By Pamela Donovan
July 21, 2016
Examining "old media" treatment of crime legends: news reports, fictional film and television depictions, and "new media" interactive discussions: versions and discussions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists, this text examines a social context vastly changed from the ...
By Ruth Pirsig Wood
April 27, 2016
This book analyzes the differences in content, reader expectation, and social/moral/ethical functions of the three types of novels in America of the 1950s. It challenges the notion that highbrow novels (Lolita ) do important cultural work while popular novels contribute to personal and social decay...
By Kenneth Bielen
February 05, 2015
This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of religious images in popular music. Examining bestsellers from 1906 to 1971, the work explores the role religious images have in the secularization of American culture. Popular music lyrics that express an adherence to a sacred order are ...
By Nicholas M. Evans, Jerome Nadelhaft
January 20, 2016
This study examines how early writers of jazz criticism (such as Gilbert Seldes and Carl Van Vechten) and literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Langston Hughes)--as well as jazz performers and composers (such as Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and George Gershwin)--associated the music directly with ...
By Kerran L. Sanger
November 24, 2015
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, such songs as We Shall Overcome, Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and Do What the Spirit Says Do were sung at virtually every mass meeting, demonstration, and planning session of Civil Rights activists. They were sung on the Freedom Rides, during the marches, and in ...
By Leslie Lindenauer
August 12, 2015
Piety and Power explores gender and religion in the seventeenth century in three American colonies with a dominant religious traditions. The book examines not only the domestic and devotional aspects of women's lives, but also the more public roles that women engaged in as arbiters of community ...
By Michael Stancliff
April 23, 2015
A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and ...
By Heather Addison
April 23, 2015
This book examines the relationship between cinema and physical culture i.e. activities such as dieting and muscle-building. It presents a case study of Hollywood's impact on the American reducing craze of the 1920s as the basis for speculating interrelationship of Hollywood and physical culture....
By Todd J. Pfannestiel
April 23, 2015
Using New York as a lens, this book examines the Red Scare that griped America between 1919-1923 and the pattern it established for future episodes of political repression. It also presents the first in-depth study of the Soviet Bureau, the unofficial Bolshevik embassy that attempted to establish ...
By Suzanne Lavin
September 11, 2014
This work examines the dramatic changes in America women's comedy performance in the years 1955-1995.The study focuses on the standup of Phyllis Diller and Roseanne andon the character comedy of Lily Tomlin. As the historical arc of women's comedy unfolds, it outlines a change from the traditional ...
By Jaime Osterman Alves
December 11, 2013
Seeking to understand how literary texts both shaped and reflected the century's debates over adolescent female education, this book examines fictional works and historical documents featuring descriptions of girls' formal educational experiences between the 1810s and the 1890s. Alves argues ...
By Megan Sanborn Jones
December 11, 2013
In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer...