Successor to the dime novel, pulp fiction is cheap, paperback, pocket-sized novels with colorful, lurid covers. It includes many genres: crime and detective stories, horror, westerns, science fiction, romance. Pulp fiction reshaped literature from an intellectual pastime into fantasies packaged for laborers to read anywhere, anytime. Frequently banned or censored, pulp’s reputation as depraved, sexually promiscuous stories only made them more popular. Pulps also presented stories of African Americans or gay and lesbian heroes in a culture that suppressed these groups. Their popularity drew Hollywood’s attention, and many titles became movies with cross-media advertising and images. These portable fantasies were among the few entertainments available to American GIs deployed on ships and at the front during World War II. After the war, soldiers left behind millions of copies in foreign countries, where postwar pulp publication became a global phenomenon. Pulps convey American values to a mass, international audience.

Barred from many employments, Jewish artists entered the music industry and produced a twentieth-century canon of Tin Pan Alley hits, show tunes, and jazz standards combining light opera, sophistication, and Black music. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical Show Boat (1936) set a new paradigm: its “Ol’ Man River” blends minstrelsy, classical music, and spirituals. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) fused European influences with blues, foxtrot, ragtime, and jazz. His “I Got Rhythm” (1930) is among history’s most influential jazz compositions, and his jazz opera Porgy and Bess (1935) boldly depicts Black experience. Gershwin’s union of lowbrow-highbrow, Jewish and African American music created a radical multicultural art. Although recent scholars accuse Gershwin, Kern, and others of cultural exploitation, many Black jazz artists embraced their music. Even Duke Ellington, who denounced Porgy and Bess, eventually recorded it and imitated Gershwin’s chord progressions and rhythms.

During the Cold War, popular culture played an important political role when the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) leveraged against each other the two biggest African American stars Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. HUAC’s investigation into Hollywood “subversives” and Communist media influence is usually remembered for those who refused to cooperate and were jailed (“the Hollywood Ten”) or “blacklisted” and boycotted from working in Hollywood. When Paul Robeson, who viewed his celebrity as a platform for championing social justice, spoke candidly that the United States presumed to be a model democracy for the world while it denied basic civil rights to African Americans, HUAC was outraged. The committee called baseball hero Jackie Robinson as a countermeasure to Robeson’s inflammatory speeches. Robinson, the first Black MajorLeague baseball player, reassured HUAC on a national stage of African American patriotism while trying to convey the importance of Robeson’s civil rights fight.

Before 1970, media rarely addressed LGBTQ+ identity and only as a curiosity, disease, or deviation from heteronormativity, making visibility the biggest issue. The few 1960s films addressing queerness still displayed society’s intolerance. 1970s–1990s Hollywood occasionally produced queer-identified characters through straight viewpoints. There were alternatives: camp operated in gay subculture, and lesbian subculture flourished in feminist bars and events. A pivotal moment occurred when comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 sitcom Ellen depicted her coming out. However, after that media event, the show’s storytelling about her life as a lesbian led to its swift cancellation. DeGeneres then began a talk show dependent on her personal style of warmth, humor, likeability – basically, a non-threatening lesbian. Since Ellen, television regularly incorporates LGBTQ+ characters/plots due to television’s more fragmented, narrowly defined audience programming in cable channel proliferation and streaming services. Movies and cyberculture likewise more frequently adopt queer sensibilities.

The Smithsonian’s new exhibit “Entertainment Nation” signals how museums now embrace popular culture when they previously dismissed it. Beginning in the 1970s–1980s, American museums expanded definitions of “culture,” their role as educational sites, and their audiences. New “hometown” museums memorialized Hollywood celebrities’ grass roots, successful so long as the stars remained famous. Museums dedicated to sports, musical genres, and other types of popular culture simultaneously grew. Traditional museums also began to embrace the history of American popular culture in topical exhibits. Especially popular are new museums dedicated to the mass media. In one instance, however, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ 2024 exhibit on the film industry’s Jewish founders sparked a backlash for being anti-Semitic. Its dramatic failure illustrates what this volume argues is most important: American popular culture must be narrativized within a web of political, technological, economic, and cultural constraints.

Although musical theatre originally mixed theatrical and musical styles and genres – from minstrel shows and burlesque to ballet and opera – it only developed a cohesive form that told a story through speech, song, and dance in the 1920s. Musicals quickly became America’s most popular theatrical entertainment. They continued to evolve, even incorporating social topics and aesthetic elements emerging more organically as part of the story. Many recent hits have been jukebox musicals (relying on hit pop songs) and film-to-stage adaptations. There is a commercial rationale for this proliferation: whether it is name recognition of the sources or nostalgia for their original releases, they help box office success. Recently, even Disney has made repurposing its movie catalog into musicals a continuous, profitable operation. Musicals have also become a vehicle for satire and parody, resulting in memorable television and YouTube musical sketches. Broadway’s engagement with popular culture has become a symbiotic one.

Native Americans working in alternative media to Hollywood are overthrowing Indian stereotypes. The 1990s rise of an independent film festival circuit, especially the Sundance Film Festival, and multiplying cable channels and streaming services, have supported Indigenous self-representation and anti-colonial discourse. Documentaries by Native American filmmakers Sandra Osawa, George Burdeau, and Victor Masayesva Jr. critique stereotypes and express tribal aesthetics. Fiction films, like Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998), Naturally Native (1998), Doe Boy (2001), and Sterlin Harjo’s features, depict modern Native American life and characters while cable and streaming TV series are set in modern Indigenous communities. However, Martin Scorcese’s big-budget Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) garnered more attention and awards for portraying 1920s atrocities against the Osage Nation. Although sympathetic to Native Americans, the film is still a reiteration of history. Only with Native American artists are stories refocusing from fascination with the past to the present and future.

New Hollywood describes European influenced, character driven films from 1967–1980 directed by a new generation of film school-educated White males. As the movies’ creative forces or auteurs, they staked out self-conscious stylistic boundaries that reflected contemporary social upheaval. Their hit films instilled new life into a stale Hollywood cinema and spoke to a youthful audience with whom they shared cultural values. The collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the transition from an outdated censorship Production Code to a new ratings system, and financial restructuring of big production companies enabled this brief golden age. New Hollywood ended when big-budget, spectacular movies restored the status of Hollywood blockbusters and ushered in Postclassical Hollywood. By the 2000s, the top movies were all blockbusters. But, both New Hollywood and Postclassical Hollywood stemmed from intersections of economics, technology, global marketing, and cultural relevancy.

Jews have always participated in popular culture, but positive Jewish images rarely occurred until the 1990s. Jewish insider/outsider status shaped the film industry, radio and television, comic books, and stand-up comedy. A few Jewish characters were prominent in the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen). With the rise of the Internet and media industries targeting niche audiences, Jewish imagery now highlights Latinx Jews, Black Jews, Asian American Jews, Indigenous Jews, Sephardic Jews, and LGBTQ+ Jews. For example, Transparent (2014–2019) about a Jewish father who comes out as a transgender woman, routinely incorporates religious rituals. Broad City (2014–2019) celebrates the escapades of sexually fluid twenty-something Jewish friends. Drake and Tiffany Haddish, both Black Jews, repackaged their Bar/Bat Mitzvahs for comic effect. Explicit intra-Jewish diversity within wider American experiences disrupts historical tensions between Jewish presence and erasure in pop culture that were fueled by anti-Semitism.

This chapter introduces the various processes by which the Song government obtains resources from its people to pay for its expenses, and also how the Song state, in pursuit of its interests, is able to manage economic activities. After outlining the dynamics of Song society and the economy, it introduces tensions generated by the various goals the fiscal administration pursued at different political and military periods. The third and main section of the chapter offers an overview of the different taxes and tax mechanisms that the state used to extract revenues from the various sectors of the economy. Emphasis is placed on the state tea and wine monopolies which were crucial both for public finance and for guidance of the Song economy. The conclusion offers some answers to the problems raised by the tensions within this system.

The surge in archaeological activity since the 1950s has led to the discovery of a large number of Song burials in northern China, adorned with pictorial scenes and architectural motifs. This chapter investigates the decoration of these tombs, shifting our focus from the elaborate tombs themselves to the individuals who constructed them. By emphasizing the significance of burial practices during the Song dynasty, it becomes clear that tombs not only continued to reflect principles of filial piety and ancestral reverence but also became a critical force in shaping cultural values and social order. These tombs can be interpreted as a form of self-expression by the wealthy class, emerging from the interplay between ritual regulations and regional social customs, while simultaneously serving as focal points for family bonds, ancestor veneration, and belief systems.