100 People Who Changed 20th-Century America [2 volumes]

by Mary Cross (Editor)

Overview

To what extent does a person's own success result in social transformation? This book offers 100 answers, providing thought-provoking examples of how American culture was shaped within a crucial time period by individuals whose lives and ideas were major agents of change.

100 People Who Changed 20th-Century America provides a two-volume encyclopedia of the individuals whose contributions to society made the 20th century what it was. Comprising contributions from 20 academics and experts in their field, the thought-provoking essays examine the men and women who have shaped the modern American cultural experience—change agents who defined their time period as a result of their talent, imagination, and enterprise. Organized chronologically by the subjects' birthdates, the essays are written to be accessible to the general reader yet provide in-depth information for scholars, ensuring that the work will appeal to many audiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610690850
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/07/2013
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 10.30(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Mary Cross, PhD, is emerita professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, where she was chairman of the English Department. Her published works include Praeger's Bloggerati, Twitterati: How Blogs and Twitter Are Transforming Popular Culture and Greenwood's Madonna: A Biography. She was editor of Greenwood's A Century of American Icons and Praeger's Advertising and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives.

Editorial Reviews

"Articles include portraits of the individuals, biographical information, and an overview of the person’s impact and significance. The articles are written at a level accessible to the general public, making this a potentially useful starting point for research." - ARBA

From the Publisher

Cross explains that those selected to be in this set were chosen during months of review and discussion by an editorial board made up of academics from a variety of backgrounds, who chose people who were, among other things, change agents, builders, artists who created new aesthetic forms, entertainers, and practical and theoretical scientists. Each biographical essay runs between five and seven pages in length and includes references and a black-and-white photograph. A major criticism is that men make up 87 per cent of the chosen subjects. Mary Jo Lepson (co-founder of One Laptop Per Child), Eleanor Roosevelt (mentor of female journalists and the first chair of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council), Clare McCardell (American fashion designer who brought style and comfort to middle-class women), Toni Morrison (author and Nobel Prize winner for literature), Margaret Burke White (photographer of Buchenwald, first female war correspondent) and Betty Friedan (author of the ground-breaking The Feminine Mystique) are only a few of the hundreds of women who had a significant impact on 20th-century America. Who is in this book, and who is excluded, highlights the difficulty of such an undertaking, for strong arguments can be made for another 100 people (or more) to be included and certainly many more women who are, so often, forgotten. VERDICT The value of this work, as with others like it, is that it brings attention to those who made an unusually significant contribution to American life, but the drawback is that it excludes others who contributed just as much. In an era of depleted budgets, it's difficult to justify the purchase of this title for all but only the largest reference collections.—Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston

Library Journal