Gary S. Cross

The History of an Elusive Ideal

Free Time

On Course is full of experience-tested, research-based advice for graduate students and new teaching faculty. It provides a range of innovative and traditional strategies that work well without requiring extensive preparation or long grading sessions when trying to meet one's own demanding research and service requirements.

Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood

Kids' Stuff

Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.

How the Cute, Camp and Creepy Shaped Modern Popular Culture

Freak Show Legacies

Gary Cross reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. By unmasking the character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism

Consumed Nostalgia

Distinguished Professor of Modern History Gary Cross

The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940

A Quest for Time

Publisher's description -- Adam Sandler movies, HBO's Entourage, and such magazines as Maxim and FHM all trade in and appeal to one character -

The Making of Modern Immaturity

Men to Boys

Men today delay marriage and responsibility deep into their 20s or 30s, preferring instead to hold fast to the pleasures of youth. Instead of blaming the young or glorifying the past, Cross studies the attitudes and cultures of three generations of men, linking their rebellion against maturity to parallel shifts in American culture.

Written as an introductory text, A Social History of Leisure Since 1600 describes, synthesizes, and provides a broad theoretical framework in which to understand the emergence of leisure as a central feature of the modern world. While recreation and leisure are receiving increasing attention from historians, to date there had been no book which provided a broad-based understanding for the beginning student of the subject. Cross has achieved a rare feat -- a book that will be of interest to both beginning students and historians.

A Social History of Leisure Since 1600

For American teenagers, getting a driver’s license has long been a watershed moment, separating teens from their childish pasts as they accelerate toward the sweet, sweet freedom of their futures. With driver’s license in hand, teens are on the road to buying and driving(and maybe even crashing) their first car, a machine which is home to many a teenage ritual—being picked up for a first date, “parking” at a scenic overlook, or blasting the radio with a gaggle of friends in tow. So important is this car ride into adulthood that automobile culture has become a stand-in, a shortcut to what millions of Americans remember about their coming of age. Machines of Youth traces the rise, and more recently the fall, of car culture among American teens. In this book, Gary S. Cross details how an automobile obsession drove teen peer culture from the 1920s to the 1980s, seducing budding adults with privacy, freedom, mobility, and spontaneity. Cross shows how the automobile redefined relationships between parents and teenage children, becoming a rite of passage, producing new courtship rituals, and fueling the growth of numerous car subcultures. Yet for teenagers today the lure of the automobile as a transition to adulthood is in decline.Tinkerers are now sidelined by the advent of digital engine technology and premolded body construction, while the attention of teenagers has been captured by iPhones, video games, and other digital technology. And adults have become less tolerant of teens on the road, restricting both cruising and access to drivers’ licenses. Cars are certainly not going out of style, Cross acknowledges, but how upcoming generations use them may be changing. He finds that while vibrant enthusiasm for them lives on, cars may no longer be at the center of how American youth define themselves. But, for generations of Americans, the modern teen experience was inextricably linked to this particularly American icon.

America’s Car Obsession

Machines of Youth

The cute child - spunky, yet dependent, naughty but nice - is largely a 20th-century invention. In this book, Gary Cross examines how that look emerged in American popular culture and how the cute turned into the cool, seemingly its opposite, in stories and games.

Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture

The Cute and the Cool

Gary S.. Cross

The victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been home to the most aggressive and thoughtful critics of consumption such as Puritanism and Prohibition. This work offers a history of how market forces came to dominate American life.

Gary S. Cross

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