Sheryl Kaskowitz is a scholar of American music who has most recently served as a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University.

"Probing and insightful... illuminating and thoughtful... An engaging portrait of how the song infiltrated patriotism, business and sports." --The Washington Post

"Kaskowitz reveals that the seventh-inning stretch is far from the strangest occasion that 'God Bless America' has turned up on since its premiere in 1938." --Forward

"Shows how [patriotic songs] acquired their powerful symbolism and how they became ways of suppressing dissent... Clips of Smith, Berlin and even Richard Nixon singing the title song add another dimension to Kaskowitz's account of the song, and the way politicians and the American public have used it over the decades are also part of the story." --The Dallas Morning News

"A model of song biography. From the mountains to the prairies to the White House to the ballpark, Kaskowitz's 'surprising history' offers a compelling journey into the complicated and contradictory American soul." --Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater

"Who knew? God Bless America brims with surprises and insights. Irving Berlin's song has cut a complicated path through twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. history, evoking intense passions around questions of war and peace, tolerance and strife, patriotism and disaffection. In so skillfully mapping this song's career, Kaskowitz demonstrates the richness of 'culture' as an object of study, and also the nature of history itself as layered rather than merely sequential." ---Matthew Frye Jacobson, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History, Yale University

"Like me, some readers of this book may have felt themselves tortured in their childhood by televised renditions of Kate Smith singing 'God Bless America,' but that's even more reason to dive into Sheryl Kaskowitz's elegantly spun narrative of the history of this patriotic chestnut. And what a history it is: enduring conflict between Kate Smith's camp and Irving Berlin; lyric changes from isolationism to intervention at the dawn of WWII; anti-Semitic protests; Woody Guthrie's response song ('This Land Is Your Land'); and finally the song's triumphant re-emergence after 9/11 as a hymn of commemoration. Throughout, Kaskowitz reminds us of the power of song and of collective performance to both unite and coerce, and of our astonishing capacity to interpret and reinterpret songs over their lifetime, and then to argue over those interpretations." -- Gage Averill, Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia

"Kaskowitz's book is an important contribution to our understanding of how a 'simple' song can shift in meaning in our complex world." --ARSC Journal

"Suggests a promise for secular communal singing and shared civic experience." --Journal of American Culture