Selected Essays by Jim Cullen


“Springsteen’s Early Struggles Reveal How the Music Industry Has Changed,” Washington Post, January 5, 2023.

“As ‘All in the Family” Turns 50, a Look at Why it Succeeded,” New York Daily News, January 11, 2021.

“Summer’s Fall: Springsteen in Senescence” in Springsteen at 70, edited by June Sawyers and Jonathan Cohen (Rutgers University Press, 2019).

All in the Family Pushed the Envelope on Race and Gender. Has America Regressed Since Then?” USA Today, September 28, 2018.

“Mind the Gap: Teaching the Integrated Essence of Hamilton,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Re-Staging America’s Past edited by Claire Potter and Renee Romano (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

“A Teacher Wrestles with What to Say to His Students about Trump Win,” The Washington Post, November 9, 2016

“Problems and Promises of the Self-Made Myth,” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 15:2 (Summer 2013): 8-22.

“How Six Oscar Winners Tell the Story of America,” The Washington Post, February 24, 2013.

“Twilights Gleaming: The American Dream and the Ends of Republics,” in The American Dream in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Sandra Hanson and John White (Temple University Press, 2011).

“Homeland (the White Picket Fence),” Forbes, June 26, 2007.

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:   Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Various essays and reviews in Rolling StoneNewsday, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the Providence Journal-Bulletin, and other publications, 1981-1991.