Changing Cultural Tastes offers a critical survey of the taste wars fought over the past two centuries between the intellectual establishment and the common people in Germany. It charts the uneasy relationship of high and popular culture in Germany in the modern era. The impact of National Socialism and the strong influence from Great Britain and the United States are assessed in this cultural history of a changing nation and society. The period 1920-1980 is given special prominence, and the work of significant writers and artists such as Josef von Sternberg and Bertolt Brecht, Elfriede Jelinek and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Erwin Piscator and Heinrich Böll, is closely analysed. Their work has reflected changing tastes and, crucially, helped to make taste more pluralistic and democratic.

Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them. Professor Kammen shows how the post-traditional popular culture that flourished after the 1880s became full-blown mass culture after World War II, in an era of unprecedented affluence and travel. He charts the influence of advertising and opinion polling; the development of standardized products, shopping centers, and mass-marketing; the separation of youth and adult culture; the gradual repudiation of the genteel tradition; and the commercialization of organized entertainment. He stresses the significance of television in the shaping of mass culture, and of consumerism in its reconfiguration over the past two decades. Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion. An important commentary on the often conflicting ways Americans have understood, defined, and talked about their changing culture in the twentieth century.

What accounts for our tastes? Why and how do they change over time? Stanley Lieberson analyzes children's first names to develop an original theory of fashion. He disputes the commonly-held notion that tastes in names (and other fashions) simply reflect societal shifts.

Selected essays written over a period of fifteen years.

Food preferences and tastes are among the fundamentals affecting human existence; the sociocultural, physiological and neurological factors involved have therefore been widely researched and are well documented. However, information and debate on these factors are scattered across the academic literature of different disciplines. In this volume cross-disciplinary perspectives are brought together by an international team of contributors that includes socialand biological anthropologists, ethologists and ethnologists, psychologists, neurologists and zoologists in order to provide access to the different specialisms on the topic.

How and why do we think about food, taste it, and cook it? While much has been written about the concept of terroir as it relates to wine, in this vibrant, personal book, Amy Trubek, a pioneering voice in the new culinary revolution, expands the concept of terroir beyond wine and into cuisine and culture more broadly. Bringing together lively stories of people farming, cooking, and eating, she focuses on a series of examples ranging from shagbark hickory nuts in Wisconsin and maple syrup in Vermont to wines from northern California. She explains how the complex concepts of terroir and goût de terroir are instrumental to France's food and wine culture and then explores the multifaceted connections between taste and place in both cuisine and agriculture in the United States. How can we reclaim the taste of place, and what can it mean for us in a country where, on average, any food has traveled at least fifteen hundred miles from farm to table? Written for anyone interested in food, this book shows how the taste of place matters now, and how it can mediate between our local desires and our global reality to define and challenge American food practices.

Democratic in intention and approach, the book will argue that the home interior, as independently created by the ‘amateur’ householder, offers a continuous informal critique of shifting architectural styles (most notably with the advent of Modernism) and the design mainstream. Indeed, it will suggest that the popular increasingly exerts an influence on the professional. Underpinned by academic rigour, but not in thrall to it, above all this book is an engaging attempt to identify the cultural drivers of aesthetic change in the home, extrapolating the wider influence of ‘taste’ to a broad audience – both professional and ‘trade’. In so doing, it will explore enthralling territory – money, class, power and influence. Illustrated with contemporary drawings and cartoons as well as photos, the book will not only be an absorbing read, but an enticing and attractive object in itself.