studies, to do with our position as academics, in Canada, right now? Ohmann argues that mass culture emerged hand in hand with the modern research university, each shaping and serving the other. Along the fault lines and colour lines of cultural hierarchy, such creative forces marshaled solidarity and resistance.
The Colored Cooperative Publishing Company in Boston, James McGirt in Philadelphia, and Sutton Griggs in Tennessee all produced and marketed popular magazines and books to Black communities, heroizing African-American and mixed-race figures and raging, in their various ways, against racial inequities. In the same period, African-Americans across the country did an end-run on the white monopoly on publishing and distribution, seizing the new tools of mass publishing for their own ends. Alice Callahan (Muskogee)-currently identified as the first Native American woman to publish a novel, Wynema (1891)-used the popular sentimentalism associated with white middleclass women to launch an excoriating attack on the genocidal policies and practices of the government of the day. Some, of course, refused such distinctions and their own relegation within the cultural hierarchy.
'The eastern establishment sought both to distance itself from and to control this new mass culture marketplace, and a new class alignment-sometimes named the professional-managerial class-emerged. S.-such as Ellen Gruber Garvey, Kathy Peiss, and Richard Ohmann-have traced parallel power relations in struggles between established middle-class book publishers and the makers of mass magazines, in the gendered division of commercialized leisure, and in the commodification of audiences by advertisers. Other scholars of the late-nineteenth-century U. Levine closely documents how this class succeeded in fissuring what had been "a rich shared public culture," removing Shakespeare, symphonic music, opera, and the fine arts to a pantheon of inaccessible high culture (9). As the century wore on, that distinction was increasingly wielded by a class of "old stock" Anglo-American gentlemen who sought to shore up their privilege in the face of threats posed by galloping immigration, industrialization, and technology. The book zeroes in on mid-nineteenth-century phrenology, which measured cranial dimensions to establish a hierarchy of racial types, from the high brows of European Caucasians to the low brows of alien races: Coombs' Popular Phrenology of 186s typically illustrated the domed forehead of Shakespeare against the flat-headed skull of "A Cannibal New Zealand Chief" (Levine 222). The result was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.