In recent decades historians have traced the popularization of “high” culture in the United States in the post-World War II era. In recognizing opera, classical music, and ballet as part of the “culture boom” of the 1960s, they tend, however, to treat the status of cultural forms as fixed and unchanging: pre-existing “high” arts become popular. By tracing the cultural history of ballet dancing in the United States, an art form long tied to the popular theater but elevated to the status of high art in the twentieth century, this dissertation examines the process by which cultural categories take form. The widespread dissemination of ballet in the United States via television, film, and theater, the tours of international ballet companies, and the prevalence of regional ballet schools, companies, and festivals in the 1940s and 1950s reveals that ballet reached a diverse, national audience in the United States in the post-war period, a notable achievement given the peripheral nature of ballet to American culture during most of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries. Once limited to occasional appearances within popular forms of entertainment, ballet now entertained millions of Americans, many of whom eventually enjoyed ballet as a unique and independent art form – ballet for the sake of ballet. Ballet dancers, choreographers, and publicists exploited the cultural politics of the era that privileged high art, particularly Cold War era inspired international rivalries and pervasive social anxieties pertaining to American consumer culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class, and positioned ballet as a symbol of cultural accomplishment and refinement. At the same time, by drawing from the long history of ballet in popular culture, these ballet makers also created an art form with widespread public appeal. The celebration of the ballerina, an image of grace, refinement, and control, as a representation of iconic American womanhood, and the simultaneous fascination with the glamorous, highly sexual and often effeminate Russian male ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev reveals the particularly important role changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity played in the ballet revival. Drawing from contemporary popular literature and newspapers, the extensive film and television collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the records of several major ballet companies, dancers, and associations, “Elevated: Ballet and Culture in the United States, World War II to the National Endowment for the Arts” traces the invention of ballet as high art. Recognized today as one of the highest of the high arts in the United States, ballet dancing has not always occupied this place in American culture. The history of ballets elevation to this role is the history of the making of modern American culture, a culture in which the ballerina epitomizes feminine grace and is a major influence on contemporary fashions, in which ballet classes symbolize middle and upper class accomplishment, and in which appreciation of ballet indicates taste.