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Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Michael Kimmel. New York, The Free Press: 1997.
Michael Kimmel claims that men do not have a history--espite the fact that men have traditionally dominated history books-and he is right. With the exception of a few monographs by scholars such as Anthony Rotundo and Robert Griswold, very few historical works have explored the experiences of being a man in America. And even fewer have questioned how masculinity as a construct has shaped that experience.
Manhood in America is not Kimmel's first attempt at unearthing the meaning of manhood; he has published a series of articles and anthologies on the topic of masculinity dating back to the late 1980s. But this work is different. In Manhood in America, Kimmel manages to...