George Lipsitz

The classic work on collective memory and popular culture in the United States.Probes the complicated relationship between postwar America between historical memory and commercial culture-popular television, music, and film.

In a world tour that touches down in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Budapest, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, George Lipsitz explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures to be found in world music including rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, Puerto Rican bugalu and Chicano punk.

This book tells the story of Ivory Perry, a black worker and community activist who, for more than thirty years, has distributed the leaflets, carried the picket signs, and planned and participated in the confrontations that were essential to the success of protest movements. Using oral histories and extensive archival research, George Lipsitz examines the culture of opposition through the events of Perry's life of commitment and illumines the social and political changes and conflicts that have convulsed the United States during the past fifty years.

Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.