CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
Classic essays that have greatly influenced the cultural interpretation of American society
Paths into American Culture
John C. Burnham
In this volume, a major historian of American culture assembles for the first time a number of his classic essays which have greatly influenced the cultural interpretation of American society. Many of these essays have helped shape significant areas in recent historiography, particularly the history of venereal disease, morals, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and popular psychology. A new essay on the historiography of sex is included. Original introductory material, editorial transitions, and a conclusion join these chapters in intellectual and social history in making a strong case for a cultural approach to America’s past.
Contents
1. The Fragmenting of the Soul: Intellectual Prerequisites for Ideas of Dissociation in the United States
2. The Mind-Body Problem in the Early Twentieth Century
3. On the Origins of Behaviorism
4. The Medical Origins and Cultural Use of Freud’s Instinctual Drive Theory
5. The New Psychology: From Narcissism to Social Control
6. The Influence of Psychoanalysis upon American Culture
7. American Historians and the Subject of Sex
8. How Recent Historiography Vindicates Ditzion’s Approach to the History of Sex
9. Medical Inspection of Prostitutes in America in the Nineteenth Century: The St. Louis Experiment and Its Sequel
10. The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward Sex
11. New Perspectives on the Prohibition "Experiment" of the 1920s
12. Psychiatry, Psychology, and the Progressive Movement
13. Medical Specialists and Movements Toward Social Control in the Progressive Era: Three Examples
14. The Cultural Interpretation of the Progressive Movement
About the Author(s)
John C. Burnham is Professor of History and Lecturer in Psychiatry at The Ohio State University.
Subject Categories
In the series
American Civilization, edited by Allen F. Davis.
The focus of American Civilization, edited by Allen F. Davis, is American cultural history. In keeping with the interdisciplinary work in this field, which characteristically brings together art history, literary history and theory, and material culture, the titles in this series cover diverse aspects of American experience—from attitudes toward death to twentieth-century design innovations to images of country life in art and letters to trade unions' reliance on religious discourse. The series has been a pioneer in presenting work that uses photographs as historical documents and from its inception has been firmly committed to women's studies. As the first university press series in the field, American Civilization provided the inspiration and the standard for much of the interdisciplinary work developing in the contemporary academy.