"We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us." These words are from the front page of Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper published in the United States, in 1827, a milestone event in the history of an oppressed people. From then on a prodigious and hitherto almost unknown cascade of newspapers, magazines, letters, and other literary, historical, and popular writing poured from presses chronicling black life in America.

The authentic voice of African-American culture is captured in this first comprehensive guide to a treasure trove of writings by and for a people, as found in sources in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. This bibliography of over 6,000 entries is the indispensable guide to the stories of slavery, freedom, Jim Crow, segregation, liberation, struggle, and triumph.

Besides describing many new discoveries--from church documents to early civil rights ephemera, from school records to single-mother newsletters, from artists' journals to labor publications--this work informs researchers where and how to find them (for example, through online databases, microfilm, or traditional catalogs).

Digital technology and the Internet have revolutionized film criticism, programming, and preservation in deeply paradoxical ways. The Internet allows almost everyone to participate in critical discourse, but many print publications and salaried positions for professional film critics have been eliminated. Digital technologies have broadened access to filmmaking capabilities, as well as making thousands of older films available on DVD and electronically. At the same time, however, fewer older films can be viewed in their original celluloid format, and newer, digitally produced films that have no “material” prototype are threatened by ever-changing servers that render them obsolete and inaccessible.

Cineaste, one of the oldest and most influential publications focusing on film, has investigated these trends through a series of symposia with the top film critics, programmers, and preservationists in the United States and beyond. This volume compiles several of these symposia: “Film Criticism in America Today” (2000), “International Film Criticism Today” (2005), “Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet” (2008), “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” (2013), “The Art of Repertory Film Exhibition and Digital Age Challenges” (2010), and “Film Preservation in the Digital Age” (2011). It also includes interviews with the late, celebrated New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael and the critic John Bloom (“Joe Bob Briggs”), as well as interviews with the programmers/curators Peter von Bagh and Mark Cousins and with the film preservationist George Feltenstein. This authoritative collection of primary-source documents will be essential reading for scholars, students, and film enthusiasts.

Jennifer Phegley presents an examination of four mid-Victorian magazines that middle-class women read widely. Educating the Proper Woman Reader reevaluates prevailing assumptions about the vexed relationship between nineteenth-century women readers and literary critics.

While many scholars have explored the ways nineteenth-century critics expressed their anxiety about the dangers of women’s unregulated and implicitly uncritical reading practices, which were believed to threaten the sanctity of the home and the cultural status of the nation, Phegley argues that family literary magazines revolutionized the position of women as consumers of print by characterizing them as educated readers and able critics. Her analysis of images of influential women readers (in Harper’s), intellectual women readers (in The Cornhill), independent women readers (in Belgravia), and proto-feminist women readers/critics (in Victoria) indicates that women played a significant role in determining the boundaries of literary culture within these magazines. She argues that these publications supported women’s reading choices, inviting them to define literary culture rather than to consume it passively.

Not only does this book revise our understanding of nineteenth-century attitudes toward women readers, but it also takes a fresh look at the transatlantic context of literary production. Further, Phegley demonstrates the role these publications played in improving cultural literacy among women of the middle classes as well as the interplay between fiction and essays of the time by writers such as Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant, George Sala, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.

Media platforms continually evolve, but the issues surrounding media representations of gender and sexuality have persisted across decades. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism has published groundbreaking articles on gender and sexuality, including some that have become canonical in film studies, since the journal’s founding in 1982. This anthology collects seventeen key articles that will enable readers to revisit foundational concerns about gender in media and discover models of analysis that can be applied to the changing media world today.

Spectatorship begins with articles that consider issues of spectatorship in film and television content and audience reception, noting how media studies has expanded as a field and demonstrating how theories of gender and sexuality have adapted to new media platforms. Subsequent articles show how new theories emerged from that initial scholarship, helping to develop the fields of fandom, transmedia, and queer theory. The most recent work in this volume is particularly timely, as the distinctions between media producers and media spectators grow more fluid and as the transformation of media structures and platforms prompts new understandings of gender, sexuality, and identification. Connecting contemporary approaches to media with critical conversations of the past, Spectatorship thus offers important points of historical and critical departure for discussion in both the classroom and the field.

Today The New Yorker is one of a number of general-interest magazines published for a sophisticated audience, but in the post-World War II era the magazine occupied a truly significant niche of cultural authority. A self-selected community of 250,000 readers, who wanted to know how to look and sound cosmopolitan, found in its pages information about night spots and polo teams. They became conversant with English movies, Italian Communism, French wine, the bombing of the Bikini Atoll, prêt-à-porter, and Caribbean vacations. A well-known critic lamented that "certain groups have come to communicate almost exclusively in references to the [magazine's] sacred writings." The World through a Monocle is a study of these "sacred writings."

Mary Corey mines the magazine's editorial voice, journalism, fiction, advertisements, cartoons, and poetry to unearth the preoccupations, values, and conflicts of its readers, editors, and contributors. She delineates the effort to fuse liberal ideals with aspirations to high social status, finds the magazine's blind spots with regard to women and racial and ethnic stereotyping, and explores its abiding concern with elite consumption coupled with a contempt for mass production and popular advertising. Balancing the consumption of goods with a social conscience which prized goodness, the magazine managed to provide readers with what seemed like a coherent and comprehensive value system in an incoherent world.

Viewing the world through a monocle, those who created The New Yorker and those who believed in it cultivated a uniquely powerful cultural institution serving an influential segment of the population. Corey's work illuminates this extraordinary enterprise in our social history.