Sherrie Tucker is Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Swing Shift: ""All-Girl"" Bands of the 1940s and coeditor of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, both also published by Duke University Press.
The publication of Dance Floor Democracy elevates cultural studies scholarship to new levels of sophistication and significance. Sherrie Tucker's impressive skills as an oral historian, musicologist, and gender studies specialist coupled with her focused attention on the particularities of place and time have enabled her to craft an exemplary book. A book that is at one and the same time, a social history of the U.S. home front during World War II, a magnificent demonstration of how commercial culture functions as a historical force, and a generative exploration into the tensions between appeals to hierarchy and appeals to equality that lie at the heart of U.S. political culture. --George Lipsitz, author of Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story