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H Alexander Rich, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 394–395, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae171
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Where, when, and how creativity began is not Samuel W. Franklin's concern in his aptly titled The Cult of Creativity. Instead, his concern is where, when, and how the concept of creativity became a discussable topic and entered our collective lexicon. In his brisk, highly engaging, and deeply researched study, Franklin, a cultural historian based in the Netherlands, explores how—despite our acute familiarity with creativity as a catch-all term today—talk of creativity as a concept is a relatively recent phenomenon. Franklin asserts that, although discussions of imagination, genius, and even creativeness abound in history, the term creativity remains virtually unseen until as early as 1875 and heightens in use beginning in the Cold War era, and specifically in the United States.
Why then? Why in the United States? One apparent reason is that, as the United States emerged from World War II, creativity could be the American (democratic-capitalist-individualist) antidote to Soviet (totalitarian-communist-conformist) kryptonite. As Franklin writes, in the eyes of pioneering creativity researchers such as the psychologists Frank X. Barron and Abraham Maslow, “the creative person was even a metonym for democratic society itself” (p. 93).
