Studies in American Popular History and Culture
Film and the Nuclear Age: Representing Cultural Anxiety
1st Edition
By Toni A. Perrine
December 04, 2018
Just as we generally pay scant attention to the potential dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war, until quite recently, scholars have made limited critical attempts to understand the cultural manifestations of the nuclear status quo. Films that feature nuclear issues most often simplify and ...
First Do No Harm: Empathy and the Writing of Medical Journal Articles
1st Edition
By Mary Ellen Knatterud
December 04, 2018
First Do No Harm is an interdisciplinary study examining how various members of academic physicians have constructed certain images of patients on paper over time. The study pays special attention to the classical concept of pathos, or its modern equivalent, empathy....
Understanding Elvis: Southern Roots vs. Star Image
1st Edition
By Susan M. Doll
February 27, 2017
Although the importance of Elvis Presley's Southern heritage has long been recognized, few have considered the complex connection between the performer's career and his Southern roots. This study investigates how that identity affected each stage of Presley's career. Elvis Presley's career can be ...
Studies in the Land: The Northeast Corner
1st Edition
By David Smith
August 26, 2016
Drawing on primary documents such as farmer's diaries, small rural papers of the 19th century, and the publications of state agricultural societies, this provocative study presents an intelligent overview into the driving forces of that shaped American history in the Northeast....
Race-ing Masculinity: Identity in Contemporary U.S. Writings
1st Edition
By John Christopher Cunningham
July 29, 2016
This study explores the intersection of race and gender identity in writings by contemporary American men of color, showing how ostensibly sexist or homophobic texts coexist with or are engendered by articulations of anti-racism. Conversely, certain articulations of gender concerns produce ...
Hollywood's Frontier Captives: Cultural Anxiety and the Captivity Plot in American Film
1st Edition
By Barbara A. Mortimer
July 21, 2016
The captivity narrative, the earliest genre of American popular literature, continues to be of cultural significance in late 20th-century Hollywood. Many popular films of the last four decades incorporate the most common elements of the captivity narrative tradition, including a politically ...
No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends and the Internet
1st Edition
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 ...
Public Lives, Private Virtues: Images of American Revolutionary War Heroes, 1782-1832
1st Edition
By Christopher Harris
May 13, 2016
Public Lives, Private Virtues surveys portraits of American Revolutionary heroes in books, magazines, and school texts from 1782 to 1832 and relates these sketches to cultural changes of the period. Faced with rapid and sometimes unsettling change, historians, biographers, and editors of period ...
Lolita in Peyton Place: Highbrow, Middlebrow, and LowBrow Novels of the 1950s
1st Edition
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...
Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s
1st Edition
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 ...
When the Spirit Says Sing!: The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement
1st Edition
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 ...
Crime and the Nation: Prison and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia. 1786-1800
1st Edition
By Peter Okun
August 19, 2015
Crime and the Nation explores the correlation between fiction writing and national identity in the late eighteenth century when these two enterprises went hand in hand. The 1780s and '90s witnessed a spirited public debate on crime and punishment that produced a new kind of fiction and a new kind ...