Product Description: Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always soPopular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play? At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture...read more

Product Description: The Fruits of Exile casts new light on the history of Jewish émigré thinkers escaping from the rise of fascism in Central Europe. Editors Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis, along with an international group of contributors, emphasize the contributions to American and British culture by the European intellectual diaspora of the 1930s through their careful study of artists, scientists, and cultural figures often ignored in previous studies of the era...read more

Product Description: Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon explores the relationship between postwar conservatives and the president from 1968 to 1974. Seemingly casting those years out of their history, conservatives have never fully explored how Richard Nixon affected their movement...read more

Product Description: In 1994 Benjamin R. Barber was invited by President Clinton to participate in a seminar on the future of democratic ideas and ideals. Following their meeting, Barber became an informal consultant to the Clinton White House, working with a president who proved to be an astonishing listener open to a variety of ideas...read more

Written in the spirit of an idea about ideas, a narrative about personalities and American history is told through the story of an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872 to talk about ideas and whose members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. Reprint. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Written by one of the most promising young scholars on the Mexican intellectual scene, The Shadow of Ulysses attempts to reconnect the American and Mexican intellectual experiences by exploring historical as well as contemporary issues in both countries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Since the late nineteenth century, American intellectuals have consistently criticized the mass arts, charging that entertainments ranging from popular theater, motion pictures, and dance halls to hit records, romance novels, and television are harmful to the public...read more

Product Description: A new intellectual community came together in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, a community outside the universities, the professions and, in general, the established centers of intellectual life. A generation of young intellectuals was increasingly challenging both the genteel tradition and the growing division of intellectual labor...read more

Looks at changing popular taste in the U.S., and discusses quiz shows, camp, TV programs, photography, and pornography