Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-291) and index.

Lipsitz uses the modern electronic media--television, rock music, films--as guideposts on the journey to the problem of collective memory. He argues that Americans constantly battle with their ethnicity and class as a result of the ongoing dialectical between conformity and individuality. Examining ethnicity in early television, he argues that TV helped transform a culturally and ethnically diverse working class into a unified consumer class. He includes sections on culture and history; popular music, with focus on rock music in the 1960s and 1970s; and film and literature. Though Lipsitz views the commercial cultures as vehicles for the expression of the powerless peoples, he argues that the popular cultures are still the means by which Americans express their diversity. ISBN 0-8166-1805-4: $34.95.

SACFinal081324