Media, popular culture, and the American century

Seen from a contemporary perspective, it is evident that the greatest cultural impact of the U.S. in the fabled American Century was not at the high end of intellectual thought, but at the level of popular culture, the mass media, technology and the spread of the American vernacular in all its semiotic forms. From the first days of Hollywood till the present, the desire for U.S. cultural products through advertising, fashion, film, life-styles, popular music, television, and much else, has been a force felt worldwide. In 1941, Henry R. Luce published his since-contested paean to the American Century, in which he asserted that: “American jazz, Hollywood, movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common.”