Product Description

Boasting a rich, complex history rooted in Celtic and Christian ritual, Halloween has evolved from ethnic celebration to a blend of street festival, fright night, and vast commercial enterprise. In this colorful history, Nicholas Rogers takes a lively, entertaining look at the cultural origins and development of one of the most popular holidays of the year. Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, from classical history to Hollywood films, Rogers traces Halloween as it emerged from the Celtic festival of Samhain (summer's end), picked up elements of the Christian Hallowtide (All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day), arrived in North America as an Irish and Scottish festival, and evolved into an unofficial but large-scale holiday by the early 20th century. He examines the 1970s and '80s phenomena of Halloween sadism (razor blades in apples) and inner-city violence (arson in Detroit), as well as the immense influence of the horror film genre on the reinvention of Halloween as a terror-fest. Throughout his vivid account, Rogers shows how Halloween remains, at its core, a night of inversion, when social norms are turned upside down, and a temporary freedom of expression reigns supreme. He examines how this very license has prompted censure by the religious Right, occasional outrage from law enforcement officials, and appropriation by Left-leaning political groups. Engagingly written and based on extensive research, Halloween is the definitive history of the most bewitching day of the year, illuminating the intricate history and shifting cultural forces behind this enduring trick-or-treat holiday.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86178 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
If America is a melting pot, then Halloween is the stew that simmers in our national cauldron. In this fascinating study, Rogers shows how the holiday is a hodgepodge of ancient European pagan traditions, 19th-century Irish and Scottish celebrations, Western Christian interpretations of All Souls' Day and thoroughly modern American consumer ideals. At its heart, he says, Halloween is a celebration of the inversion of social codes-children have power over adults, marauders can make demands of established homeowners and anyone may assume a temporary disguise. Canadian professor Rogers is a fine cultural historian, who carefully sifts through complex social and religious data to tease out meanings and trajectories. One excellent chapter illuminates Halloween and Hollywood, while a chapter entitled Border Crossings discusses Halloween observance among non-Anglo populations in North America, including Mexico's "Dia de los Muertos." Rogers's is the best study to date of the history and growing significance of Halloween.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The best work so far on this increasingly important holiday."--Publishers Weekly
"Performs the heroic service of taking all the stuff in stores seriously, as instruments in the creation of a new unreligious holiday of some significance, if the retailers are to be believed.... They say that the devil is in the details, and Rogers is a connoisseur of delicious tidbits of macabre."--New York Times Book Review
"Halloween is a rich mix of historical detail and keen cultural observation about the holiday in North America. He reaches far back to the festival's pagan roots and follows its development into a unique celebration of liminality, cultural borrowing, and outrageous invention. Halloween is surely an important contribution to a growing literature that takes seriously our moments of play."--Penne Restad, author of Christmas in America: A History
"This book paints its subject in very broad strokes, giving us a glimpse of an increasingly significant holiday over a vast expanse of space and time. How delightful, too, to read about an event through a North American, rather than strictly American perspective."--Jack Kugelmass, author of Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade

About the Author

Nicholas Rogers is Professor of History at York University. He is the co-author of Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (OUP) and the author of Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (OUP), for which he received the 1999 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association for the best book on non-Canadian history.

Customer Reviews

Beating Up the Strawman (or Scarecrow?)
The negative reviews I've read so far are trashing the book because it wasn't what they expected it to be: a nostalgic, easy-reading book that tickled the toes and the spine while the reader sips hot cider. The book doesn't present itself as such and is clearly an academic and scholarly survey of the holiday, from its origins, through its break into popular North American culture, to contemporary practices. If you're not looking for that kind of treatment, don't read this book. But don't slam it because it didn't do what you wanted it to do. (If you don't get the connection between this paragraph and the title, look up "straw man argument.")

I found the book to be a slim, well-written text that still manages to cover a wide range of topics and provide tons of interesting facts and figures. Rogers' main thesis is that Halloween, a holiday that continually reinvents itself, continues to provide "a space for transgression and parody," even as it is appropriated to fit the social and political needs of the culture. Rogers explores this thesis by examining the origins of Halloween, its history in Britain and North America, its similarities to Mexico's "Day of the Dead," urban legends and popular reactions to the holiday, its representation in Hollywood, and current trends in its celebration. He ends with a few guesses and questions about the holiday's future. A thorough analysis without getting bogged down in any one aspect.

A serious cultural history of Halloween
Single-subject histories on the likes of salt, codfish and even the color red have become a fashionable lately, and this book is a fine specimen of the genre. It traces the history of the celebration of October 31 from Samhain, the year cycle rite observed by the pagan Celts in Britain, to the many ways it is marked in North America at the time of the new millennium. His central thesis, supported by myriad examples and illustrations, is that Halloween has always been a liminal time, a boundary between autumn and winter, this world and the other world, life and death. Drawing from the theory of anthropologist Victor Turner, he argues that liminal times are also periods of ritual inversion in which the obverse of cultural values, however they are construed, are temporarily allowed to emerge into public consciousness and celebrated before being relegated once again to the cultural closet. Whether these oppositional symbols are spiritual otherworlds, as they were for the ancient Celts, or consist instead of what is disavowed by the dominant cultural paradigm, Halloween provides a framework during which they can be publicly explored and performed. This central feature of Halloween, more than any individual rite or symbol, constitutes the core of the holiday that has endured for over a thousand years. From Celtic Samhain to globalized celebration of consumer culture, Halloween seems to attract to it the oppositional and the carnivalesque. No wonder, then, that is has become a popular target for the invectives of conservative Christian ministers and their congregations, who label it "Satanic" and call for its suppression. But the suppression of culturally contested symbols never successfully eliminates the ideas behind them. In fact, as Turner and French cultural historian Michel Foucault argue, these oppositional images are fertile ground for cultural renewal, and provide alternative ways of envisioning reality: they are cultural countersites where social mores and pretensions can be mocked, parodied, and lampooned with impunity, and an alternative universe can temporarily be imagined.
This excellent book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It reads fluidly and easily, is theoretically well-informed without being jargon-ridden or using theory as a bludgeon, and could easily be adopted for use in large undergraduate courses on cultural history, folkloristics and anthropology.

If you want the real history!
First let me say that this book is like a history book on the history of halloween. If you are looking for a quick halloween story or costume and party information, then this book is not for you.This book deals with the actual history of this wonderful holiday,where it came from and how it adapted to what it is now.I found this book to be a great source of information on the history of my favorite holiday.I would recommend this book to anyone who wants an in depth read of the history of Halloween.