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Michael Kimmel. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. In 1953 Simone de Beauvoir said, "A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the particular situation of the human male." Bad prediction. Michael Kimmel has written five volumes on men's lives including his latest Manhood in America.
This book seeks to provide a cultural history of American manhood from 1776 to the present. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels and popular fiction, film and television, political pamphlets, and more conventional political and economic history, Kimmel examines and categorizes paradigms of masculinity that he sees in American popular culture.
According to Kimmel, at the turn of the nineteenth century, American manhood was rooted in land ownership (the Genteel Patriarch) or in the self possession of the independent artisan, shopkeeper, or farmer (the Heroic Artisan). Then the Industrial Revolution came along and American men were forced to define themselves in a...