Lawrence W. Levine (1) (1933–2006)

Academia often will mark anything dated ten to fifteen years prior to the present as "dated" simply by the mere fact that its conception took place more than a decade ago. Levine's 1988 tome testifies that this attitude is shortsighted and moreover, erroneous. Levine has written a book that serves both as a history lesson as well as a hopeful plea to reconsider our cultural biases as constructs of our own doing.

Levine does not simplify the situation by presenting a black and white portrait show more of the American development of high vs. low culture. Instead he offers a well-researched argument supporting a flux in cultural ideas wherein we travel through various redefinitions of culture, both high and low. Investigating the societal milieu surrounding Shakespeare, opera and orchestral music in nineteenth-century America, Levine aptly demonstrates how we arrived at our current struggle to accommodate contrasting ideas about culture.

One need not be an expert in the arts to appreciate the severity of Levine's message. The comprehension of "cultural hierarchy" is absolutely fundamental to understanding our societal existence. One can moreover applaud Levine for tackling the subject in a way that is accessible and easily comprehended by those not ensconced in academic dialogue. His writing is bold and charismatic, making this book a refreshing change from many academic missives which aim to keep the discourse within the walls of the ivory tower. Levine invites us outside those walls by presenting us with an uncracked mirror by which we can clearly see our own responsibilities and reactions to culture in America. show less

This book is rightfully a landmark text. Well researched and pact with facts this text covers black music, black humor and black heros. I've gave this text 3 stars b/c at times this book was really just a chore to read as is with most academic centered text. I really felt like i was reading something by somebody that got paid by the word. I don't know whether its an issue of the writing style or me just losing interest after the 7th or 8th example of a particular concept. Anyways still a show more worthy addition to anyone's library show less

The most useful and often cited book in my collection. Levine's tome and analysis have proven relevant through three college degrees. Highly recommended for anyone in the humanities or social science fields.

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 show more 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. show less