Matthew B Karush
Biographic Data
| ID | 121607 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthew B Karush |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthew B |
| FAMILY NAME | Karush |
| SIGNATURE | KARUSH M B |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-2962-8511 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Historia de la juventud en la Argentina de los siglos XX y XXI
Modernity at the Movies
During the early years of the twentieth century, the cinema offered urbanites the world over a key venue for engaging with modernity. In Latin America as elsewhere, the new technology thrilled audiences, spurring the emergence of local film industries. After World War I, Hollywood studios, backed by the US government, gained dominance over foreign markets, turning the cinema into a powerful vector of US cultural influence abroad. Scholars have ex…
Introduction to “On Agency” at Twenty
In 2003, the Journal of Social History published “On Agency.” Walter Johnson’s short, sharp, nine-page reckoning with perhaps the foundational category of “history-from-the-bottom-up” has become a classic of methodological and theoretical self-reflection. Two decades on, it remains the Journal of Social History’s most cited article. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of “On Agency,” the Journal asked ten leading historians to reflect once mor…
Hearing the Americas
This article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas , a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas , showing in eac…
Breve historia del antipopulismo
In 2015, the wealthy, right-wing businessman Mauricio Macri won the Argentine presidency and set about dismantling the ambitious social programs created by his predecessors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. To the historian Ernesto Semán, the language weaponized by Macri and his followers seemed familiar: the ascendant Right denounced “populism” and aimed its vitriol at “choriplaneros,” lazy, poor people living on government han…
Five Decades of Social History
Current Journal of Social History Editor Matt Karush sat down with Peter Stearns to discuss the major challenges and contributions of his long career. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
La marchita, el escudo y el bombo
Peronism, Argentina's most distinctive, resilient, and protean political movement, continues to attract and challenge scholars from a range of disciplines. In recent years, one of the most productive areas of inquiry has been cultural history, as a new generation of historians has shifted the focus away from labor unions, political discourse, and intellectual genealogy and onto such topics as education, leisure, recreation, and consumption. In th…
Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina
This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and lite…
The Banjo
In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite the history of popular music in the United States. By situating that history in a transnational context, they have destabilized the unexamined, nationalist genealogies that dominate conventional narratives. At the same time, they have historicized the racial associations that attach to specific genres, and they have uncovered the agency that musicians and audiences were able to exercise within ideol…
Reinventing the Latin in Latin Jazz
This article examines the career of Gato Barbieri, a jazz saxophonist from Argentina who relocated to the United States in the 1960s. In this new setting, audiences and critics saw Barbieri as "Latin," an ethnic category and a musical descriptor that meant nothing to him before he left home. By negotiating the distance between his own sense of self and the perceptions of North American jazz musicians and critics, Barbieri developed a distinctive …
Looking Forward
It is with a great sense of excitement that I take over as editor of the Journal of Social History. Under the able direction of our founding editor, Peter Stearns, the JSH has come to occupy a special position within the discipline. Founded just as the new subfield of social history was challenging scholars with its innovative concerns and methodologies, the Journal has evolved in step with the discipline, often providing crucial space for import…
Making Samba
Reviewed by: Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil by Marc A. Hertzman Matthew B. Karush Hertzman, Marc A. Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. xvii + 364 pp. In Brazil, perhaps more than in any other country, the political and historical relevance of popular music has long been obvious. Samba, in particular, has been directly implicated in histories of Brazilian populism, in debate…
Citizens and Sportsmen
Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile." Social History, 38(1), pp. 127–128
Culture of Class
Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.
Culture of Class
In an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's domestic cultural production in crucial ways, as Argentine producers tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these producers to compete by marke…
Blackness in Argentina
On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies of mestizaje that broke with European and North American models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elements in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals rejected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national identities tha…
The new cultural history of Peronism
The New Cultural History of Peronism
Football in the Americas
Over the last several decades, football, the world's most popular sport, has begun to attract well-deserved attention from academics in a variety of disciplines. In general, this scholarship has fallen into two unrelated fields of inquiry. While historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have asked questions about the culture of football, economists and experts in management and marketing have approached the sport with a very different agenda.…
The Melodramatic Nation
The 1930s represent a paradoxical decade within Argentine cultural history. Historians in search of the origins of Peronism have uncovered rising class antagonisms in these years. The dislocations of import substitution industrialization and massive internal migration, along with the restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930, deepened class resentment among workers, creating a receptive audience for Juan Perón’s populist…
Wandering Paysanos
Book Review| March 01 2005 Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era Ricardo D. Salvatore Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003 xiv+ 563 pp., $59.95 (cloth) Matthew B. Karush Matthew B. Karush Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (1): 133–135. https://doi.org/10.12…
National Identity in the Sports Pages
The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the city'…
Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation
The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the 'gauc…
National Identity in the Sports Pages
The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the city'…
Blackness in Argentina
On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies of mestizaje that broke with European and North American models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elements in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals rejected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national identities tha…
Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation
The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the 'gauc…
The Melodramatic Nation
The 1930s represent a paradoxical decade within Argentine cultural history. Historians in search of the origins of Peronism have uncovered rising class antagonisms in these years. The dislocations of import substitution industrialization and massive internal migration, along with the restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930, deepened class resentment among workers, creating a receptive audience for Juan Perón’s populist…
Workers, Citizens and the Argentine Nation
The electoral democracy created by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 opened up dramatic new possibilities for working-class political identity. In the important port city of Rosario, the Radical politician Ricardo Caballero crafted a political discourse that combined an explicit defence of working-class interests with a nostalgic depiction of the country's rural past. By linking class consciousness with images drawn from the popular culture of the 'gauc…
National Identity in the Sports Pages
The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the city'…
Wandering Paysanos
Book Review| March 01 2005 Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era Ricardo D. Salvatore Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003 xiv+ 563 pp., $59.95 (cloth) Matthew B. Karush Matthew B. Karush Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2005) 2 (1): 133–135. https://doi.org/10.12…
The Melodramatic Nation
The 1930s represent a paradoxical decade within Argentine cultural history. Historians in search of the origins of Peronism have uncovered rising class antagonisms in these years. The dislocations of import substitution industrialization and massive internal migration, along with the restricted political system ushered in by the military coup of 1930, deepened class resentment among workers, creating a receptive audience for Juan Perón’s populist…
Football in the Americas
Over the last several decades, football, the world's most popular sport, has begun to attract well-deserved attention from academics in a variety of disciplines. In general, this scholarship has fallen into two unrelated fields of inquiry. While historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have asked questions about the culture of football, economists and experts in management and marketing have approached the sport with a very different agenda.…
The new cultural history of Peronism
The New Cultural History of Peronism
Culture of Class
Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.
Culture of Class
In an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's domestic cultural production in crucial ways, as Argentine producers tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these producers to compete by marke…
Blackness in Argentina
On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies of mestizaje that broke with European and North American models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elements in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals rejected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national identities tha…
Citizens and Sportsmen
Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile." Social History, 38(1), pp. 127–128
Making Samba
Reviewed by: Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil by Marc A. Hertzman Matthew B. Karush Hertzman, Marc A. Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2013. xvii + 364 pp. In Brazil, perhaps more than in any other country, the political and historical relevance of popular music has long been obvious. Samba, in particular, has been directly implicated in histories of Brazilian populism, in debate…
Looking Forward
It is with a great sense of excitement that I take over as editor of the Journal of Social History. Under the able direction of our founding editor, Peter Stearns, the JSH has come to occupy a special position within the discipline. Founded just as the new subfield of social history was challenging scholars with its innovative concerns and methodologies, the Journal has evolved in step with the discipline, often providing crucial space for import…
Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina
This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and lite…
The Banjo
In recent years, scholars have begun to rewrite the history of popular music in the United States. By situating that history in a transnational context, they have destabilized the unexamined, nationalist genealogies that dominate conventional narratives. At the same time, they have historicized the racial associations that attach to specific genres, and they have uncovered the agency that musicians and audiences were able to exercise within ideol…
Reinventing the Latin in Latin Jazz
This article examines the career of Gato Barbieri, a jazz saxophonist from Argentina who relocated to the United States in the 1960s. In this new setting, audiences and critics saw Barbieri as "Latin," an ethnic category and a musical descriptor that meant nothing to him before he left home. By negotiating the distance between his own sense of self and the perceptions of North American jazz musicians and critics, Barbieri developed a distinctive …
La marchita, el escudo y el bombo
Peronism, Argentina's most distinctive, resilient, and protean political movement, continues to attract and challenge scholars from a range of disciplines. In recent years, one of the most productive areas of inquiry has been cultural history, as a new generation of historians has shifted the focus away from labor unions, political discourse, and intellectual genealogy and onto such topics as education, leisure, recreation, and consumption. In th…
Five Decades of Social History
Current Journal of Social History Editor Matt Karush sat down with Peter Stearns to discuss the major challenges and contributions of his long career. The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Breve historia del antipopulismo
In 2015, the wealthy, right-wing businessman Mauricio Macri won the Argentine presidency and set about dismantling the ambitious social programs created by his predecessors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. To the historian Ernesto Semán, the language weaponized by Macri and his followers seemed familiar: the ascendant Right denounced “populism” and aimed its vitriol at “choriplaneros,” lazy, poor people living on government han…
Hearing the Americas
This article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas , a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas , showing in eac…
Introduction to “On Agency” at Twenty
In 2003, the Journal of Social History published “On Agency.” Walter Johnson’s short, sharp, nine-page reckoning with perhaps the foundational category of “history-from-the-bottom-up” has become a classic of methodological and theoretical self-reflection. Two decades on, it remains the Journal of Social History’s most cited article. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of “On Agency,” the Journal asked ten leading historians to reflect once mor…
Modernity at the Movies
During the early years of the twentieth century, the cinema offered urbanites the world over a key venue for engaging with modernity. In Latin America as elsewhere, the new technology thrilled audiences, spurring the emergence of local film industries. After World War I, Hollywood studios, backed by the US government, gained dominance over foreign markets, turning the cinema into a powerful vector of US cultural influence abroad. Scholars have ex…
Historia de la juventud en la Argentina de los siglos XX y XXI
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Art (11 works) · History (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Argentine historical studies (7 works) · Art history (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)