Jim P. Cullen Books

Pioneering the field of Springsteen scholarship when it first appeared in 1997,  Born in the U.S.A.  remains one of the definitive studies of Springsteen’s work and its impact on American culture. Moving beyond journalistic and biographical approaches, Jim Cullen situates the artist in a wider historical canvas that stretches from the Puritans to Barack Obama, showing how he has absorbed, refracted, and revitalized American mythology, including the American Dream, the work ethic, and the long quest for racial justice. Exploring difficult questions about Springsteen’s politics, he finds a man committed to both democratic and republican principles, as well as a patriot dedicated to revealing the lapses of a country he loves.  This third edition of  Born in the U.S.A.  is fully revised and updated, incorporating discussion of Springsteen’s wide output in the 21st century. While addressing Springsteen’s responses to events like 9/11, it also considers the evolution of his attitudes towards religion, masculinity, and his relationship with his audience. Whether a serious Springsteen fan or simply an observer of American popular culture,  Born in the U.S.A.  will give you a new appreciation for The Boss.  

A classroom of skeptical students and their charismatic teacher make a foray into the nation’s past. The characters are fictive; the history—most importantly, the vision of history, grounded in a dying but immortal dream—is real. History teacher Kevin Lee is retiring from Seneca Falls High School, where he has worked for the past forty years. He decides to use the freedom of his pending exit to toss the state curriculum and teach the U.S. survey as the story of the alluring, inspiring, murderous concept we know as the American Dream—which, he understands, his students regard with justified, if instinctive, skepticism. Lee discusses the rise, fall, and legacy of the Dream with these smart, funny, and irreverent eleventh graders, in a narrative peppered with memos, email exchanges, text messages, student journalism, and other documents from beyond the walls of his classroom. The result is the best history class you never had. A chronological history of the United States, this compelling novel also offers a snapshot of American education, written by a veteran teacher who slices through the arid literature of pedagogy to vividly depict the life of the classroom. Finally, it offers a deeply affectionate and patriotic vision of American life—one fully aware of the nation’s limits and failures while honoring the longings so many of us have to believe in our country, even as we harbor deepening doubts about our nation.

"History is a subject we all learn in school, some of us with more enthusiasm than others. But the way most of us know history-experience it, absorb it, apply its lessons to make sense of our everyday lives-is through popular culture. And no medium of popular culture has been more pervasive in offering Americans a vision of their country in the past century than television. Television has played an especially important role in the interpretation-and reinterpretation-of collective memory, which is to say the events that were experienced first- or second-hand but which have since receded into the past. From Memory to History examines the way TV shows of the past fifty years have depicted US society in the last century. The book examines how a series of events in the past hundred years-from the advent of Prohibition to the advent of the Internet-were portrayed in some of the most beloved shows of all time, among them The Waltons, M*A*S*H, and Mad Men. But the book does more than that. It also explains how any given TV show is at least as important a historical artifact of the time it was made as it is the time it depicts. So it is, for example, that we see how That ''70 Show reveals a lot about the 1990s in the process of telling a story about the 1970s. Or How Hogan's Heroes, a (somewhat bizarre, in retrospect) sitcom about a German concentration camp in World War II, almost despite itself, reveals underlying anxieties about Civil Rights and the Vietnam War in its hermetically sealed episodes. Or how The Americans valorizes the outcome of a Cold War that was a good deal more uncertain than it was in the 1980s, when the series is set. Each of the book's seven chapters offers context for a show's setting, the show's interpretive argument in the moment it was made, and how both look from the perspective of the 2020s. Here, truly, is history in three dimensions. Lively, informative, and incisive, From Memory to History will help you look at television, the American Century, and the times in which you are living in an intriguing new light"-- Provided by publisher

More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of  Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  to the scrappy Irish immigrants of  Gangs of New York . And in films as varied as  Casino ,  The Aviator , and  The Wolf of Wall Street , he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed.   This book is the first study of Scorsese’s profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as  The Age of Innocence ,  Hugo , and  Kundun . Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant,  Martin Scorsese and the American Dream  illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.

A thinking person's exploration of the cultural significance of Bruce Springsteen.Moving beyond the biographical and journalistic approaches of most writing on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A. was the first major work of cultural criticism to situate Springsteen's work in the broader sweep of American history―the heir of Walt Whitman and Woody Guthrie, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Springsteen is an influential chronicler of our society, says Jim Cullen, a "good conservative" who preserves the traditional values of hard work, inclusive families, and genuine concern for the less fortunate. In the new edition to this landmark work, Cullen also discusses new currents in Springsteen's music since 9/11, notably his 2002 album The Rising. This Wesleyan edition includes a new foreword, introduction, and afterword. Must reading for any serious fan―or anyone who has ever been curious about what all the fuss has been about.

Experienced Wall Street pro Jim Cullen explains how investors can use the value approach for successful investing today, as well as sharing a wealth of fascinating stories from his time on the Street.

"The American Dream" is one of the most familiar and resonant phrases in our national lexicon, so familiar that we seldom pause to ask its origin, its history, or what it actually means. In this fascinating short history, Jim Cullen explores the meaning of the American Dream, or rather the several American Dreams that have both reflected and shaped American identity from the Pilgrims to the present. Cullen notes that the United States, unlike most other nations, defines itself not on the facts of blood, religion, language, geography, or shared history, but on a set of ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and consolidated in the Constitution. At the core of these ideals lies the ambiguous concept of the American Dream, a concept that for better and worse has proven to be amazingly elastic and durable for hundreds of years and across racial, class, and other demographic lines. The version of the American Dream that dominates our own time--what Cullen calls "the Dreamof the Coast"--is one of personal fulfillment, of fame and fortune all the more alluring if achieved without obvious effort, which finds its most insidious expression in the culture of Hollywood.