic of Spin illuminates both the power of spin and its limitations—its capacity not only to mislead but also to lead.