Jeff Melnick is professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston, where he specializes in teaching 20th-century cultural history. His most recent book is Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family. He is also the author of 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song, and Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction (with Rachel Rubin).
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
All in This Together?: On Grace Elizabeth Hale’s “Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture”
Jeff Melnick considers the rise of alternative music in the American South, as discussed in Grace Hale’s new hybrid ethnography-memoir, “Cool Town.”...
Waves of Mutilation: An Excerpt from Jeff Melnick’s “Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family”
LARB presents an excerpt from Jeff Melnick’s “Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family.”...
Out of the Mystic
Jeff Melnick on Ryan H. Walsh’s “Astral Weeks,” a history of Van Morrison’s iconic album....
Who Was Sharon Tate?
Sanders's first contribution was to see Manson as an individual — not a symbol....
