Creating the College Man: American Mass Magazines and Middle-Class Manhood, 1890–1915 (Studies in American Thought and Culture) - Softcover

Clark, Daniel A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299235343 ISBN 13: 9780299235345

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Synopsis

How did a college education become so vital to American notions of professional and personal advancement? Reared on the ideal of the self-made man, American men had long rejected the need for college. But in the early twentieth century this ideal began to change as white men born in the U.S. faced a barrage of new challenges, among them a stultifying bureaucracy and growing competition in the workplace from an influx of immigrants and women. At this point a college education appealed to young men as an attractive avenue to success in a dawning corporate age. Accessible at first almost exclusively to middle-class white males, college funneled these aspiring elites toward a more comfortable and certain future in a revamped construction of the American dream.
    In Creating the College Man Daniel A. Clark argues that the dominant mass media of the era—popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and the Saturday Evening Post—played an integral role in shaping the immediate and long-term goals of this select group of men. In editorials, articles, fiction, and advertising, magazines depicted the college man as simultaneously cultured and scientific, genteel and athletic, polished and tough. Such depictions underscored the college experience in powerful and attractive ways that neatly united the incongruous strains of American manhood and linked a college education to corporate success.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel A. Clark is assistant professor of history at Indiana State University.

Review:

“Examines how ‘going to college’ became that quintessential middle-class experience and, moreover, how it reshaped the archetype of the American businessman for the emergent economic base of corporate capitalism.”— John Pettegrew, author of Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920

“A valuable contribution to the scholarship on the several areas it pulls together: the histories of popular magazines, the success ethic, business, higher education, and intercollegiate athletics.”—Michael Oriard, author of Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle

“[A]n engaging contribution to the history of the mass media that provides evidence of the power of magazines to shape our mental lives.”—Bookforum

“Clark’s book is a valuable addition to the growing historical literature on the meaning and significance of higher education in America. . . .[I]t clearly and thoroughly illuminates crucial sources of popular images of college life.  Such images remain familiar to this day and, whether we realize it or not, shape our own expectations and perceptions of what college is and should be about.”—The Cutting Edge

“Articulate and engaging. . . .the findings here are significant and timely, suggesting how college education acquired its democratic value and even utility, less from curricular changes than from larger norms and narratives attached to it by educators, editors, and advertisers.”—Thomas Augst, Journal of American History

“The book is rich in reflections about these magazine’s representations of college curricula and extracurricular life, and the linkages between these and both the newly developing ideals of masculinity and the world of corporate capitalism.”—Historical Studies in Education

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0299235343
• ISBN 13: 9780299235345
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256