City Folk

Daniel J. Walkowitz is Professor Emeritus of History and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He is the author of City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America (NYU Press, 2010) and Working witb Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle Class Identity (UNC Press, 1999).

City Folk brings matters of class, nation, and whiteness front and center, reframing the kinds of questions that can be fairly asked of English Country Dancing in the twentieth-century U.S. and Britain. Turning a keen eye on urban cohorts who embraced this dancing, Walkowitz provides a model for joining consideration of things political with things culturalspecifically with practices of the bodyand for doing so across disciplinary divides. - Linda J. Tomko,University of California, Riverside Richly informative, conceptually exciting, and strikingly original. Walkowitz narrates the stories of compelling characters in the history of English Country Dance, particularly Cecil Sharp and the various figures, mostly women, with whom he dances through the complexities of organizing a movement in two countries. Walkowitz follows this story up to the present, combining analytic, ethnographic, and autobiographical reflections on the recent and contemporary folk dance scene. His authorial stance permits him to engage major questions about modern society, the middle class, and the role culture and cultures play in how people negotiate structural change over time. City Folk will be of interest to a diverse readership that stretches from general readers interested in folk dance and dancers and modern cultural history more broadly, to academic readers in fields including folklore, anthropology, performance, cultural studies, social history, and transatlantic perspectives. - Michael Frisch,University at Buffalo, State University of New York Walkowitz brings the joy of a dancer together with the analytical acuity of a scholar to create a fascinating picture of how English Country Dance reflected the shifting terrain of twentieth-century liberalism. City Folk is a model study of culture and politics. - Lizabeth Cohen,author of A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America Walkowitz has drawn from a plethora of primary and secondary sources, and from his own experience, to produce a fascinating, wide-ranging history of English country dance in Great Britain and the US. . .The transatlantic approach is groundbreaking; no comparable studies exist. The book includes numerous illustrations, detailed endnotes, and a helpful bibliography. Summing Up: Highly Recommended. (Choice) [] Walkowitzs conclusion that the English Folk Revival emerged from belief in & the redemptive power essential Englishness is both succinct and credible; his summary of attitudes within its American equivalentis persuasive. (Folklore)

• Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction I Anglo-American Urban Folk Revivals 1 Revival Stories 2 Orderly Bodies: Dancing New York, 1900-1914 3 Orderly Bodies: Dancing London, 1900-1914 4 Planting a Colony in America 5 The American Branch I I Liberalism and Folk Reimaginings 6 The Second Folk Revival 7 Re-Generation 8 Modern English Country Dance and the Culture of Liberalism Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author