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In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.

This fascinating book examines the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a loosely organized association of ambitious and influential planners who hoped to guide the new urban and industrial developments of the early twentieth century and thereby design a radically improved America. After discussing the roots of this effort in the Progressive and World War I periods, Edward K. Spann traces the development of the RPAA from its formation in 1923 through the decades of its greatest effort (which ended in 1934) to its decline and ultimate demise in the late 1930s. Taking a biographical approach and drawing on both published works and private correspondence, the book focuses on the richly varied thoughts and activities of the leading members of the RPAA regarding significant aspects of urban and regional planning.

The members of the RPAA discussed here include Charles Harris Whitaker, Frederick L. Ackerman, Robert D. Kohn, Benton MacKaye, Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, Robert Bruere, Stuart Chase, Edith Elmer Wood, and Catherine Bauer. Spann threads together the philosophies and work of these individuals by focusing on important points in the movement's history, such as the emergence of a community housing movement in World War I, the development of Benton MacKaye's seminal idea of the Appalachian Trail as an instrument for rural reconstruction, and Lewis Mumford's efforts to foster the idealism he thought necessary for successful planning. Spann also looks at Clarence Stein's work with regional planning in New York State during the governorship of Alfred E. Smith; the birth of the RPAA and its early publicity efforts, which culminated in the famous regional planning issue of Survey Graphic; the RPAA's differences with the Regional Plan of New York; the relationship between the RPAA and Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression; and the early years of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

This work should appeal not only to students of city and regional planning, of architecture, and of environmentalism, but to all those interested in the intellectual developments of the period between 1914 and 1938, especially as they relate to an important phase of modernization in the United States.

Doing the Right Thing examines the use of extraordinary legislative procedures in four cases in the U.S. Congress to accomplish policy objectives that many political scientists would argue are impossible to achieve. It not only shows that Congress is capable of imposing parochial costs in favor of general benefits but it argues that Congress is able to do so in a variety of policy areas through the use of very different kinds of procedural mechanisms that are underappreciated.

The book opens by developing a theory of procedural choice to explain why Congress chooses to delegate in differing degrees in dealing with similar kinds of policy problems. The theory is then applied to four narrative case studies—military base closures, the Yucca Mountain Project, NAFTA, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986—that both show the variety of factors that impact procedural choice and highlight how our national legislature was able to “do the right thing.”

The book concludes by pointing to the variety of ways in which Congress will be confronted with similar policy problems in the coming years and offering some lessons from these cases about what kinds of procedures and policy outcomes we might expect. In short, Congress is remarkably adept at “doing the right thing,” even under difficult circumstances, but only when legislators are willing to manipulate procedures in all the necessary ways.

“[Dakotah] is about hope, disappointment, impermanence and erasure. . . . This is a meditation Bowden fans will not want to miss.”—Arizona Daily Star

“Bowden’s prose—bleak, fierce, surreal like a swirling sandstorm, like an endlessly ramifying arroyo—provided for me, in its rejection of facile theses and clear-cut answers, an honest mapping of our contemporary predicament.”—Leath Tonino, Lit Hub

The fourth installment in Charles Bowden's acclaimed “Unnatural History of America,” Dakotah uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the life of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

This is the first biography of Dale L. Morgan, preeminent Western historian of the fur trade, historic trails, and the Latter Day Saint movement. The book explores how, despite personal struggles, Morgan committed his life to tracking down sources and interpreting the past on the strength of documentary evidence. Connecting Morgan’s life with some of the broad cultural changes that shaped his experiences, this book engages with methodological shifts in the historical profession, the mid-twentieth-century collision of interpretations within Latter Day Saint history, and the development of a descriptive, scholarly approach to that history.
 
Morgan’s body of work and commitment to serious scholarship signaled the start of new ways of understanding, studying, and retelling history, and he motivated a generation of historians from the 1930s to the 1970s to transform their historical approaches. Sounding board, mentor, and close friend to Nels Anderson, Fawn Brodie, Juanita Brooks, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Leonard Arrington, Dale Morgan is the common factor linking this influential generation of mid-twentieth-century historians of western America.

From the ruthless deals of the Ewing clan on TV's "Dallas" to the impeccable customer service of Neiman-Marcus, doing business has long been the hallmark of Dallas. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Dallas business leaders amassed unprecedented political power and civic influence, which remained largely unchallenged until the 1970s.

In this innovative history, Patricia Evridge Hill explores the building of Dallas in the years before business interests rose to such prominence (1880 to 1940) and discovers that many groups contributed to the development of the modern city. In particular, she looks at the activities of organized labor, women's groups, racial minorities, Populist and socialist radicals, and progressive reformers—all of whom competed and compromised with local business leaders in the decades before the Great Depression.

This research challenges the popular view that business interests have always run Dallas and offers a historically accurate picture of the city's development. The legacy of pluralism that Hill uncovers shows that Dallas can accommodate dissent and conflict as it moves toward a more inclusive public life. Dallas will be fascinating and important reading for all Texans, as well as for all students of urban development.

Until the recent recognition of Deaf culture and the legitimacy of signed languages, majority societies around the world have classified Deaf people as “disabled,” a term that separates all persons so designated from the mainstream in a disparaging way. Damned for Their Difference offers a well-founded explanation of how this discrimination came to be through a discursive exploration of the cultural, social, and historical contexts of these attitudes and behavior toward deaf people, especially in Great Britain.

       Authors Jan Branson and Don Miller examine the orientation toward and treatment of deaf people as it developed from the 17th century through the 20th century. Their wide-ranging study explores the varied constructions of the definition of “disabled,” a term whose meaning hinges upon constant negotiation between parties, ensuring that no finite meaning is ever established. Damned for Their Difference provides a sociological understanding of disabling practices in a way that has never been seen before.

A biography and anthology of William Wright (1829–1898), better known by the pen name Dan DeQuille or Dan De Quille, an American author, journalist, and humorist. He was best known for his written accounts of the people, events, and silver mining operations on the Comstock Lode at Virginia City, Nevada, including his non-fiction book History of the Big Bonanza (American Publishing Company, 1876).

DeQuille was on the staff of the (Virginia City) Territorial Enterprise for over thirty years, and his writings were also printed in other publications throughout the country and abroad. Highly regarded for his knowledge of silver mining techniques and his ability to explain them in simple terms, he was also appreciated for his humor, similar in style to that of his associate and friend Mark Twain, and of a type very popular in the United States at that time, now referred to as the Sagebrush School literary genre.

Dancing Revolution presents richly diverse case studies to illuminate these patterns of movement and influence in movement and sound in the history of American public life. Christopher J. Smith spans centuries, geographies, and cultural identities as he delves into a wide range of historical moments. These include the God-intoxicated public demonstrations of Shakers and Ghost Dancers in the First and Second Great Awakenings; creolized antebellum dance in cities from New Orleans to Bristol; the modernism and racial integration that imbued twentieth-century African American popular dance; the revolutionary connotations behind images of dance from Josephine Baker to the Marx Brothers; and public movement's contributions to hip hop, antihegemonic protest, and other contemporary transgressive communities’ physical expressions of dissent and solidarity.

Multidisciplinary and wide-ranging, Dancing Revolution examines how Americans turned the rhythms of history into the movement behind the movements.

Contributors are Norma E. Cantú, Susan Cashion, María Teresa Ceseña, Xóchitl C. Chávez, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez, Renée de la Torre Castellanos, Peter J. García, Rudy F. García, Chris Goertzen, Martha González, Elisa Diana Huerta, Sydney Hutchinson, Marie "Keta" Miranda, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Shakina Nayfack, Russell Rodríguez, Brenda M. Romero, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, José Sánchez Jiménez, and Alberto Zárate Rosales.