BiblioVault - Books about Present

Radio's Second Century

Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

John Allen Hendricks

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2022 Broadcast Education Association Book Award

One of the first books to examine the status of broadcasting on its one hundredth anniversary, Radio’s Second Century investigates both vanguard and perennial topics relevant to radio’s past, present, and future. As the radio industry enters its second century of existence, it continues to be a dominant mass medium with almost total listenership saturation despite rapid technological advancements that provide alternatives for consumers. Lasting influences such as on-air personalities, audience behavior, fan relationships, and localism are analyzed as well as contemporary issues including social and digital media. Other essays examine the regulatory concerns that continue to exist for public radio, commercial radio, and community radio, and discuss the hindrances and challenges posed by government regulation with an emphasis on both American and international perspectives. Radio’s impact on cultural hegemony through creative programming content in the areas of religion, ethnic inclusivity, and gender parity is also explored. Taken together, this volume compromises a meaningful insight into the broadcast industry’s continuing power to inform and entertain listeners around the world via its oldest mass medium--radio.

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A Reference Guide to Medicinal Plants

Herbal Medicine Past and Present

John K. Crellin and Jane Philpott

Duke University Press, 1997

Reissued as a companion edition to Trying to Give Ease: Tommie Bass and the Story of Herbal Medicine, this illustrated reference guide covers over 700 medicinal plants, of which more than 150 are readily obtainable in health food stores and other outlets. Based on the Appalachian herbal practice of the late A. L. "Tommie" Bass, each account of a plant includes the herbalist’s comment, an assessment of the plant’s efficacy, and current information on its chemical constituents and pharmacological effects. Unlike most herbal guides, this is a comprehensive, fully documented reference work that interweaves scientific evaluation with folkloric use.

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Rethinking Past and Present in Cuba

essays in memory of Alistair Hennessy

Edited by Antoni Kapcia

University of London Press, 2018

This collection of essays and research articles has been designed, by its breadth of expertise and discipline, to pay suitable homage to the seminal influence and contribution made by the late Alistair Hennessy towards the development of Cuban studies. For that reason, it includes a judicious mixture of the old and the new, including several of the leading and internationally well-established experts on Cuban history, politics and culture, but also some up-and-coming researchers in the field; that mixture and the combination of topics (some addressing the past directly, others assessing the present within a historical context) reflects Hennessy’s own cross-disciplinary and open-minded approach to the study of the history of Cuba.

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The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry

The History of Style, 1800 to the Present

Joseph E. Duncan

University of Minnesota Press, 1959

The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry was first published in 1959. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The metaphysical style, as expressed in its most distinguished and distinguishable form by the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, has had an increasing influence on latterday critics and poets. Thus it is important to an understanding of literary history to examine this revival. Professor Duncan traces the movement and analyzes changing interpretations of the style in the work of British and American poets and critics. He shows that much of the "new criticism" and the metaphysical poetry of T. S. Eliot and that of the metaphysical style has thrived on fresh critical interpretation and vital poetic experimentation.

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Revolution in the Echo Chamber

Audio Drama's Past, Present and Future

Leslie McMurtry

Intellect Books, 2019

Revolution in the Echo Chamber is a sociohistorical analysis of British and American radio and audio drama from 1919 to present day. This volume examines the aesthetic, cultural, and technical elements of audio drama along with its context within the literary canon. In addition to the form and development of aural drama, Leslie Grace McMurtry provides an exploration of mental imagery generation in relation to its reception and production. Building on historical analysis, Revolution in the Echo Chamber provides contemporary perspective, drawing on trends from the current audio drama environment to analyze how people listen to audio drama, including podcast drama, today--and how they might listen in the future.

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The Roots of Modern Hollywood

The Persistence of Values in American Cinema, from the New Deal to the Present

Nick Smedley

Intellect Books, 2014

In this insightful study of Hollywood cinema since 1969, film historian Nick Smedley traces the cultural and intellectual heritage of American films, showing how the more thoughtful recent cinema owes a profound debt to Hollywood’s traditions of liberalism, first articulated in the New Deal era. Although American cinema is not usually thought of as politically or socially engaged, Smedley demonstrates how Hollywood can be seen as one of the most value-laden of all national cinemas. Drawing on a long historical view of the persistent trends and themes in Hollywood cinema, Smedley illustrates how films from recent decades have continued to explore the balance between unbridled individualistic capitalism and a more socially engaged liberalism. He also brings out the persistence of pacifism in Hollywood’s consideration of American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Middle East. His third theme concerns the treatment of women in Hollywood films, and the belated acceptance by the film community of a wider role for the American post-feminist woman. Featuring important new interviews with four of Hollywood’s most influential directors—Michael Mann, Peter Weir, Tony Gilroy, and Paul Haggis—The Roots of Modern Hollywood is an incisive account of where Hollywood is today and the path it has taken to get there.

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Ruled by Race

Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present

Grif Stockley

University of Arkansas Press, 2008

Winner of the 2010 Booker Worthen Literary Prize, and the 2009 Ragsdale Award.

From the Civil War to Reconstruction, the Redeemer period, Jim Crow, and the modern civil rights era to the present, Ruled by Race describes the ways that race has been at the center of much of the state’s formation and image since its founding. Grif Stockley uses the work of published and unpublished historians and exhaustive primary source materials along with stories from authors as diverse as Maya Angelou and E. Lynn Harris to bring to life the voices of those who have both studied and lived the racial experience in Arkansas.

Topics range from the well-known Little Rock Central High Crisis of 1957 to lesser-known events such as the Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 and the shocking yet sadly commonplace attitudes found in newspaper reports and speeches. Through the words of the most powerful Arkansans such as racist Arkansas Govenor Jeff Davis (1901–1906) to the least powerful, including an unflinching look at the narratives of former slaves, readers will come away with increased awareness of the ways that race continues to affect where Arkansans live, send their children to school, work, travel, shop, spend leisure time, worship, and choose their friends and life partners.

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Russia's New Fin de Siècle

Contemporary Culture between Past and Present

Edited by Birgit Beumers

Intellect Books, 2013

This volume investigates Russian culture at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia, and the United States exploring aspects of culture with regard to one overarching question: What is the impact of the Soviet discourse on contemporary culture. This question comes at a time when Russia is concerned with integrating itself into European arts and culture while enhancing its uniqueness through references to its Soviet past. Thus, contributions investigate the phenomenon of post-Soviet culture and try to define the relationship of contemporary art to the past.

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The Ryukyu Islands

A New History from the Stone Age to the Present

Gregory Smits

University of Chicago Press, 2025

The first comprehensive history of the Ryukyu Islands region in English.

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands’ history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region’s changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands’ early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands’ history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

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