Religion and Manly Hippies: Two New Reviews

H-Amstdy, an online scholarly discussion group and listserv dedicated to American Studies, recently published reviews of two Columbia University Press titles. (You can also save 20% on these titles during our special sale on American Studies titles.)

In a review entitled, “Relgious Road Trip,” Matthew Sutton calls Mark Hulsether’s Relgion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States, “An excellent introduction to the major movements in modern American religion. It draws on the best scholarship in American religion to focus on how particular movements interact and engage with each other and the broader American society.”

For more on the book, you can also read an interview with Mark Hulsether.

In “How to Be a Manly Longhair,” Anna Zuschlag considers Timothy Hodgon’s Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities, 1965-1983. Hodgon’s book considers the countercultural communities of the Diggers and the Farmers and argues that even as these groups claimed to offer a new type of manhood they also reproduced mainstream society’s assumptions about gender.

Zuschlag writes, “Hodgdon works to deconstruct preconceived notions of a homogeneous counterculture and, as such, presents a … nuanced narrative about cultural radicalism in the sixties and late twentieth-century American manhood.”