Jet Age Aesthetic

Vanessa R. Schwartz teaches art history, history, and film at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Visual Studies Research Institute and the Graduate Certificate program.

“Jet Age Aesthetic is a landmark achievement, laying the foundation for a new kind of critical history of the present.”—W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want? “Decades before the Internet, there was the Jet Age. In this visually delicious study, Vanessa Schwartz returns to a time just before our own, when all that was solid took to the air and the future became as weightless as a cloud out the window. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. You’ll be amazed at what you see.”—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties“Vanessa Schwartz’s archaeology of the jet age has taught me that the railway journey of the nineteenth century was not the last word but rather the beginning of a new story.”—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey“Gracefully written, engagingly narrated, and accompanied by brilliantly selected images, this is a book that anyone interested in the post–WWII world can read with pleasure and profit.”—Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine“A dazzling and stylish journey through the art and culture of the jet age. Beautifully illustrated, this important book offers a new way of understanding the modernity of the 1950s and 1960s.”—Lynda Nead, author of The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain