Recommended Books on Folk and Popular Culture

Recommended Books on Folk and Popular Culture

Bronner, Simon. 2011. Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press. In this volume, Bronner discusses the ways in which folk traditions contribute to contemporary cultures, including the culture of the Internet. The book includes many examples of American folk culture behavior surrounding phenomena like storytelling, football, and the construction of roadside shrines for the dead.

Carney, George O. (ed.). 1998. Baseball, Barns and Bluegrass: A Geography of American Folklife. Boulder, CO.: Rowman & Littlefield. A wonderful collection of readings that, contrary to the title, span the gap between folk and popular culture.

Ensminger, Robert F. 1992. The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. A common American folk barn, part of the rural cultural landscape, provides geographer Ensminger with visual clues to its origin and diffusion; a fascinating detective story showing how geographers “read” cultural landscapes and what they learn in the process.

Glassie, Henry. 1968. Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Glassie, a student of folk geographer Fred Kniffen, considers the geographical distribution of a wide array of folk culture items in this classic overview.

Jordan, Terry G., Jon T. Kilpinen, and Charles F. Gritzner. 1997. The Mountain West: Interpreting the Folk Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reading the folk landscapes of the American West, three geographers reach conclusions about the regional culture and how it evolved.

Skelton, Tracey, and Gill Valentine (eds.). 1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge. The engaging essays in Cool Places explore the dichotomy of youthful lives by addressing the issues of representation and resistance in youth culture today. Using first-person vignettes to illustrate the wide-ranging experiences of youth, the authors consider how the media have imagined young people as a particular community with shared interests and how young people resist these stereotypes, instead creating their own independent representations of their lives.

Weiss, Michael J. 1994. Latitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends, Politics, and Passions. New York: Little, Brown. Using marketing data organized by postal zip codes, Weiss reveals the geographical diversity of American popular culture.

Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1992. The Cultural Geography of the United States, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. This revised edition of a sprightly classic book, originally published in 1973, reveals the cultural sectionalism in modern America in the era of popular culture, with attention also to folk roots.