CULLEN, Jim 1962-

PERSONAL: Born December 9, 1962, in New York, NY; son of James R. (a firefighter) and Grace (a contract administrator; maiden name, Capone) Cullen; married Lyde Sizer, August 12, 1989; children: James Faust, Grason Sterling, Ryland Bailey, Nancy Anis. Education: Tufts University, B.A., 1985; Brown University, A.M., 1988, Ph.D., 1992. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Movies, popular music.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Alice Martell, The Alice Martell Agency, 545 Madison Ave., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Journal-Bulletin, Providence, RI, copy editor, 1989–93; University of New Hampshire, Durham, lecturer in history, 1993–94; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, lecturer in expository writing, history, and literature, 1994–2001; Ethical Culture Fieldston School, New York, NY, history teacher, 2001–.

MEMBER: Natioanl Association of Independent Schools.

WRITINGS:

The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, Smithsonian Institution Press (Washington, DC), 1995.

The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States, Monthly Review Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, Harper Collins (New York, NY), 1997, new edition with a foreword by Daniel Cavicchi, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 2005.

(Editor) Popular Culture in American History, Blackwell Publishers (Malden, MA), 2000.

Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream: Character Studies of a Spiritual Quest from the Time of the Puritan to the Present, Sheed & Ward (Franklin, WI), 2001.

The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor, with Lyde Cullen Sizer) The Civil War Era: An Anthology of Sources, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2005.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Rolling Stone.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Hail to the Fallible Chief: Turning Points in the Lives of Presidents, for Palgrave, projected 2007.

SIDELIGHTS: Jim Cullen's first book, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, examines five twentieth-century cultural phenomena with their roots in the Civil War: historian and poet Carl Sandburg's prize-winning multi-volume biography of Civil Warera President Abraham Lincoln; Margaret Mitchell's classic saga Gone with the Wind; rock and roll music, which began as a Southern genre; the film Glory, about a company of African-American Union Army volunteers; and the thriving hobby of re-enacting Civil War battles. Cullen describes each one, then shows how all of them reflect the current social struggles of the time in which they were created. Sandburg's books, Cullen argues, were an attempt to answer concerns about the expansion of federal power during the 1930s, while Civil War re-enactors are trying to stake a claim to an honorable role for white males amidst the current emphasis on multicultural history. The book was extensively researched and carefully documented; as James E. Jacobsen noted in Civil War History, "Cullen's citations will lead the reader to a host of new discoveries as newly generated questions are matched with previously unappreciated or underappreciated sources." "Cullen has made a superb contributions to the subdiscipline known as 'history of memory,' Ethan Rafuse concluded in the Historian. "The Civil War in Popular Culture is an enjoyable and informative study that reminds us that history often reveals as much about the people telling the story as it does about the story itself."

In Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition Cullen draws on his experiences writing for the music magazine Rolling Stone to examine that rock star's relationship to the history of American writing. Cullen contends that Springsteen's lyrics follow in the footsteps of such rustic wordsmiths and American icons as poet Walt Whitman, President Abraham Lincoln, and writer Mark Twain"—a nice idea, but one that Cullen doesn't completely realize," concluded a Publishers Weekly critic. However, as Mike Tribby attested in Booklist, the book's "depth and documentation are excellent: quotes attributed, dates given, references traced."

In The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Cullen actually discusses four separate dreams that have animated Americans for the past four hundred years: upward class mobility, the equality of all people, home ownership, and what he calls the "Dream of the Coast"—the desire to have the sort of easy, effortlessly luxurious life depicted by Hollywood and symbolized by California as a whole. This final dream "provides [Cullen] with truly original insight," according to America contributor Thomas Murphy. As Steven G. Kellman elaborated in USA Today Magazine, "Cullen laments the glorification of leisure and the way a culture that idolizes celebrity has displaced dreams rooted in character with those rooted in mere personality. His book becomes an elegy for how a noble dream degenerated into a shabby fantasy." The American Dream "desires to be suggestive rather than exhaustive," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, but "its broader exploration of freedom, equality and shared ideals offers a nice dose of depth as well."

Cullen once told CA: "It has been my ambition to become a writer for as long as I can remember. I realized fairly early that I lacked the talent to write fiction, and virtually all of my work since adolescence has been nonfiction, especially journalism. To a degree, my journalistic experiences have shaped my method. I try to write in steady, incremental intervals, in prose that is as artless as possible. In large measure, I attended graduate school in the hope that I would learn the craft of writing books. I began writing The Art of Democracy because I wanted to try my hand at telling a coherent story over a fairly long period of time, in this case, two hundred years.

"I am a student of American political culture. I consider myself a republican and a democrat (in lowercase letters). My work involves an effort to trace indigenous American traditions of egalitarianism, traditions that allowed me, the child of working-class parents and the first person in my family to receive a college education, to pursue my aspirations.

"I consider myself lucky that I've been able to do what I have thus far, and I hope to be able to continue to write books."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, February 18, 2002, Thomas Hughson, review of Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream: Character Studies of a Spiritual Quest from the Time of the Puritan to the Present, p. 26; September 29, 2003, Thomas Murphy, review of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, p. 24.

American Historical Review, February, 1997, Ann Fabian, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, p. 193.

American Studies International, February, 1998, John L. Hare, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 103.

Black Scholar, winter, 1996, review of The Art of Democracy, p. 64.

Booklist, June 1, 1997, Mike Tribby, review of Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition, p. 1639; February 15, 2003, Vernon Ford, review of The American Dream, p. 1034.

Choice, May, 1996, review of The Art of Democracy, p. 1542.

Civil War History, December, 1997, James E. Jacobsen, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 338.

Entertainment Weekly, May 29, 1998, review of Born in the U.S.A., p. 69.

Historian, spring, 1996, Ethan Rafuse, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 636.

History: Review of New Books, winter, 1996, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 59; winter, 2001, Robert L. Patterson, review of Popular Culture in American History, p. 56.

Journal of American Culture, summer, 1996, Mark D. Van Ells, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 136; fall, 1996, review of The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States, p. 125.

Journal of American History, March, 1997, Ruth Banes, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 1410.

Journal of American Studies, April, 1996, Craig Monk, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 148; August, 1998, review of The Art of Democracy, p. 322.

Journal of Southern History, August, 1996, Darden Asbury Pyron, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 599.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1997, review of Born in the U.S.A., p. 689; December 15, 2002, review of The American Dream, p. 1816.

Library Journal, September 1, 1996, Mary Hamel-Schwulst, review of The Art of Democracy, p. 198; March 1, 2003, Jack Forman, review of The American Dream, p. 102.

New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1997, review of Born in the U.S.A., p. 16.

Public Historian, winter, 1997, review of The Civil War in Popular Culture, p. 112.

Publishers Weekly, February 5, 1996, review of The Art of Democracy, p. 81; April 21, 1997, review of Born in the U.S.A., p. 50; January 13, 2003, review of The American Dream, p. 47.

USA Today Magazine, September, 2003, Steven G. Kellman, review of The American Dream, p. 80.

Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2003, David Brooks, review of The American Dream, p. D10.