Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965

Between the start of the First World War and the aftermath of the Second, a small group of American intellectuals began to search for new answers to the question of what makes us human. They were no more than a dozen at the start, outsiders in one way or another—secular Jews, immigrants from Europe, young women. Yet they rapidly rose to influence in New York, Berkeley, Cambridge, New Haven, and Chicago, and in a few decades their ideas would reorient American attitudes toward matters as basic to existence as race, sex, and human nature. They were anthropologists, and as John Gilkeson demonstrates

print June/July/Aug 2010

Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890–1915

Magazines were the first national news medium. They arrived before the radio and newsreels, backed by techniques and technologies (mass advertising, photo engraving, the rotary press) that spread a sensational brand of reporting that challenged governments, put pressure on trusts, and stimulated reform. Daniel A. Clark takes up an aspect of this story in Creating the College Man, an engaging contribution to the history of the mass media that provides evidence of the power of magazines to shape our mental lives. His close reading of Munsey’s, Collier’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday