On July 1, 2005, a jubilant procession marched through downtown Los Angeles to celebrate the inauguration of Antonio Villaraigosa, the first person of Mexican descent to be elected mayor in over a century. The parade route went from City Hall to the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, where an interfaith service, representing Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Hindus, had just been conducted. Fortuitously, this event seemed to proffer a positive answer to the questions raised by the conference on public culture, which met at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the spring of 2003. “Is there an...

The eminent Chinese anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotong spent a year in the United States during the Second World War. He was struck by how little regard Americans had for history and tradition. “When tradition is concrete, when it is a part of life, sacred, something to be feared and loved, then it takes the form of ghosts,” he said. “To be able to live in a world that has ghosts is fortunate.”¹

He recalled that after his grandmother died he could almost see her going to the kitchen to check on lunch preparations, as she did every day. Her...

Victory in World War II did not mean that all Americans saw this cataclysmic event in the same way. Some people spent the war years helping to build bombers or partying in crowded nightclubs. Some slogged through jungles fighting enemies, and others mourned in the privacy of their homes. Americans have often referred to the experience as the “good war,” but no one epithet could capture the full range of personal and national experiences that citizens encountered in the early 1940s. To be sure the war created winners and losers and transformed the lives and politics of individuals and nations....

Although we are surrounded by so many commercial messages that they work without our even noticing most of them, advertising keeps showing up in new places. Ads printed on the back of a cookie fortune or pasted onto an airplane tray table suggest that contemporary consumer culture abhors a blank space; a company’s name on trail markers in a public park hints at the ways that public institutions must pander to private ones in order to flourish, and sometimes to survive (Figure 4.1). American culture, at home and across the globe, is corporate culture. The public is defined by and...

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, traditional forms of entertainment had to reinvent their place in U.S. life and culture. The de rigueur violence of mass media—both news and fiction—no longer seemed business as usual. While Hollywood usually defends its mass-destruction ethos with claims to “free speech,” constitutional rights, and industry-wide discretion (à la ratings systems), in the weeks following September 11 the industry exhibited (whether for sincere or cynical reasons) a new will toward “tastefulness” as potentially trauma-inducing films like Warner Bros.’ Collateral Damage were pulled from release. On television, violent movies also came under network...

In the 1990s, the Internet was sold as the marketplace of ideas, as democracy, come true. Al Gore contended that a global information infrastructure heralded “a new Athenian Age of democracy” because it gave citizens free access to information and thus the power to control their lives.¹ The U.S. judiciary declared the Internet “the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed … [and thus deserving of] the highest protection from governmental intrusion.”² It was so deserving not only because there were extremely low barriers to speech, but also because it allegedly eradicated inequalities that belied the public sphere as...

As the urban environment decentralized in the 1920s and 1930s with the adoption of the car as a routine part of American life, the highway became more than merely a route to be traveled. It became the site of a new kind of public landscape and conception of public culture. To some, including the outdoor advertisers who are the main subject of this essay, the highway had become the “buyway,” a boundless marketplace bursting out of its traditional confinement within town and city centers that was “millions of miles long” and, thanks to the throngs it carried, “billions of dollars”...

Nostalgia for older forms of community and the public space in which they were enacted stirs us to appreciate the places where we have shopped in the past. Partly this reflects their technological and social obsolescence—as my grandparents recalled “the delights of corner-shops, gas lamps, horsecabs, trams, pisstalls: all gone, it seems, in successive generations,” so I regret the passing of friendly chats with shop clerks and greengrocers and their replacement by the soulless autonomy of Internet shopping.² But the feeling of attachment to, or alienation from, shopping places is not all a matter of structural change. It also...

I pulled my car in front of the building, where a large sign welcomed me to “Home Courts,” a combination gym and recreational center that sponsored youth and adult basketball and volleyball leagues and instruction. The sign advertised courts for rent, leagues for kids and adults, and space for parties of all sorts. A schedule offered a weekend volleyball tournament, advertising club teams from around the region.

As we entered, the sound of squeaking tennis shoes, dribbling basketballs, and excited young voices was music to my ears. It brought back memories of my own youth, of the endless games that...

African Americans historically have had a fraught relationship with public culture and, consequently, with their public identity. W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor of the veil, which captures both the envy and contempt black Americans have felt toward the white world, centers on the idea of the veil as visual barrier. The veil both obscures the wearer from being seen and empowers one’s ability to survey others without being noticed. The portrayal of invisibility as depicted in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man offers the more stark idea that African Americans do not have a public identity as they are completely...

The city of Toledo is in northwest Ohio. Situated just south of Detroit, the Glass City, as it’s called, has been in the Motor City orbit as long as there have been cars assembled in the region. Workers from western, central, and eastern Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, Indian reservations, and the American South gravitated to these cities throughout the great surge in automobile manufacturing that powered the national economy throughout the twentieth century. Michael Moore has illustrated the dramatic local effects of the eventual downturns in this industry in his documentary Roger and Me. Speaking in Toledo, Moore once...

On a warm summer night in late August 2004, a candlelight procession of seven hundred men, women, and children walked slowly across the 140-year-old suspension bridge that spans the Ohio River between Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Their voices raised in song, the Freedom Center Choir retraced the route followed by generations of enslaved Americans who had crossed that “River Jordan” in search of freedom. The procession filed onto a wide stage where an array of national, state, and local public officials, together with representatives from Cincinnati’s largest corporations waited to speak at the public dedication of the newly opened...

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the war on terror that ensued, energized an ongoing debate over civic engagement in America and led many scholars to speculate about the potential for civic revitalization in the United States. Would this conflict, like others in America’s past, mobilize the citizenry, increase volunteerism, and enhance community sentiment?¹ Political scientist Robert Putnam, who not long before 9/11 had famously warned of a decline in civic engagement in the United States illustrated by the tendency of Americans to “bowl alone,” saw in 9/11 a potential for Americans to begin “bowling together.” He wrote:...