In The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History, Lawrence Levine cautions against the historiographical rebuttals to cultural history, writing, “If too many previous historians have tripped over their own cultural umbilical cords, it is because they were poor historians and not because they were tragic prisoners of an inevitable cultural myopia. The historian who cannot significantly transcend the culture of his youth, the needs of his present, and the hopes of his future in order to come to terms with the past deserves repudiation, but we must take care not to transform his failures into unbending laws governing all historians” (pg. 31).

Discussing Shakespeare performances in the nineteenth century, Levine writes, “The relationship of an audience to the object of its focus – be it a sermon, political speech, newspaper, musical composition, or play – is a complex one and constitutes a problem for the historian who would reconstruct it. But the problem cannot be resolved through the use of such ahistorical devices as dividing both the audience and the object into crude categories and then coming to conclusions that have more to do with the culture of the writer than that of the subject” (pg. 155-156). Turning to historians’ previous reticence to study jazz, Levine writes, “Popular Culture, in spite of its name, did not have to be truly popular in order to win the title. It merely had to be considered to be of little worth aesthetically, for that became the chief criterion: the cultural categories that became fixed around the turn of the century were aesthetic and judgmental rather than descriptive terms” (pg. 173-174). In examining the popular culture of the Great Depression, Levine uses Superman as an example of how to closely read an artifact of popular culture in the context of its time.

He writes, “This growing perception that it was less and less possible to achieve traditional ends through the existing system helped to give birth to a new folk figure in the late Depression years. In 1938, Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics and became the prototype of a host of heroes who were to become prominent in American culture” (pg. 227). He continues, “Superman was important because his alter ego, his fake identity, Clark Kent, was a caricature of what individuals had become in an organized, depersonalized world: faceless, impotent, frustrated. Kent could transform himself by taking off his clothes; the rest of society could react through the world of the mass media” (pg. 227). Further, “The popularity of Superman symbolized public unrest with the institutions and bureaucracies that more and more shaped the contours of everyday life” (pg. 228).

Levine uses the photographs of the Great Depression as examples of why visual sources require context to be useful to historians. He writes, “Photographic images, like statistics, do not lie, but like statistics the truths they communicate are elusive and incomplete” (pg. 262). He further cautions, “An understanding that these icons reveal not merely the external but also the internal realities, not only appearances but also beliefs, is an important key to comprehending their significance and their meaning” (pg. 282).

In his final essay, Levine summarizes, “We have found it difficult to study Popular Culture seriously not primarily because of the constraints of our respective disciplines – which are indeed far more open to the uses of Popular Culture than we have allowed ourselves to believe – but because of the inhibitions inculcated in us by the society we inhabit. From an early age we’ve been taught that whatever else this stuff is, it isn’t art and it isn’t serious and it doesn’t lend itself to critical analysis” (pg. 295). Discussing the issue of audience reaction, Levine writes, “Recent literary theory sees neither the reader nor the text as necessarily controlling but rather places emphasis upon the interaction between the two. It is precisely in this realm that we have to understand the process of Popular Culture: not as the imposition of texts upon passive people who constitute a kind of tabula rasa, but as a process of interaction between complex texts which harbor more than monolithic meanings and audiences who embody more than monolithic assemblies of compliant people but who are in fact complex amalgams of cultures, tastes, and ideologies” (pg. 304). In this, Levine points the way forward for future cultural historians. ( )

I'm a big fan of the late Dr. Levine. Too bad I didn't get to take his courses at George Mason. ( )