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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Flowers, Benjamin. "Constructing the Modern Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York from the Great Depression through the Cold War," American Studies, University of Minnesota, December 2003.
This dissertation examines the role politics, social and material conditions, and cultural values play in shaping the production and reception of architecture, and the ways in which wealth and power operate to reorganize the built landscape. I do so by closely examining the history of two buildings - the Empire State Building and the Seagram Building - and the 1932 Museum of Modern Art Exhibit Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. Tracing the planning, financing, construction, and reception of these buildings, I examine how they materialize the eras of their creation. Located in the city that epitomizes the restless activity of the American marketplace, these iconic skyscrapers of New York stand in for the particular mode of capitalist organization of their time. Thus, as the major skyscraper of the Great Depression, the Empire State Building is a symbol of an era rooted in the values of an older producer economy and its attendant definitions of Americanism. In turn the Seagram Building - perhaps the most famous skyscraper of the 1950s - emerged from an expanding consumer culture that, within the context of the Cold War, reworked the themes of Americanism and democracy that the Empire State Building had addressed decades earlier.
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