Gary Cross: 11 books
The Cute and the Cool
Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2004
The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation...
Men to Boys
The Making of Modern Immaturity
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2008
Adam Sandler movies, HBO's Entourage, and such magazines as Maxim and FHM all trade in and appeal to one character-the modern boy-man. Addicted to video games, comic books, extreme sports, and dressing down, the boy-man would rather devote an afternoon to Grand Theft Auto than plan his next career...
An All-Consuming Century
Why Commercialism Won in Modern America
Language: English
Release Date: September 14, 2000
The unqualified victory of consumerism in America was not a foregone conclusion. The United States has traditionally been the home of the most aggressive and often thoughtful criticism of consumption, including Puritanism, Prohibition, the simplicity movement, the '60s hippies, and the consumer rights...
Consumed Nostalgia
Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism
Language: English
Release Date: September 8, 2015
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age...
The Playful Crowd
Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century
Language: English
Release Date: October 18, 2005
During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment...
Worktowners at Blackpool
Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure in the 1930s
Language: English
Release Date: July 12, 2005
Gary Cross publishes the findings of this largely forgotten study by the Mass-Observers who followed the annual pilgrimage of labourers to Blackpool, hoping to discover what attracted workers to this centre of Victorian culture.
Technology and American Society
A History
Language: English
Release Date: December 21, 2018
Providing a global perspective on the development of American technology, Technology and American Society offers a historical narrative detailing major technological transformations over the last three centuries. With coverage devoted to both dramatic breakthroughs and incremental innovations, authors...
by Gary Cross
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2009
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2009
Northern Italy, September 10, 1650 The boy knew his father was going to kill him. Just like he'd killed everyone else tonight. The boy's mother, his two older sisters and baby brother, the servants. All of them dead. When Lucius is ten years old his father returns home one evening as a vampire and...
Machines of Youth
America’s Car Obsession
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 2018
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)...
Packaged Pleasures
How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2014
From the candy bar to the cigarette, records to roller coasters, a technological revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century precipitated a colossal shift in human consumption and sensual experience. Food, drink, and many other consumer goods came to be mass-produced, bottled, canned,...
Undead Souths
The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2015
Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and...