The Rise of Popular Culture

"The Rise of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch" by LeRoy Ashby covered a lot of topics and movements in an interesting manner and he made the events inter-related. Ashby gave interesting examples of historians looking for historical facts that were overlooked. When Bill Malone was working on his PhD dissertation, he found there were no academic articles written about country music. A stark contrast was another historian, Lawrence Levine. He examined the recorded folk history of African Americans and chose to discredit the perception that African Americans were inarticulate, impotent, formed by events they had no control over. This was a very perceptive understanding that this strongly biased historical view of African Americans was a formed by political power forcing a false, unflattering cultural view on an entire group of individuals. Levine has the opportunity to study events and individuals he thought were historically and culturally significant. Ashby writes, that when Levine had to depart from traditional histories, he "felt quite lonely and vulnerable". I understood from this comment that Levine faced many difficulties, he did not have cohorts ready to assist him and the political climate was violently opposed to civil rights. In addition, I can't help but think he felt rushed to uncover historical details in the form of artifacts, letters or documentation and witnesses before this information vanished or people died.