Celebrity Culture and the American Dream (2^nd Ed.)
Stardom and Social Mobility

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition?s examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today?s celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

1. The American Dream: Celebrity, Class, and Social Mobility 2. Beyond Subsistence: The Rise of the Middle Class in the Twentieth Century 3. Prosperity and Wealth Arrive: Boom Times and Women’s Suffrage in the 1920s 4. Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps: Personal Failure and the Great Depression 5. We’re all in this Together: Collectivism and World War II 6. Suburban Utopia: The Postwar Middle-Class Fantasy 7. Is That All There Is? Challenging the Suburban Fantasy in the Sixties and Seventies 8. Massive Wealth as Moral Reward: The Reagan Revolution and Individualism 9. Success Just for Being You: Opportunity in the Internet Age

Karen Sternheimer is a sociologist at the University of Southern California, where she is a distinguished fellow at the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching. She is also the author of Connecting Popular Culture and Social Problems: Why Media is not the Answer (2013), Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility (2011), Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth (2006), It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children (2003), and is the editor and lead writer for everydaysociologyblog.com. She has provided commentary for NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The History Channel, and Fox News.