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    The New York Yankees as an American Cultural Icon, 1940-1970

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    Bishop_ku_0099D_13448_DATA_1.pdf (1.565Mb)
    Issue Date
    2014-05-31
    Author
    Bishop, William
    Publisher
    University of Kansas
    Format
    282 pages
    Type
    Dissertation
    Degree Level
    Ph.D.
    Discipline
    American Studies
    Rights
    This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.
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    Abstract
    The New York Yankees baseball club, arguably the United States' most successful and well-known sports franchise, have acquired many cultural connotations over the years, meanings transcending the immediate world of on-field sporting contest. This study argues that by the 1940s, the Yankee's success in the previous decades and their representation in popular culture caused a coherent set of cultural meanings to crystallize around the club to create an American icon. This icon served as an emblem for a set of interrelated mid-century mainstream American values, namely the American dream of upward mobility, heroic masculinity, and a narrative of national success. The meanings, perspectives on, and uses of this mid-century Yankees cultural icon have not been homogenous, but have shifted generally with the team's on-field performance and broader historic changes, as well as with the perspectives of individual cultural producers and audiences. In particular, increasingly throughout the 1950s and `60s, a general shift towards a negative perspective on the Yankees icon emerged in cultural texts of the era, one that increasingly saw the American values they embodied in a negative light. In these texts, representations of the Yankees as elitist, greedy, racist, too-tradition-bound, and overly-corporate are utilized to convey a critique of these values. This general shift in perceptions and uses of the Yankees icon parallels and is part of the broader cultural conflict and shift occurring between World War II and the end of the 1960s. Methodologically, this study draws on Roland Barthes application of semiotic theory to cultural communication in a broader sense. It draws on baseball history and general cultural history and seeks historical readings of texts from literature, film, popular music, journalism, and sports fan culture. In particular, The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Joe DiMaggio's autobiography Lucky to Be a Yankee (1947), Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Mark Harris's The Southpaw (1953), Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), Damn Yankees (1955 Broadway, '58 film), Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" (1968) and Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) are analyzed for the way they represent and use the Yankees.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1808/14516
    Collections
    • American Studies Dissertations and Theses [52]
    • Dissertations [4472]

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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    Image Credits
     

     

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