CultureAmerica - Böcker

Branded a ""cultural Chernobyl"" and the ""tragic kingdom"", the Euro Disney resort has been on its own thrill ride since opening in 1992. The much publicized version of the Magic Kingdom gave Europeans alcohol-free ""mocktails"", surly employees, even colours too muted for the Disney image. Facing financial disaster, was it any wonder that Disney execs found themselves wishing upon a star for answers? After so many knee-jerk criticisms of Euro Disney, this book combines firsthand experience and research to shed new light on claims that the park is nothing more than a form of American cultural imperialism. Andrew Lainsbury, a former Euro Disney employee who knows what the park meant to its visitors, goes beyond media bites and academic scorn to examine Europe's love/hate relationship with Euro Disneyland and some of the undiscussed issues surrounding it. ""Once Upon an American Dream"" is a story of global capitalism on a grand scale. Lainsbury has plumbed company archives and interviewed key players to give readers the real view from Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). He cracks open the Euro Disney controversy to reveal the park not as a tragic experiment in exporting American culture but the result of European efforts to ""import"" a popular form of American entertainment. Lainsbury tells how the Walt Disney company came to build a European park and locate it in France, how political negotiations affected its design and development, how it was promoted to continental audiences and what caused its widely publicized financial woes before being rescued by a real prince from Saudi Arabia. He reveals what it took to win back the hearts of skeptical Europeans - such as serving wine, selling flashy merchandise and placating the disgruntled workers. Finally, he looks into the magic mirror to speculate on the role of Euro Disney and the Walt Disney Company in the 21st century. Ultimately, Lainsbury shows that cultural imperialism is not an exlcusively American phenomenon but a global corporate strategy - and that global corporatism, by needing to be responsive to consumers, is so complex that it may not be as monolithic as feared. ""Once Upon an American Dream"" is a fairy tale for our times, reminding us that, for all the critical huffing and puffing, the creation and marketing of pleasure is what Euro Disneyland is all about.

A lit cigarette glows in the dark. A faceless voice describes sinister forces that are hard at work behind the scenes - a hidden conspiracy that controls our lives and perhaps even our thoughts. Then, like a ghost in the night, the voice is gone, leaving a residue of unease and a whisper of paranoia. As emblematic as ""Deep Throat"" in ""All the President's Men"" or the ""Cigarette Smoking Man"" in the wildly popular ""X-Files"", that ghostly presence stands in for numerous other ""voices"" in a wide range of American films from the classic era of film noir through Oliver Stone's ""JFK"" and Curtis Hanson's ""L.A. Confidential"". In this sweeping and idiosyncratic synthesis of film and politics, Ray Pratt shows us how such movies are deeply rooted in post-war American culture and continue to exert an enormous influence on the national imagination. For decades American cinema has mirrored and promoted the postmodern anxieties and paranoid perceptions embedded in our society. Tapping into the moviegoing audience's own projected fears, many Hollywood films seem to confirm our belief that there are indeed secret sinister forces at work and that our lives are at risk because of them. Pratt revisits blockbusters and cult favourites alike and shows their images of conspiracy have been fostered by the public's increasing distrust of large organizations, producing in turn a cinematic ""narrative of resistance"" that challenges the status quo. He offers ""Seven Days in May"" and ""Dr. Strangelove"" as signposts of Cold War hysteria; ""Chinatown"", ""The Conversation"" and ""Missing"" as clear reflections of our distrust of political and corporate elites in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate; and ""Blue Velvet"" and ""The Stepfather"" as dark countermyths to the ""family values"" touted by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He also considers gender paranoia in films like ""Klute"", ""Fatal Attraction"" and ""The Silence of the Lambs"" and reminds us that sometimes, as in ""Serpico"", our guardian police forces need a bit of guarding themselves. Deftly interweaving cultural, political and film theory with fresh insights into film noir detectives, nuclear angst, sexual predators and government conspiracies, ""Projecting Paranoia"" is interesting reading for anyone interested in the American psyche or great moviemaking.

In early-20th-century motion picture houses, offensive stereotypes of African Americans were as predictable as they were prevalent. However, few people realize that from 1915 to 1929 a number of African-American film directors worked diligently to counter such racist definitions of black manhood found in films like D.W. Griffith's ""The Birth of a Nation"", the 1915 epic that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. This comprehensive study of the African American cinematic vision in silent film concentrates on works largely ignored by most contemporary film scholars: African American produced and directed films and white independent productions of all-black features. Using these ""race movies"" to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race in popular culture, he separates cinematic myth from historical reality: the myth of the Euro American-controlled cinematic portrayal of black men versus the actual black male experience. Through archival research, Butters reconstructs many lost films, expanding the discussion of race and representation beyond the debate about ""good"" and ""bad"" imagery to explore the construction of masculine identity and the use of race as device in the context of western popular culture. He particularly examines the filmmaking of Oscar Micheaux, a prolific and controversial African-American silent film director and creator of ""Within Our Gates"" - a film that exposed a virtual litany of white abuses toward blacks.

History has been fodder for cinema from the silent era to the blockbuster present, a fact that has seldom pleased historians themselves. As pundits increasingly ponder ""how Hollywood fails history"", Robert Toplin counters with a provocative alternative approach to this enduring debate over the portrayal of history in film. Toplin focuses on movies released since 1985 - during which 12 historical films won the Oscar for Best Picture - and argues that critics often fail to recognize the unique ways in which fictional films communicate important ideas about the past. His work establishes commonsense ground rules for improving critical analysis in this area. Citing films like ""Gladiator"" and ""Braveheart"", ""Gandhi"" and ""Nixon"", he underscores the pressures placed on filmmakers to simplify and alter historical fact to conform to the demands of an extraordinarily expensive mass medium. Toplin demonstrates how a historical epic like ""Glory"" may contain ""creative adjustments"" that worry historians but shows how its distortions communicate broader and deeper truths about the Civil War experiences of African Americans - just as ""Saving Private Ryan"" presented little factual detail about World War II and yet effectively conveyed the experience of combat. He also shows how other films - such as ""Mississippi Burning"", ""Amistad"" and ""The Hurricane"" - contain so many elements of fictional excess and oversimplification that they deserve the criticism they receive. Toplin draws upon his own experiences in film production and takes direct aim at writing about film dominated by jargonistic theory and empty rhetoric. He urges film studies scholars to move beyond their preoccupation with formal aesthetics and recognize that, in historical films, content does matter.

Once the symbol of a robust steel industry and blue-collar economy, Youngstown, Ohio, and its famous Jeannette Blast Furnace have become key icons in the tragic tale of American deindustrialization. Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo examine the inevitable tension between those discordant visions, which continue to exert great power over Steeltown's citizens as they struggle to redefine their lives.When "the Jenny" was shut down in 1978, 50,000 Youngstown workers lost their jobs, cutting the heart out of the local economy. Even as the community organized a nationally recognized effort to save the mills, the city was rocked by economic devastation, runaway crime, and mob scandal, problems that persist twenty-five years later. In the midst of these struggles the Jenny remained standing as a proud symbol of the community's glory days, still a dominant force in the construction of both individual and collective identities in Youngstown.ocusing on stories and images that both reflect and perpetuate how Youngstown understands itself as a community, Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo have forged a historical and cultural study of the relationship between community, memory, work, and conflict. Drawing on written texts, visual images, sculptures, films, songs, and interviews with people who have lived and worked in Youngstown, the authors show the importance of memory in forming the collective identity of a place.Steeltown, U.S.A. is a richly developed portrait of a place, showing how images of the Jenny and of Youngstown have been used in national media and connecting these representations to the broader public conversation about work and place: Bruce Springsteen's song "Youngstown," the book Journey to Nowhere, and other pop culture artifacts have helped make Youngstown the symbolic epicenter of American deindustrialization. And while many people see the need to get over the past and on with the future, in rushing to erase the difficult parts of Youngstown's history they might also forget the powerful events that made the city so important, such as the struggles for economic and social justice that improved the lives of steelworkers.This multifaceted study of the meaning of work and place in one community pointedly depicts the relationships among economic development, media representations, and community life. As we see how people's faith in the value of their work dwindled away in Youngstown, their stories can help us understand not only how the meaning of work has changed but also why the changing meaning of work matters.

Tucked between the activist Sixties and the conservative Eighties lies a largely misunderstood and still under-appreciated decade. Now nine leading scholars of postwar America offer a revealing look at the Seventies and their rightful place in the epic narrative of American history. This is the first major work to relate the economic decline and cultural despair of the Seventies to the creative efforts that would reshape American society. Dogged by economic and political crises at home and foreign policy failures abroad, Americans responded to a growing sense of uncertainty in a variety of ways. Some explored the new freedoms promised by the social change movements of the late Sixties. Some challenged the technological verities that ruled corporate America. Others sought to create autonomous zones in the ruins of decaying cities or on the bleak landscape of anemic suburbia. And, against a backdrop of massive economic dislocation and bicentennial celebrations, many Americans struggled to redefine patriotism and the meaning of the American dream.

Visitors to Colorado's famous ski resorts embrace alpine adventures, luxurious amenities, and a glamorous nightlife, all against a backdrop of towering mountains and high-drifted snow. Wherever they go in search of fresh powder, one thing is certain: skiing has become a major part of recreational sport and culture and, in the process, dramatically altered America's social, physical, economic, and imaginative landscapes. Annie Coleman has written the first cultural history of skiing in the United States, telling how this European sport evolved into an American industry combining recreation, tourism, consumption, and wilderness - along with a solid dose of exhilaration and a dash of celebrity. She reveals how the meaning of skiing changed over the twentieth century, how sport and leisure in America came to be about status and style as much as about physical activity, and how modern consumer culture merged the mythic West with real western places. Coleman traces skiing from its Norse roots and Alpine influences through the utility of ski travel in the winter Rockies to the rise of Colorado resorts. Much more than a history of the sport, her work explains how the recreation industry sold the experience of skiing and created mythic mountain landscapes with real problems - and a ski culture that exalts celebrity and status over the physical act of skiing. Along the way, Coleman looks at bums, bunnies, betties, and everyone else who uses the sport to define who they are and how they fit in. Today's skiers are more diverse than they were half a century ago (though chances are they're wealthier), and even snowboarders have joined the very culture they once opposed - reviving places like Aspen through a subversive youth culture gone mainstream. The allure of white powder at high altitudes, manicured ski runs designed to frame picture-perfect views, the illusion of danger - the American skiing experience is all of this and more. Extensively researched and engagingly written, Ski Style puts readers on the slopes - and in the lodges - to show what it's really all about.

A deformed thumb, a neck scar from a stage accident, and a broken left leg, the result of a dramatic leap. These were the telltale markings that for decades identified a sideshow attraction as the supposed body of John Wilkes Booth. They persuaded onlookers that Lincoln's assassin was not killed in 1865 but survived the assault on Garrett's barn to live on as a fugitive for thirty years afterwards. As Wyatt Evans shows, some popular stories, no matter how weird and improbable, simply refuse to die. Evans recounts how a mummified corpse came to embody the romantic image of the assassin and the legend of his survival. He traces the legend's development in the weeks following the assassination to the appearance of the ""Booth Mummy,"" the remains of an Oklahoma drifter embalmed in 1903 and displayed in carnival sideshows throughout the West. He assesses the political and ideological motivations in both Southern and Northern cultures that made proliferation of the legend possible as well as profitable. He concludes by examining the legend's persistence in present-day America, the mummy's ironic fate, and the recent efforts to exhume Booth's real remains. Weaving a ""vernacular intellectual history,"" Evans shows how the legend emerged from a tangle of cultural and historical events including white Americans' quest for a suitable racial pre-history, collective memories of the Civil War, and even incipient suspicions of conspiracy, since belief in Booth's escape automatically implied a government cover-up of Booth's capture and death. More than a sop to Confederate diehards for whom Booth's escape symbolized Southern vindication, the legend exemplified Americans' inability and unwillingness to enact closure over the tragedy of Lincoln's death. The Legend of John Wilkes Booth is a compelling story of how collective memories and popular histories collide with, clash, and sometimes overcome mainstream accounts of the past. It offers an alternate venue for studying the workings of Civil War memory in American culture and demonstrates how (and why) culture produced at the grassroots level can challenge the official version of events. Through his meticulous account, Evans sheds new light on our complex attitudes toward heroes and villains, our need to mythologize tragedies, and our unwillingness to let go of myths, however absurd.

Alan Nadel's provocative new book reminds us that most of the images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm - particularly during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision of America. Nadel depicts a time when television effectively hijacked and monopolized the nation's vision of itself to create a virtual but severely distorted civic space. On Cold War TV's three channels there were no double beds, no liberated housewives, no social criticism, and no homosexuality. And the few available black faces overwhelmingly belonged to athletes, musical entertainers, and actors playing menial roles. Even America's beloved Walt Disney promoted his highly popular TV and themepark versions of society as utterly homogeneous representations of reality. During this era, prime-time TV was dominated by ""adult westerns,"" with heroes like ""The Rebel's Johnny Yuma"" reincarnating southern values and ""Bonanza's"" Cartwright family reinforcing the notion of white patriarchy - programs that, Nadel shows, bristled with Cold War messages even as they spoke to the nation's mythology. America had become visually reconfigured as a vast Ponderosa, crisscrossed by concrete highways designed to carry suburban white drivers beyond the moral challenge of racism and racial poverty and increasingly vocal civil rights demands. ""Television in Black-and-White America"" revisits a time and space that some might miss for its simplicity and relative innocence. Nadel, however, entreats us to look beyond such nostalgia to see how, even in its earliest days, television had already become a powerful mediator of social norms that both controlled and warped our sense of reality.

What is Geronimo doing sitting in a Cadillac? Why is an Indian woman in beaded buckskin sitting under a salon hairdryer? Such images startle and challenge our outdated visions of Native America. Philip Deloria's revealing accounts of Indians doing unexpected things - singing opera, driving cars, acting in Hollywood - explores this cultural discordance in ways that suggest new directions for American Indian history. Deloria chronicles how Indians came to represent themselves in Wild West shows, Hollywood films, sports, music, and even Indian people's use of the automobile - an ironic counterpoint to today's highways teeming with Dakota pickups and Cherokee sport utility vehicles. He also examines longstanding stereotypes of Indians as invariably violent, suggesting that, even as such views continued in American popular culture, they were also transformed by the violence at Wounded Knee. Throughout, Deloria reveals previously hidden narratives that force us to rethink familiar expectations. These ""secret histories,"" Deloria suggests, compel us to reconsider our own current expectations about what Indian people should be, how they should act, and even what they should look like. More important, he shows how such seemingly harmless (even if unconscious) expectations contribute to the racism and injustice that still haunt the experience of many Native American people today.

During the 1920s and 1930s, black artists and writers achieved something totally unprecedented: they created a new image of African Americans that truly reflected their times as well as their history. In so doing, they set the artistic agenda of the Harlem Renaissance and gave form to some of its most compelling visions. This innovative study examines the efforts of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers to create a hybrid expression of black identity that drew on their ancient past while participating in contemporary American culture. Caroline Goeser investigates a critical component of Harlem Renaissance print culture that until now has been largely overlooked, arguing that illustrations became the most timely and often most radical visual products of the movement. This vibrant partnership between literary and visual talents - a trail blazed by artist Aaron Douglas and poet Langston Hughes - resulted in the image of the New Negro, one that remade the African American past in order to foster greater participation in modern American culture and commerce. Illustrations by Douglas, James Wells, Gwendolyn Bennett, and others appeared on covers of books about black American life and in journals such as ""Opportunity and The Crisis"". Goeser considers the strategies that these artists developed to circumvent stereotypes and shows how their work was received within the movement and in mainstream America. Connecting visual imagery with literary text and commercial enterprise, these illustrations participated in the modern economy in ways that painting and sculpture could not. Goeser reveals how Harlem Renaissance illustrators depicted the wide-ranging and sometimes conflicting ideas about black identity held within the community: African roots and Egyptian heritage, racial uplift and gay pride. She shows how some artists revisited the Judeo-Christian tradition by portraying a black Adam and Jesus, and examines the interdependent relationships between race and sexuality in the work of artists Richard Bruce Nugent and Charles Cullen, the former black, the latter white. Goeser clearly shows that, contrary to common belief, the visual image of the New Negro was created by African Americans, for African Americans. Her work assigns a central role to black artists as cultural innovators and is a new touchstone in understanding both the emergence of black identity and American culture between the world wars.

From figurines to bumper stickers, Broadway to prime-time TV, angels have taken over America. Our fascination with angels has become big business but, as Peter Gardella shows, this phenomenon has extended well beyond the commercial world to attract and inspire people from all walks of life for a diverse array of reasons. Gardella's engaging study is the first to look objectively at the place of angels in American culture. He explores in particular the emergence of a domestic religion of ""useful angels"" - especially outside mainstream churches - that has created a uniquely American faith, one that addresses everything from the sexuality of angels to how angels and demons literally figure in the War on Terror. Gardella explores the history of angels in America from Spanish colonialism and Puritan sermons to the modern angel craze that overtook the nation in the 1990s in the wake of Sophy Burnham's bestselling ""A Book of Angels"". He argues that our collective fascination with angles seems especially linked to their perceived utility as helpmates and describes how they have been incorporated into everything from healing practices and child rearing to warding off evil and evoking love. But, Gardella argues, these angels are often perceived as servants of man rather than agents of God, and this very servitude has helped codify our sense of national uniqueness and righteousness. Angel enthusiasm may be centered in America's heartland - home of the Hallmark empire and Precious Moments chapel - but it extends everywhere, including our music, popular literature, advertising, television shows, and Hollywood movies like ""It's a Wonderful Life"", ""Michael"", and ""City of Angels"". And, as Gardella shows, whether New Age or evangelical, these angels are becoming more multicultural, more physical, and more intimately engaged with us all the time. Beautifully and sympathetically written, but with a scholar's eye for pattern and detail, ""American Angels"" mixes theology, psychology, sociology of religion, gender theory, and even film criticism to create an unusually well-rounded survey of a uniquely American phenomenon. It shows us how the utility of angels speaks to the very core of religion and will enlighten skeptics and believers alike.

For those who eagerly awaited its periodic appearance, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. ""The Whole Earth Catalog"" billed itself as ""Access to Tools,"" and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America. In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, Andrew Kirk recounts how San Francisco's Stewart Brand and his counterculture cohorts in the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. By piecing together the social, cultural, material, environmental, and technological history of that philosophy's incarnation in the Catalog, Kirk reveals the driving forces behind it, tells the story of the appropriate technology movement it espoused, and assesses its fate. This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and organizations who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to construct this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, Whole Earth became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way. It also enabled later environmental advocates like Al Gore to explain our current ""inconvenient truth,"" and the actions of Brand's Point Foundation demonstrated that the epistemology of Whole Earth could be put into action in meaningful ways that might foster an environmental optimism distinctly different from the jeremiads that became the stock in trade of American environmentalism. Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. In an era of political protest, it suggested that staying home and modifying your toilet or installing a solar collector could make a more significant contribution than taking to the streets to shout down establishment misdeeds. Given its visible legacy in the current views of Al Gore and others, the subtle environmental heresies of Whole Earth continue to resonate today, which makes Kirk's lucid and lively tale an extremely timely one as well.

What's white, costs billions of dollars, and embodies the American dream? For years, a white-gowned bride, multi-tiered white cake, and shiny gold rings have been the central icons for a grand American tradition that remains vibrant despite changing times. Now Katherine Jellison gives us a comprehensive cultural history of American weddings since World War II, examining the development of our precise and expensive standards for celebrating weddings and the staying power of this phenomenon in the face of enormous social, political, and economic upheaval.Jellison's book is the first to examine wedding culture in the context of postwar cultural change, analyzing the mechanisms that disseminated, updated, and sustained the specific tradition of the white wedding. Tracing the ritual back to the rise of consumer culture in the postwar boom, it also examines how Americans guaranteed the survival of the white wedding into the twenty-first century by amending the ideology that supported it and reinterpreting the functions it served.Jellison examines the ways the bridal business, the media, and consumers responded to new norms that expanded the notions of who was an appropriate white-wedding bride. She particularly examines the key influences that have sustained this cultural phenomenon for sixty years - the bridal-wear industry, celebrity weddings, movie weddings, and media coverage of the weddings-next-door - to show that the white wedding has become a unifying experience that crosses gender, class, and racial lines.Here are the mystique of the perfect white wedding gown, a cavalcade of iconic brides from Grace Kelly to Caroline Bessette, and the proliferation of reality weddings in magazines and on television. Jellison draws on pro-wedding writings of contemporary feminist authors, as well as oral histories of bridal couples from diverse backgrounds, and examines contemporary issues such as the legalization of same-sex marriage - and its backlash - and the post-Katrina ""Hurricane Brides"" project.Engagingly written and lavishly illustrated, ""It's Our Day"" tells how a fantasy event survived counterculture movements and organized feminism to become a multi-billion-dollar industry supporting clothiers, caterers, jewelers, and florists. But more than an expose of commercialism, it is a testament to the flexibility of the dream it represents.

It was a sign of the sixties. Drawn by the promise of spiritual and creative freedom, thousands of women from white middle-class homes rejected the suburban domesticity of their mothers to adopt lifestyles more like those of their great-grandmothers. They eagerly learned 'new' skills, from composting to quilting, as they took up the decade's quest for self-realization. 'Hippie women' have alternately been seen as earth mothers or love goddesses, virgins or vamps - images that have obscured the real complexity of their lives. Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo now takes readers back to Haight Ashbury and country communes to reveal how they experienced and shaped the counterculture. She draws on the personal recollections of women who were there - including such pivotal figures as Lenore Kendall, Diane DiPrima, and Carolyn Adams - to gain insight into what made counterculture women tick, how they lived their days, and how they envisioned their lives. This is the first book to focus specifically on women of the counterculture. It describes how gender was perceived within the movement, with women taking on much of the responsibility for sustaining communes. It also examines the lives of younger runaways and daughters who shared the lifestyle. And while it explores the search for self enlightenment at the core of the counterculture experience, it also recounts the problems faced by those who resisted the expectations of 'free love' and discusses the sexism experienced by women in the arts. Lemke-Santangelo's work also extends our understanding of second-wave feminism. She argues that counterculture women, despite their embrace of traditional roles, claimed power by virtue of gender difference and revived an older agrarian ideal that assigned greater value to female productive labor. Perhaps most important, she shows how they used these values to move counterculture practices into the mainstream, helping transform middle-class attitudes toward everything from spirituality to childrearing to the environment. Featuring photographs and poster art that bring the era to life, ""Daughters of Aquarius"" provides both an inside look at a defining movement and a needed corrective to long-held stereotypes of the counterculture. For everyone who was part of that scene - or just wonders what it was like - this book offers a new perspective on those experiences and on cultural innovations that have affected all our lives.

In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar celebrates hip-hop and confronts the cult of authenticity that defines its essential character. Deftly balancing an insider's love of the culture with a scholar's detached critique, he traces hip-hop's rise as a cultural juggernaut and persuasively challenges widely held notions that hip-hop is socially dangerous - to black youth in particular. ""Hip-Hop Revolution"" is a balanced cultural history that looks past negative stereotypes of hip-hop as a monolith of hedonistic, unthinking noise to reveal its evolving positive role within American society.

'This book will change the way you think about today's new media technologies' - Daniel J. Solove, author of ""The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age"". Whether you're purchasing groceries with your Safeway 'club card' or casting a vote on ""American Idol"", those data are being collected. From Amazon to iTunes, smart phones to GPS devices, Google to TiVo - all of these products and services give us an expansive sense of choice, access, and participation. Mark Andrejevic shows, however, that these continuously evolving new technologies have also been employed as modes of surveillance and control, most disturbingly exemplified by revelations about the NSA's secret monitoring of our phone calls, e-mails, and internet searches. Many contend that our proliferating interactive media empower individuals and democratize society. But, Andrejevic asks, at what cost? In ""iSpy"", he reveals that these and other highly advertised benefits are accompanied by hidden risks and potential threats that we all tend to ignore. His book, providing the first sustained critique of a concept that has been a talking point for twenty years, debunks the false promises of the digital revolution still touted by the popular media while seeking to rehabilitate, rather than simply write off, the potentially democratic uses of interactive media. Andrejevic opens up the world of digital rights management and the data trail each of us leaves - data about our locations, preferences, or life events that are already put to use in various economic, political, and social contexts. He notes that, while citizens are becoming increasingly transparent to private and public monitoring agencies, they themselves are unable to access the information gathered about them - or know whether it's even correct. (The watchmen, it seems, don't want to be watched.) He also considers the appropriation of consumer marketing for political campaigns in targeting voters and examines the implications of the Internet for the so-called War on Terror. In ""iSpy"", Andrejevic poses real challenges for our digital future. Amazingly detailed, compellingly readable, it warns that we need to temper our enthusiasm for these technologies with a better understanding of the threats they pose - to be able to distinguish between interactivity as centralized control and as collaborative participation.

Examines depictions of and by Catholics in American popular culture during the period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. The author surveys the popular films, television, and photojournalism of the era that reimagined Catholicism as an important, even attractive, element of American life to reveal the deeply political and social meanings of the Catholic presence in popular culture.|When John Kennedy ran for president, some Americans thought a Catholic couldn’t—or shouldn’t—win the White House. Credit Bing Crosby, among others, that he did. For much of American history, Catholics’ perceived allegiance to an international church centered in Rome excluded them from full membership in society. Now Anthony Burke Smith shows how the intersection of the mass media and the visually rich culture of Catholicism changed that Protestant perception and, in the process, changed American culture. Smith examines depictions of and by Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. He surveys the popular films, television, and photojournalism of the era that reimagined Catholicism as an important, even attractive, element of American life to reveal the deeply political and social meanings of the Catholic presence in popular culture. Smith shows that Hollywood played a big part in this midcentury Catholicization of the American imagination. Leo McCarey’s Oscar-winning film Going My Way, starring the soothing (and Catholic) Bing Crosby, turned the Catholic parish into a vehicle for American dreams, while Pat O’Brien and Spencer Tracy portrayed heroic priests who championed the underclass in some of the era’s biggest hits. And even while a filmmaker like John Ford rarely focused on clerics and the Church, Smith reveals how his films gave a distinctly ethnic Catholic accent to his cinematic depictions of American community. Smith also looks at the efforts of Henry Luce’s influential Life magazine to harness Catholicism to a postwar vision of middle-class prosperity and cultural consensus. And he considers the unexpected success of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s prime-time television show Life is Worth Living in the 1950s, which offered a Catholic message that spoke to the anxieties of Cold War audiences. Revealing images of orthodox belief whose sharpest edges had been softened to suggest tolerance and goodwill, Smith shows how such representations overturned stereotypes of Catholics as un-American. Spanning a time when hot and cold wars challenged Americans’ traditional assumptions about national identity and purpose, his book conveys the visual style, moral confidence, and international character of Catholicism that gave it the cultural authority to represent America.

For those who eagerly awaited its periodic appearance, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. The Whole Earth Catalog billed itself as "Access to Tools," and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America.In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, Andrew Kirk recounts how San Francisco's Stewart Brand and his counterculture cohorts in the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. By piecing together the social, cultural, material, environmental, and technological history of that philosophy's incarnation in the Catalog, Kirk reveals the driving forces behind it, tells the story of the appropriate technology movement it espoused, and assesses its fate.This book takes a fresh look at the many individuals and organizations who worked in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to construct this philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, Whole Earth became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way. It also enabled later environmental advocates like Al Gore to explain our current "inconvenient truth," and the actions of Brand's Point Foundation demonstrated that the epistemology of Whole Earth could be put into action in meaningful ways that might foster an environmental optimism distinctly different from the jeremiads that became the stock in trade of American environmentalism.Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. In an era of political protest, it suggested that staying home and modifying your toilet or installing a solar collector could make a more significant contribution than taking to the streets to shout down establishment misdeeds. Given its visible legacy in the current views of Al Gore and others, the subtle environmental heresies of Whole Earth continue to resonate today, which makes Kirk's lucid and lively tale an extremely timely one as well.

The Fox-TV series 24 might have been in production long before its premier just two months after 9/11, but its story line—and that of many other television programs—has since become inextricably embedded in the nation’s popular consciousness. This book marks the first comprehensive survey and analysis of War on Terror themes in post-9/11 American television, critiquing those shows that—either blindly or intentionally—supported the Bush administration’s security policies. Stacy Takacs focuses on the role of entertainment programming in building a national consensus favouring a War on Terror, taking a close look at programs that comment both directly and allegorically on the post-9/11 world. In show after show, she chillingly illustrates how popular television helped organise public feelings of loss, fear, empathy, and self-love into narratives supportive of a controversial and unprecedented war. Takacs examines a spectrum of program genres—talk shows, reality programs, sitcoms, police procedurals, male melodramas, war narratives—to uncover the recurrent cultural themes that helped convince Americans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and compromise their own civil liberties. Spanning the past decade of the ongoing conflict, she reviews not only key touchstones of post-9/11 popular culture such as 24, Rescue Me, and Sleeper Cell, but also less remarked-upon but relevant series like JAG, Off to War, Six Feet Under, and Jericho. She also considers voices of dissent that have emerged through satirical offerings like The Daily Show and science fiction series such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Takacs dissects how the War on Terror has been broadcast into our living rooms in programs that routinely offer simplistic answers to important questions—Who exactly are we fighting? Why do they hate us?—and she examines the climate of fear and paranoia they’ve created. Unlike cultural analyses that view the government’s courting of Hollywood as a conspiracy to manipulate the masses, her book considers how economic and industry considerations complicate state-media relations throughout the era. Terrorism TV offers fresh insight into how American television directly and indirectly reinforced the Bush administration’s security agenda and argues for the continued importance of the medium as a tool of collective identity formation. It is an essential guide to the tele visual landscape of American consciousness in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This book is part of the CultureAmerica series.

In works of silver and wool, the Navajos have established a unique brand of American craft. And when their artisans were integrated into the American economy during the late nineteenth century, they became part of a complex cultural and economic framework in which their handmade crafts conveyed meanings beyond simple adornment. As Anglo tourists discovered these crafts, the Navajo weavings and jewelry gained appeal from the romanticised notion that their producers were part of a primitive group whose traditions were destined to vanish. Erika Bsumek now explores the complex links between Indian identity and the emergence of tourism in the Southwest to reveal how production, distribution, and consumption became interdependent concepts shaped by the forces of consumerism, race relations, and federal policy. Bsumek unravels the layers of meaning that surround the branding of “Indian made.” When Navajo artisans produced their goods, collaborating traders, tourist industry personnel, and even ethnologists created a vision of Navajo culture that had little to do with Navajos themselves. And as Anglos consumed Navajo crafts, they also consumed the romantic notion of Navajos as “primitives” perpetuated by the marketplace. These processes of production and consumption reinforced each other, creating a symbiotic relationship and influencing both mutual Anglo-Navajo perceptions and the ways in which Navajos participated in the modern marketplace. Examining varied sites of production—artisans’ workshops, museums, trading posts—Bsumek shows how the market economy perpetuated “Navaho” stereotypes and cultural assumptions. She takes readers into the hogans where men worked silver and women wove rugs and into the outlets where middlemen dictated what buyers wanted and where Navajos influenced inventory. Exploring this process over seven decades, she describes how artisans’ increasing use of modern tools created controversy about authenticity and how the meaning of the “Indian made” label was even challenged in court. Ultimately, Bsumek shows that the sale of Indian-made goods cannot be explained solely through supply and demand. It must also reckon with the multiple images and narratives that grew up around the goods themselves, integrating consumer culture, tourism, and history to open new perspectives on our understanding of American Indian material culture.

When Elvis crooned “Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire,” he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerise millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous “Viva!” Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city’s portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the “last frontier town,” a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterised Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organised crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful—and available—women. In Gragg’s narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas’s most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra’s Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg’s skilful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organised crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people’s eyes light up as bright as the Strip: witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting colour photos and bursting with insider details—an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city’s extraordinary appeal.

From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the man best known as Malcolm X restlessly redefined himself throughout a controversial life. His transformations have appeared repeatedly in books, photographs, paintings, and films, while his murder set in motion a series of tugs-of-war among journalists, biographers, artists, and his ideological champions over the interpretation of his cultural meaning. This book marks the first systematic examination of the images generated by this iconic cultural figure—images readily found on everything from T-shirts and hip-hop album covers to coffee mugs. Graeme Abernethy captures both the multiplicity and global import of a person who has been framed as both villain and hero, cast by mainstream media during his lifetime as “the most feared man in American history,” and elevated at his death as a heroic emblem of African American identity. As Abernethy shows, the resulting iconography of Malcolm X has shifted as profoundly as the American racial landscape itself. Abernethy explores Malcolm’s visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop. He analyses this enigmatic figure’s representation across a variety of media from 1960s magazines to urban murals, tracking the evolution of Malcolm’s iconography from his auto-biography and its radical milieu through the appearance of Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic and beyond. Its remarkable gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of iconic photographs by Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and John Launois. Abernethy reveals that Malcolm X himself was keenly aware of the power of imagery to redefine identity and worked tirelessly to shape how he was represented to the public. His theoretical grasp of what he termed “the science of imagery” enabled him both to analyse the role of representation in ideological control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. This provocative work marks a startling shift from the biographical focus that has dominated Malcolm X studies, providing an up-to-date—and comprehensively illustrated—account of Malcolm’s cultural afterlife, and addressing his iconography in relation to images of other major African American figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Analysing the competing interpretations behind so many images, Abernethy reveals what our lasting obsession with Malcolm X says about American culture over the last five decades.

For millions of moviegoers unable to see the original stage version of West Side Story, director Robert Wise’s adaptation was a cinematic gift that brought a Broadway hit to a mass audience. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz argues that Wise’s film was not only hugely popular, but that it was also an artistic triumph that marked an important departure in the history of American movie making. With a score by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins, this update of the Romeo and Juliet story remains one of the most revered and highly popular American movie musicals, with only Singin’ in the Rain ranking higher in the AFI’s list of the best of the genre. Acevedo-Muñoz draws on previously unreleased production documents—from interoffice memos to annotations on the director’s script—to go beyond publicity accounts and provide an inside look at this critically acclaimed film classic, offering details of its filming that have never before been published. From location scouting to scripting to casting to filming, Acevedo-Muñoz focuses on little-known details of the actual production. He provides close analyses of dramatic sequences and musical numbers, emphasising the film’s technical innovations and its visual and aural coding as a means for defining character and theme. He carefully explains the differences between Broadway and film versions, exposing censorship and creative issues that the filmmakers were forced to confront. And taking readers behind the cameras, he highlights the creative differences and financial difficulties that led to the departure of Robbins—who had conceived and directed the stage version—long before filming was complete. Acevedo-Muñoz makes a strong case for the film’s daring vision in combining music, dance, dialogue, and visual elements—especially colour—in highly creative ways, while also addressing the social, racial, and class tensions of American society. Drawing on his own Puerto Rican heritage, he provides a Hispanic perspective on the cultural aspects of the story and explores the ways in which the film’s portrayal of Puerto Rican identity is neither as transparent nor as negative as some critics have charged. Bursting with facts, insights, and inside stories, this book boasts a wealth of material that has never been explored before in print. Both history and homage, it is a must for scholar and buff alike.

Fossil fuels power our cars, our food supply, our climate-controlled homes, our work, and our play. That much we know. What we understand less, and what this book makes clear, is how fossil fuels also condition Americans' sensory lives, erotic experiences, and aesthetics; how they structure what we assume to be normal and healthy; and how they prop up a distinctly modern bargain with nature that allows populations and economies to grow wildly beyond the previously understood limits of the organic economy. Carbon Nation ranges across film and literary studies, journalism, politics, art history, and ecology, to chart the course by which prehistoric carbon calories influenced--in both conscious and unconscious ways--the modern American economy and body. This includes our ways of being, sensing, and knowing as different classes, races, sexes, and conditions learned to embrace, absorb, and navigate the material manifestations, cultural potentialities, and myriad costs of fossil fuels. Combining historical ecology with cultural criticism, this book reveals the profound depths of our dependencies on carbon and the long repressed cultural history of our evasion and neglect of those dependencies. The ecological roots of modern America are introduced in the first half of the book with the revolution in material growth generated by the move from limited organic soil resources to subsoil energies. In the works of Eugene O'Neill, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane, the author exposes how coal as a cultural object is used to suppress our dependencies, buried beneath modernist narratives of progress, consumption, and unbridled growth. In films like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and George Stevens's Giant we discover cinematic expressions of our deep-seated anxieties about living in a dizzying new world wrought by fossil fuels. Any discussion of fossil fuels must go beyond energy policy and technology. As Bob Johnson reminds us, in provocative and powerful ways, what we take to be natural in the modern world is, in fact, historical, and our history and our culture have risen from this relatively recent embrace of the coal mine, the stoke hole, and the oil derrick.

Early in the twentieth century, the political humorist Will Rogers was arguably the most famous cowboy in America. And though most in his vast audience didn’t know it, he was also the most famous Indian of his time. Those who know of Rogers’s Cherokee heritage and upbringing tend to minimize its importance, or to imagine that Rogers himself did so—notwithstanding his avowal in interviews: “I’m a Cherokee and they’re the finest Indians in the World.” The truth is, throughout his adult life and his work the Oklahoma cowboy made much of his American Indian background. And in doing so, as Amy Ware suggests in this book, he made Cherokee artistry a fundamental part of American popular culture.Rogers, whose father was a prominent and wealthy Cherokee politician and former Confederate slaveholder, was born into the Paint Clan in the town of Oolagah in 1879 and raised in the Cooweescoowee District of the Cherokee Nation. Ware maps out this milieu, illuminating the familial and social networks, as well as the Cherokee ranching practices, educational institutions, popular publications and heated political debates that so firmly grounded Rogers in the culture of the Cherokees. Through his early career, from Wild West and vaudeville performer to Ziegfeld Follies headliner in the late 1910s, she reveals how Rogers embodied the seemingly conflicting roles of cowboy and Indian, in effect enacting the blending of these identities in his art. Rogers’s work in the film industry also reflected complex notions of American Indian identity and history, as Ware demonstrates in her reading of the clearest examples, including Laughing Billy Hyde, in which Rogers, an Indian, portrayed a white prospector married to an Indian woman— who was played by a white actress.In his work as a columnist for the New York Times, and in his radio performances, Ware continues to trace the Cherokee influence on Rogers’s material—and in turn its impact on his audiences. It is in these largely uncensored performances that we see another side of Rogers’ Cherokee persona—a tribal elitism that elevated the Cherokee above other Indian nations. Ware’s exploration of this distinction exposes still-common assumptions regarding Native authenticity in the history of American culture, even as her in-depth look at Will Rogers’s heritage and legacy reshapes our perspective on the Native presence in that history, and in the life and work of a true American icon.

In 1947, when J. I. Rodale, editor of Organic Gardening, declared, “the Revolution has begun,” a mere 60,000 readers and a ragtag army of followers rallied to the cause, touting the benefits of food grown with all-natural humus. More than a half century later, organic farming is part of a multi-billion-dollar industry, spreading from the family farm to agricultural conglomerates, and from the supermarket to the farmer’s market to the dinner tables of families all across America. In the organic zeitgeist the adage “you are what you eat” truly applies, and this book reveals what the dynamics of organic culture tells us about who we are. Rodale’s goal was to improve individuals and the world. American Organics shows how the organic movement has been more successful in the former than the latter, while preserving connections to environmentalism, agrarianism, and nutritional dogma. With the unbiased eye of a cultural historian, Robin O’Sullivan traces the movement from agricultural pioneers in the 1940s to hippies in the 1960s to consumer activists today—from a countercultural moment to a mainstream concern, with advocates in highbrow culinary circles, agri-business, and mom-and-pop grocery stores. Her approach is holistic, examining intersections of farmers, gardeners, consumers, government regulations, food shipping venues, advertisements, books, grassroots groups, and mega-industries involved in all echelons of the organic food movement. In American Organic we see how organic growing and consumption has been everything from a practical decision, lifestyle choice, and status marker to a political deed, subversive effort, and social philosophy—and how organic production and consumption are entrenched in the lives of all Americans, whether they eat organic food or not. Robin O’Sullivan is full-time lecturer in the history department at Troy University.