Karen Sternheimer is a sociologist at the University of Southern California, where she is a distinguished fellow at the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching. She is also the author of Connecting Popular Culture and Social Problems: Why Media is not the Answer (2013), Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility (2011), Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth (2006), It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children (2003), and is the editor and lead writer for [...]. She has provided commentary for NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The History Channel, and Fox News.

1. The American Dream: Celebrity, Class, and Social Mobility 2. Beyond Subsistence: The Rise of the Middle Class in the Twentieth Century 3. Prosperity and Wealth Arrive: Boom Times and Women's Suffrage in the 1920s 4. Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps: Personal Failure and the Great Depression 5. We're all in this Together: Collectivism and World War II 6. Suburban Utopia: The Postwar Middle-Class Fantasy 7. Is That All There Is? Challenging the Suburban Fantasy in the Sixties and Seventies 8. Massive Wealth as Moral Reward: The Reagan Revolution and Individualism 9. Success Just for Being You: Opportunity in the Internet Age