Russel B. Nye was a historian and professor at Michigan State University. He received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, where he taught before relocating to Michigan. He taught English at MSU for 39 years, serving as chairman of the department for 13 of those. Nye studied cultural trends, with interests ranging from jazz music, Gettysburg, comic strips, car racing, and hair styles. In 1945, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, awarded to his first book, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel. Nye’s biography of Bancroft, a nineteenth-century author, politician, Presidential advisor, and diplomat, was widely regarded as an important historical contribution. He also wrote Society and Culture in America: 1830-1860, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America, and Midwestern Progressive Politics. With these works, Nye helped to establish popular culture studies as a scholarly field of inquiry, blurring the distinctions between high and low culture and centering mass culture like television and comics as valuable historical sources. He co-founded the Popular Culture Association in 1970. He was the recipient of Rockefeller and Newberry Library fellowships. He died in 1993.
Nye’s lecture was held on November 25, 1968.