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Events
Mar. 1 | 2012 Franklin Prize
Nominations for 2012 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for the best-published book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | 2012 Romero Prize
Nominations for 2012 Lora Romero Publication Prize for the best-published first book in American Studies due
Mar. 1 | Community Partnership Grants
Applications for the 2012 Community Partnership Grants Program to assist American Studies collaborative, interdisciplinary community projects due
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Becker, Jane S. "Selling Tradition: The Domestication of Southern Appalachian Culture in 1930s America," Program in American and New England Studies, Boston University, December 1992. Advisor: Robert Blair St. George (2,7,10)
The “revival” of handicraft traditions in Southern Appalachia in the 1930s was shaped by the cultural politics of local craft producers, reformers, government officials, museums, urban markets, and middle-class consumers who redefined—domesticated—Appalachian craft production. The value of mountain handicrafts as commodities depended upon defining their producers as “folk,” and “traditionalizing” crafts and producers as preindustrial offered middle-class consumers a distant and timeless “usable past,” in which their Southern Appalachian contemporaries were redefined as an ideal integral to the American national identity. The dissertation addresses the meanings and invention of “tradition” and the consequences of cultural representations.
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