Results by title

2646 books match the query 'History & Criticism' and 91 start with w

cover of Walking Shadows: Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane

Walking Shadows

Orson Welles, William Randolph Hearst, and Citizen Kane

John Evangelist Walsh

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

    Walking Shadows dramatically dissects the wild, high-profile battle between newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and famous young actor, director, and filmmaker Orson Welles over Welles’s groundbreaking film Citizen Kane. In 1940 and 1941 it became the center of public controversy and scandal, especially in Hollywood where Welles’s own stark honesty and blatant self-confidence heightened the drama.
    Citizen Kane portrayed the ruthless career of an all-powerful magnate bearing (not accidentally) a striking resemblance to Hearst, who immediately tried to kill the picture. John Evangelist Walsh here illuminates the conflict between these two outsize personalities and for the first time brings Hearst’s vengeful anti-Kane campaign to the fore. Walsh provides thorough documentation, supplemental notes, and an extended bibliography.
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cover of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

Wallowing in Sex

The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television

Elana Levine

Duke University Press, 2007

Passengers disco dancing in The Love Boat’s Acapulco Lounge. A young girl walking by a marquee advertising Deep Throat in the made-for-TV movie Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. A frustrated housewife borrowing Orgasm and You from her local library in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Commercial television of the 1970s was awash with references to sex. In the wake of the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation and gay rights movements, significant changes were rippling through American culture. In representing—or not representing—those changes, broadcast television provided a crucial forum through which Americans alternately accepted and contested momentous shifts in sexual mores, identities, and practices.

Wallowing in Sex is a lively analysis of the key role of commercial television in the new sexual culture of the 1970s. Elana Levine explores sex-themed made-for-TV movies; female sex symbols such as the stars of Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman; the innuendo-driven humor of variety shows (The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Laugh-In), sitcoms (M*A*S*H, Three’s Company), and game shows (Match Game); and the proliferation of rape plots in daytime soap operas. She also uncovers those sexual topics that were barred from the airwaves. Along with program content, Levine examines the economic motivations of the television industry, the television production process, regulation by the government and the tv industry, and audience responses. She demonstrates that the new sexual culture of 1970s television was a product of negotiation between producers, executives, advertisers, censors, audiences, performers, activists, and many others. Ultimately, 1970s television legitimized some of the sexual revolution’s most significant gains while minimizing its more radical impulses.

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cover of Wandering Stars: Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905-1940

Wandering Stars

Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905-1940

Laurence Senelick

University of Iowa Press, 1992

From the beginning of this century, wars, pogroms, revolution, and economic hardship have impelled Russian cultural figures to seek their fortunes abroad—and theatre people have been no exception. This movement was a windfall for Western Europe and North America, for often the most talented and exciting actors and directors put down roots in foreign lands. Their styles and messages were transmuted in the process, but the inspiration they provided was tremendous.
Now, Wandering Stars is the first book in any language to look closely at this theatrical emigration. Essays by Russian and American scholars and practitioners examine the ways in which the process of transplanting art distorted, magnified, or otherwise altered originals and how expectations on both sides led to disappointments and achievements. A particular strength of this collection is its attention to the question of the transmission of one culture to another.
The thirteen essays in Wandering Stars, originally presented at a landmark 1991 conference at Harvard University, approach a host of historical, cultural, and theatrical issues. The effects of the pioneer touring companies of Pavel Orlenev, Alla Nazimova, and, most significantly, the Moscow Art Theatre are traced. The fates of actors like Maria Germanova and directors like Theodore Komisarjevsky who settled in the West receive careful inquiry. The techniques and influences of charismatic teachers such as Michael Chekhov and Andrius Jilinsky are examined, and the fortunes of cabarets like the Chauve-Souris and experimental playwrights like Nikolay Evreinov are given careful study. In addition, essays analyze the fascination America has held for Russian artists throughout history and the problems which face any emigrant who tries to preserve the best of his or her culture in an alien environment.
With the continuing interest in interculturalism evinced in the academy, popular literature, and the media, Wandering Stars makes a vital and timely contribution to the ongoing inquiry and debate. This book should be of interest to all students of theatre and Russian life and all those with an abiding interest in the realities of a global society. 
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cover of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!

Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s

Neepa Majumdar

University of Illinois Press, 2008

Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! maps out the early culture of cinema stardom in India from its emergence in the silent era to the decade after Indian independence in the mid-twentieth century. Neepa Majumdar combines readings of specific films and stars with an analysis of the historical and cultural configurations that gave rise to distinctly Indian notions of celebrity. She argues that discussions of early cinematic stardom in India must be placed in the context of the general legitimizing discourse of colonial "improvement" that marked other civic and cultural spheres as well, and that "vernacular modernist" anxieties over the New Woman had limited resonance here. Rather, it was through emphatically nationalist discourses that Indian cinema found its model for modern female identities. Considering questions of spectatorship, gossip, popularity, and the dominance of a star-based production system, Majumdar details the rise of film stars such as Sulochana, Fearless Nadia, Lata Mangeshkar, and Nargis.
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cover of War Culture and the Contest of Images

War Culture and the Contest of Images

Apel, Dora

Rutgers University Press, 2012

War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.

As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship.

While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.

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cover of War Games

War Games

Jonna Eagle

Rutgers University Press, 2020

The word “wargames” might seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, the declaration “This is war” is meant to signal that things have turned deadly serious, that there is no more playing around. Yet the practices of war are intimately entangled with practices of gaming, from military videogames to live battle reenactments. How do these forms of play impact how both soldiers and civilians perceive acts of war?
 
This Quick Take considers how various war games and simulations shape the ways we imagine war. Paradoxically, these games grant us a sense of mastery and control as we strategize and scrutinize the enemy, yet also allow us the thrilling sense of being immersed in the carnage and chaos of battle. But as simulations of war become more integrated into both popular culture and military practice, how do they shape our apprehension of the traumatic realities of warfare?
 
Covering everything from chess to football, from Saving Private Ryan to American Sniper, and from Call of Duty to drone interfaces, War Games is an essential guide for anyone seeking to understand the militarization of American culture, offering a compact yet comprehensive look at how we play with images of war.
 
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cover of Warhol's Working Class: Pop Art and Egalitarianism

Warhol's Working Class

Pop Art and Egalitarianism

Anthony E. Grudin

University of Chicago Press, 2017

This book explores Andy Warhol’s creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, as neoliberalism perpetuated the idea that fixed classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol’s work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically “American” or “middle class.” Drawing on archival and theoretical research into Warhol’s contemporary cultural milieu, Grudin demonstrates that these features of Warhol’s work were in fact closely associated with the American working class. The emergent technologies Warhol conspicuously employed to make his work—home projectors, tape recorders, film and still cameras—were advertised directly to the working class as new opportunities for cultural participation. What’s more, some of Warhol’s most iconic subjects—Campbell’s soup, Brillo pads, Coca-Cola—were similarly targeted, since working-class Americans, under threat from a variety of directions, were thought to desire the security and confidence offered by national brands.
 
Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol’s work disseminated these promises, while also providing a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.
 
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cover of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema

Washed in Blood

Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema

King, Claire S

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Will Smith in I Am Legend. Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. Charlton Heston in just about everything.

Viewers of Hollywood action films are no doubt familiar with the sacrificial victim-hero, the male protagonist who nobly gives up his life so that others may be saved. Washed in Blood argues that such sacrificial films are especially prominent in eras when the nation—and American manhood—is thought to be in crisis. The sacrificial victim-hero, continually imperiled and frequently exhibiting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, thus bears the trauma of the nation.

Claire Sisco King offers an in-depth study of three prominent cycles of Hollywood films that follow the sacrificial narrative: the early–to–mid 1970s, the mid–to–late 1990s, and the mid–to–late 2000s. From Vietnam-era disaster movies to post-9/11 apocalyptic thrillers, she examines how each film represents traumatized American masculinity and national identity. What she uncovers is a cinematic tendency to position straight white men as America’s most valuable citizens—and its noblest victims.

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cover of Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969

Watching Jim Crow

The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969

Steven D. Classen

Duke University Press, 2004

In the early 1960s, whenever the Today Show discussed integration,WLBT-TV, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi, cut away to local news after announcing that the Today Show content was “network news . . . represent[ing] the views of the northern press.” This was only one part of a larger effort by WLBT and other local stations to keep African Americans and integrationists off Jackson’s television screens. Watching Jim Crow presents the vivid story of the successful struggles of African Americans to achieve representation in the tv programming of Jackson, a city many considered one of the strongest bastions of Jim Crow segregation. Steven D. Classen provides a detailed social history of media activism and communications policy during the civil rights era. He focuses on the years between 1955—when Medgar Evers and the NAACP began urging the two local stations, WLBT and WJTV, to stop censoring African Americans and discussions of integration—and 1969, when the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a landmark decision denying WLBT renewal of its operating license.

During the 1990s, Classen conducted extensive interviews with more than two dozen African Americans living in Jackson, several of whom, decades earlier, had fought to integrate television programming. He draws on these interviews not only to illuminate their perceptions—of the civil rights movement, what they accomplished, and the present as compared with the past—but also to reveal the inadequate representation of their viewpoints in the legal proceedings surrounding WLBT’s licensing. The story told in Watching Jim Crow has significant implications today, not least because the Telecommunications Act of 1996 effectively undid many of the hard-won reforms achieved by activists—including those whose stories Classen relates here.

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cover of Watching Television Come of Age: The New York Times Reviews by Jack Gould

Watching Television Come of Age

The New York Times Reviews by Jack Gould

Edited by Lewis L. Gould

University of Texas Press, 2002

Providing video companionship for isolated housewives, afternoon babysitting for children, and nonstop evening entertainment for the whole family, television revolutionized American society in the post-World War II years. Helping the first TV generation make sense of the new medium was the mission of Jack Gould, television critic of The New York Times from 1947 to 1972. In columns noteworthy for crisp writing, pointed insights, and fair judgment, he highlighted both the untapped possibilities and the imminent perils of television, becoming "the conscience of the industry" for many people.

In this book, historian Lewis L. Gould, Jack Gould's son, collects over seventy of his father's best columns. Grouped topically, they cover a wide range of issues, including the Golden Age of television drama, McCarthy-era blacklisting, the rise and fall of Edward R. Murrow, quiz show scandals, children's programming, and the impact of television on American life and of television criticism on the medium itself. Lewis Gould also supplies a brief biography of his father that assesses his influence on the evolution of television, as well as prefaces to each section.

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cover of Watching While Black Rebooted!: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Watching While Black Rebooted!

The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences

Beretta E. Smith-Shomade

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means in an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this updated edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters. Contributors traverse programs and platforms to wrestle with a changing television industry that has exploded and included Black audiences as a new and central target of its visioning. The book illuminates history, care, monetization, and affect. Within these frames, the chapters run the gamut from transmediation, regional relevance, and superhuman visioning to historical traumas and progress, queer possibilities, and how televisual programming can make viewers feel Black. Mostly, the work tackles what the future looks like now for a changing televisual industry, Black media makers, and Black audiences.

Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Underground, such seemingly innocuous programs as Soul Food, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Being Mary Jane and Atlanta. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen. Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black Rebooted sheds much-needed light on under examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.
 
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cover of Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences

Watching While Black

Centering the Television of Black Audiences

Smith-Shomade, Beretta E

Rutgers University Press, 2013

 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Television scholarship has substantially ignored programming aimed at Black audiences despite a few sweeping histories and critiques. In this volume, the first of its kind, contributors examine the televisual diversity, complexity, and cultural imperatives manifest in programming directed at a Black and marginalized audience.

Watching While Black considers its subject from an entirely new angle in an attempt to understand the lives, motivations, distinctions, kindred lines, and individuality of various Black groups and suggest what television might be like if such diversity permeated beyond specialized enclaves. It looks at the macro structures of ownership, producing, casting, and advertising that all inform production, and then delves into television programming crafted to appeal to black audiences—historic and contemporary, domestic and worldwide.

Chapters rethink such historically significant programs as Roots and Black Journal, such seemingly innocuous programs as Fat Albert and bro’Town, and such contemporary and culturally complicated programs as Noah’s Arc, Treme, and The Boondocks. The book makes a case for the centrality of these programs while always recognizing the racial dynamics that continue to shape Black representation on the small screen.  Painting a decidedly introspective portrait across forty years of Black television, Watching While Black sheds much-needed light on under-examined demographics, broadens common audience considerations, and gives deference to the the preferences of audiences and producers of Black-targeted programming.

           

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cover of Watching Wildlife

Watching Wildlife

Cynthia Chris

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammalsSo let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.—Bloodhound GangIt has never been easier for Americans to observe wild and exotic animals from the comfort and safety of their couches. Several cable channels—Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel—provide around-the-clock wildlife programming while the traditional networks regularly broadcast animal documentaries, late-night appearances by zoologists and their animal charges, and sensationalistic specials about animals attacking hapless humans. Though the ubiquity of animals on television is new, the genre of the wildlife documentary is as old as cinema itself.In Watching Wildlife, Cynthia Chris traces the history of the wildlife genre from its origins in precinematic, colonial visual culture to its contemporary status as flagship programming on global television and explores evolving beliefs about, and attitudes toward, animal subjects. Nature programming and films are consistently presented as real and unmediated reflections of nature. But in Chris's analysis of specific shows (Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and cable television's Crocodile Hunter) and film and television history (the colonial cinema, the launch of Animal Planet), she points out how—particularly in the genre's preoccupation with mating and the favoritism bestowed on certain species—documentary images of animals are and always have been about prevailing ideologies about human gender, sexuality, and race.Ultimately, Chris's sweeping and cogent account of the wildlife documentary incorporates this frequently overlooked genre into broader debates about media globalization, human-animal relations, and popular scientific discourse.Cynthia Chris is assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.
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cover of Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News

Watching Women's Liberation, 1970

Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News

Bonnie J. Dow

University of Illinois Press, 2014

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC--the “Big Three” of the pre-cable television era--discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes.
 
In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks’ eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists’ efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement.
 
Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.
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cover of Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America

Watching the Traffic Go By

Transportation and Isolation in Urban America

By Paul Mason Fotsch

University of Texas Press, 2007

2007 — Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Publication Award – Urban Communication Foundation

As twentieth-century city planners invested in new transportation systems to deal with urban growth, they ensured that the automobile rather than mass transit would dominate transportation. Combining an exploration of planning documents, sociological studies, and popular culture, Paul Fotsch shows how our urban infrastructure developed and how it has shaped American culture ever since.

Watching the Traffic Go By emphasizes the narratives underlying our perceptions of innovations in transportation by looking at the stories we have built around these innovations. Fotsch finds such stories in the General Motors "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair, debates in Munsey's magazine, films such as Double Indemnity, and even in footage of the O. J. Simpson chase along Los Angeles freeways.

Juxtaposed with contemporaneous critiques by Lewis Mumford, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Fotsch argues that these narratives celebrated new technologies that fostered stability for business and the white middle class. At the same time, transportation became another system of excluding women and the poor, especially African Americans, by isolating them in homes and urban ghettos.

A timely, interdisciplinary analysis, Watching the Traffic Go By exposes the ugly side of transportation politics through the seldom-used lens of popular culture.

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cover of Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio

Waves of Opposition

Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Radio sparked the massive upsurge of organized labor during the Great Depression. The powerful new medium became an important weapon in the ideological war between labor and business. Corporations used radio to sing the praises of individualism and consumerism, while unions emphasized equal rights, industrial democracy, and social justice. 

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf analyzes the battle to utilize, and control, the airwaves in radio's early era. Working chronologically, she explores the advent of local labor radio stations such as WCFL and WEVD, labor's campaigns against corporate censorship, and union experiments with early FM broadcasting. Using union archives and broadcast industry records, Fones-Wolf demonstrates radio's key role in organized labor's efforts to fight business's domination of political discourse throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. She concludes with a look at how labor's virtual disappearance from today's media helps explain why unions have become so marginalized, and offers important historical lessons for revitalizing organized labor.

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cover of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

We Are Having This Conversation Now

The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr

Duke University Press, 2022

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.
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cover of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

Doug Bradley

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Rolling Stone's #1 Music Book of 2015

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.” For a “tunnel rat” who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze.” For a Black Marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's “Chain of Fools.” And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die,” “Who'll Stop the Rain,” or the song that gives this book its title.

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also “solo” pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

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cover of We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

We Had Fun and Nobody Died

Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

Amy T. Waldman

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 



"[An] adventure-filled biography of music promoter Peter Jest. . . . Reflecting decades of changes to the music business, We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fascinating biography of a passionate promoter’s work to transform Milwaukee’s music scene." 
—Foreword Reviews 

“Amy Waldman and Peter Jest weave a thrilling tale of fanhood gone pro. Dreams followed, dragons slain, and the roof of a venerable venue repeatedly blown sky-high. We’re proud to have provided the name [for Shank Hall]; it took men and women of sterner stuff to do the heavy lifting.”  
—Michael McKean, actor and comedian, This Is Spinal Tap 

“We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fantastic journey of a Midwest boy, his love of music, and his excitement to be part of it all.” 
—Kevn Kinney, lead singer and guitarist of Drivin N Cryin 

“Peter Jest’s story is one that conveys a winning combination of friendship, determination, and entrepreneurial insights that led him to a lifelong career in support of the live music industry and the community that comes together in common appreciation of it.” 
—Shana Morrison, singer-songwriter 

 

[more]
cover of We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

We Had Fun and Nobody Died

Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter

Amy T. Waldman

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2025

The entertaining and inspiring story of a stubbornly independent promoter and club owner 

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands.

As the music industry has become dominated by profit-driven corporations, We Had Fun and Nobody Died chronicles the career of a one-of-a-kind independent promoter whose hardheadedness and love of music have helped him keep it real and make it in the music business for more than forty years. 



"[An] adventure-filled biography of music promoter Peter Jest. . . . Reflecting decades of changes to the music business, We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fascinating biography of a passionate promoter’s work to transform Milwaukee’s music scene." 
—Foreword Reviews 

“Amy Waldman and Peter Jest weave a thrilling tale of fanhood gone pro. Dreams followed, dragons slain, and the roof of a venerable venue repeatedly blown sky-high. We’re proud to have provided the name [for Shank Hall]; it took men and women of sterner stuff to do the heavy lifting.”  
—Michael McKean, actor and comedian, This Is Spinal Tap 

“We Had Fun and Nobody Died is a fantastic journey of a Midwest boy, his love of music, and his excitement to be part of it all.” 
—Kevn Kinney, lead singer and guitarist of Drivin N Cryin 

“Peter Jest’s story is one that conveys a winning combination of friendship, determination, and entrepreneurial insights that led him to a lifelong career in support of the live music industry and the community that comes together in common appreciation of it.” 
—Shana Morrison, singer-songwriter 

 

[more]
cover of We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill: An Oral History

We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill

An Oral History

By Jean A. Boyd

University of Texas Press, 2003

The Light Crust Doughboys are one of the most long-lived and musically versatile bands in America. Formed in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, Texas, with Bob Wills and Milton Brown (the originator of western swing) at the musical helm and future Texas governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel as band manager and emcee, the Doughboys are still going strong in the twenty-first century. Arguably the quintessential Texas band, the Doughboys have performed all the varieties of music that Texans love, including folk and fiddle tunes, cowboy songs, gospel and hymns, commercial country songs and popular ballads, honky-tonk, ragtime and blues, western swing and jazz, minstrel songs, movie hits, and rock 'n' roll.

In this book, Jean Boyd draws on the memories of Marvin "Smokey" Montgomery and other longtime band members and supporters to tell the Light Crust Doughboys story from the band's founding in 1931 through the year 2000. She follows the band's musical evolution and personnel over seven decades, showing how band members and sponsors responded to changes in Texas culture and musical tastes during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. Boyd concludes that the Doughboys' willingness to change with changing times and to try new sounds and fresh musical approaches is the source of their enduring vitality. Historical photographs of the band, an annotated discography of their pre-World War II work, and histories of some of the band's songs round out the volume.

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cover of Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America

Weavers of Dreams, Unite!

Actors' Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America

Sean P. Holmes

University of Illinois Press, 2013

Published to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Actors' Equity Association in 1913, Weavers of Dreams, Unite! explores the history of actors' unionism in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the onset of the Great Depression. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival resources in New York and Los Angeles, Sean P. Holmes documents how American stage actors used trade unionism to construct for themselves an occupational identity that foregrounded both their artistry and their respectability. In the process, he paints a vivid picture of life on the theatrical shop floor in an era in which economic, cultural, and technological changes were transforming the nature of acting as work. The engaging study offers important insights into the nature of cultural production in the early twentieth century, the role of class in the construction of cultural hierarchy, and the special problems that unionization posed for workers in the commercial entertainment industry.

[more]
cover of Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town

Welcome 2 Houston

Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town

Langston Collin Wilkins

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space.

A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

[more]
cover of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs

Welcome to the Dreamhouse

Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs

Lynn Spigel

Duke University Press, 2001

In Welcome to the Dreamhouse feminist media studies pioneer Lynn Spigel takes on Barbie collectors, African American media coverage of the early NASA space launches, and television’s changing role in the family home and its links to the broader visual culture of modern art. Exploring postwar U.S. media in the context of the period’s reigning ideals about home and family life, Spigel looks at a range of commercial objects and phenomena, from television and toys to comic books and magazines.
The volume considers not only how the media portrayed suburban family life, but also how both middle-class ideals and a perceived division between private and public worlds helped to shape the visual forms, storytelling practices, and reception of postwar media and consumer culture. Spigel also explores those aspects of suburban culture that media typically render invisible. She looks at the often unspoken assumptions about class, nation, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation that underscored both media images (like those of 1960s space missions) and social policies of the mass-produced suburb. Issues of memory and nostalgia are central in the final section as Spigel considers how contemporary girls use television reruns as a source for women’s history and then analyzes the current nostalgia for baby boom era family ideals that runs through contemporary images of new household media technologies.

Containing some of Spigel’s well-known essays on television’s cultural history as well as new essays on a range of topics dealing with popular visual culture, Welcome to the Dreamhouse is important reading for students and scholars of media and communications studies, popular culture, American studies, women’s studies, and sociology.
[more]
cover of Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog

Joshua Lund

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Werner Herzog's protean imagination has produced a filmography that is nothing less than a sustained meditation on the modern human condition. Though Herzog takes his topics from around the world, the Americas have provided the setting and subject matter for iconic works ranging from Aquirre, The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo to Grizzly Man.

Joshua Lund offers the first systematic interpretation of Werner Herzog's Americas-themed works, illuminating the director's career as a political filmmaker—a label Herzog himself rejects. Lund draws on materialist and post-colonial approaches to argue that Herzog's American work confronts us with the circulation, distribution, accumulation, application, and negotiation of power that resides, quietly, at the center of his films. By operating beyond conventional ideological categories, Herzog renders political ideas in radically unfamiliar ways while fearlessly confronting his viewers with questions of world-historical significance. His maddeningly opaque viewpoint challenges us to rethink discovery and conquest, migration and exploitation, resource extraction, slavery, and other foundational traumas of the contemporary human condition.

[more]
cover of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson

Donna Kornhaber

University of Illinois Press, 2017

The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom have made Wes Anderson a prestige force. Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums have become quotable cult classics. Yet every new Anderson release brings out droves of critics eager to charge him with stylistic excess and self-indulgent eclecticism.

Donna Kornhaber approaches Anderson's style as the necessary product of the narrative and thematic concerns that define his body of work. Using Anderson's focus on collecting, Kornhaber situates the director as the curator of his filmic worlds, a prime mover who artfully and conscientiously arranges diverse components into cohesive collections and taxonomies. Anderson peoples each mise-en-scéne in his ongoing ""Wesworld"" with characters orphaned, lost, and out of place amidst a riot of handmade clutter and relics. Within, they seek a wholeness and collective identity they manifestly lack, with their pain expressed via an ordered emotional palette that, despite being muted, cries out for attention. As Kornhaber shows, Anderson's films offer nothing less than a fascinating study in the sensation of belonging--told by characters who possess it the least.

[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 28 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2021)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 28 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2021)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This is volume 28 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 28 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2021)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 28 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2021)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

This is volume 28 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 29 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2022)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 29 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2022)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

This is volume 29 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 29 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2022)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 29 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2022)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

This is volume 29 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 30 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2023)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 30 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2023)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

This is volume 30 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 30 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2023)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 30 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2023)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023

This is volume 30 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 31 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2024)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 31 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2024)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024

This is volume 31 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 31 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2024)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 31 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2024)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024

This is volume 31 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 32 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2025)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 32 number 1 (Spring-Summer 2025)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025

This is volume 32 issue 1 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 32 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2025)

West 86th

A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, volume 32 number 2 (Fall-Winter 2025)

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025

This is volume 32 issue 2 of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Focusing on the decorative arts, design history, and material culture, West 86th provides a forum for new research into all aspects of the content, meaning, and significance of material objects in history. West 86th publishes scholarly articles; review articles; primary source translations; critical book, catalogue, and exhibition reviews; research inquiries; letters to the editor; and supplementary digital material integral to articles.
[more]
cover of Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Westerns

Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Lee Clark Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 1996

A history of the Western in fiction and on film that shows how it reflects the changing obsessions and fears of American culture

Few genres are so closely identified with America as the Western. In this wide-ranging examination of the Western and its appeal, Lee Clark Mitchell ranges from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollar to show how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark book shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. 
[more]
cover of What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To: A Memoir

What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To

A Memoir

Mary Lucia

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

An iconic rock DJ of the Twin Cities tells her harrowing story of being stalked while living her very public life

What’s it like to be in the public spotlight when it just might get you killed? For Mary Lucia, becoming a wildly popular rock DJ meant connecting with a multitude of fans through a shared love of music and deep cuts. But for one listener, that connection became a dangerous obsession, catapulting Lucia into the terrifying three-year nightmare that she chronicles in this raw, wry, and profoundly courageous memoir. With electrifying wit and anger, Lucia shares her experience of navigating constant terror while life absurdly goes on: interview rock stars, curate a radio show song list, judge high school battles of the band, kick a drug addiction cold turkey . . . all while fearing what might be waiting in her mailbox or who might be waiting on her front step or at her back door.

 

Lucia was no stranger to inappropriate or weird contact from fans, but things turned sinister when ten pounds of raw meat were delivered to her at work, followed by a steady stream of ominous letters, cards, packages, and messages. When the letters included threats to her dogs’ safety, she tried to get help, but without a name and return address on these communications there was nothing she could do. As the stalker’s actions escalated, Lucia felt more and more isolated. Police responding to her 911 calls were insensitive and dismissive, and even her friends implied that being stalked was just a hazard of her high-profile job and her high-energy personality. No one seemed to take seriously the danger she faced.

 

Inseparable from this ordeal is the story of how Mary Lucia became the notorious radio malcontent known by so many avid listeners. From the good, bad, and weird of growing up in her eccentric family to drugs, death, and dogs, Lucia finally shares her life on her own terms in What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To. Applying her signature dark humor to her own traumatic experiences, Lucia’s memoir is idiosyncratic, bold, and—ironically—relatable.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

[more]
cover of What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme

What Goes Around Comes Around

The Films of Jonathan Demme

Michael Bliss and Christina Banks

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

This first book on the director of The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia is comprehensive, analyzing each of Jonathan Demme’s thirteen films.

Demme received the 1980 New York Film Critics Award as Best Director for Melvin and Howard. Subsequent Demme films such as Something Wild and the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, which won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Documentary, made Demme a cult favorite in the league of Roger Corman.

With 199l’s The Silence of the Lambs, Demme moved into a different league. The top-grossing film of the year, Silence won five Academy Awards, becoming the first film to sweep the Best Director, Actor, Actress, and Picture categories since 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Philadelphia also has been a top-grossing film, with Tom Hanks winning 1994’s Best Actor Oscar.

Michael Bliss and Christina Banks include a wealth of biographical and critical data; an exclusive interview with Demme; the only on-set report on the filming of The Silence of the Lambs; an interview with Craig McKay, Demme’s Emmy-winning film editor; a bibliography; and a Demme filmography. Many of the book’s movie still illustrations have never been published.

[more]
cover of What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America

What Have They Built You to Do?

The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America

Matthew Frye Jacobson

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Considered by many to be the best political thriller ever made, The Manchurian Candidate is as entertaining, troubling, and relevant today as it was in 1962. Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, and directed with probing insight by John Frankenheimer, the film was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Largely out of circulation for the next two decades, it acquired a well-deserved cult following until it was rereleased during the last year of the Reagan presidency, when its pointed satire of political and media manipulation seemed more timely than ever. In What Have They Built You to Do?—a key line of dialogue from the original film—Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González undertake an ambitious reexamination of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1959 novel by Richard Condon on which it was based, and—critically analyzed here for the first time—the 2004 remake directed by Jonathan Demme. Based on close readings of the film and broad investigations into the eras in which it was made and rediscovered, the authors decode the many layers of meaning within and surrounding the film, from the contradictions of the Cold War it both embodies and parodies—McCarthyism and Kennedy liberalism, individualism and conformity—to its construction of Asian villains, overbearing women, and male heroes in a society anxious about race, gender, and sexuality. Through their multifaceted analysis of The Manchurian Candidate (in all its incarnations), Jacobson and González raise provocative questions about power and anxiety in American politics and society from the Cold War to today.Matthew Frye Jacobson teaches American studies at Yale University. His books include Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Gaspar González is an independent scholar and journalist in Miami. He has taught American studies at Yale University and film studies at the University of Miami.
[more]
cover of What Music Did: The Story of Numerocracy in the West

What Music Did

The Story of Numerocracy in the West

Tony Conrad. Edited by Patrick Nickleson

University of Michigan Press, 2026

In What Music Did, experimental filmmaker and violinist Tony Conrad explores in depth the relationship between music and mathematics. A work of decades that was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2016, Conrad’s expansive history of the interrelationship of music and mathematics is published here for the first time. Editor Patrick Nickleson describes Conrad’s method as that of an anarchic, interarts haberdasher; much of the research comes from musty and out-of-print sources, giving the impression that Conrad followed paths opened up for him in used book shops and conversations, rather than seeking a direct scholarly argument. 

Throughout the book, readers encounter scenes from over two thousand years of history, mathematics, and music: Pythagoras using pebbles to articulate didactic number games to his disciples; Galileo fretting a hill and listening with a musician’s ear to calculate the rate of acceleration under gravity; Rameau trapping Western music in a five-limit tuning system, and what could have been if he were more adept with numbers. Even when drawing on classical sources to explore canonical figures like Saint Augustine, What Music Did offers idiosyncratic critical insights that highlight our ongoing cultural reverence when answers result in simple whole number ratios like 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4. What Music Did is Tony Conrad’s extended indictment of music’s role, from the Pythagoreans to the twentieth century, in upholding the use of number as a clandestine and circumscribed armature of power.
[more]
cover of What Philosophy Wants from Images

What Philosophy Wants from Images

D. N. Rodowick

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In recent decades, contemporary art has displayed an ever increasing and complicated fascination with the cinema—or, perhaps more accurately, as D. N. Rodowick shows, a certain memory of cinema. Contemporary works of film, video, and moving image installation mine a vast and virtual archive of cultural experience through elliptical and discontinuous fragments of remembered images, even as the lived experience of film and photography recedes into the past, supplanted by the digital.
            Rodowick here explores work by artists such as Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and others—artists who are creating forms that express a new historical consciousness of images. These forms acknowledge a complex relationship to the disappearing past even as they point toward new media that will challenge viewers’ confidence in what the images they see are or are becoming. What philosophy wants from images, Rodowick shows, is to renew itself conceptually through deep engagement with new forms of aesthetic experience.
 
[more]
cover of What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s

What Women Watched

Daytime Television in the 1950s

By Marsha F. Cassidy

University of Texas Press, 2005

In this pathfinding book, based on original archival research, Marsha F. Cassidy offers the first thorough analysis of daytime television's earliest and most significant women's genres, appraising from a feminist perspective what women watched before soap opera rose to prominence.

After providing a comprehensive history of the early days of women's programming across the nation, Cassidy offers a critical discussion of the formats, programs, and celebrities that launched daytime TV in America—Kate Smith's variety show and the famed singer's unsuccessful transition from patriotic radio star to 1950s TV idol; the "charm boys" Garry Moore, Arthur Godfrey, and Art Linkletter, whose programs honored women's participation but in the process established the dominance of male hosts on TV; and the "misery shows" Strike It Rich and Glamour Girl and the controversy, both critical and legal, they stirred up.

Cassidy then turns to NBC's Home show, starring the urbane Arlene Francis, who infused the homemaking format with Manhattan sophistication, and the ambitious daily anthology drama Matinee Theater, which strove to differentiate itself from soap opera and become a national theater of the air. She concludes with an analysis of four popular audience participation shows of the era—the runaway hit Queen for a Day; Ralph Edwards's daytime show of surprises, It Could Be You; Who Do You Trust?, starring a youthful Johnny Carson; and The Big Payoff, featuring Bess Myerson, the country's first Jewish Miss America. Cassidy's close feminist reading of these shows clearly demonstrates how daytime TV mirrored the cultural pressures, inconsistencies, and ambiguities of the postwar era.

[more]
cover of When Colleges Sang: The Story of Singing in American College Life

When Colleges Sang

The Story of Singing in American College Life

J. Lloyd Winstead

University of Alabama Press, 2013

When Colleges Sang is an illustrated history of the rich culture of college singing from the earliest days of the American republic to the present.
 
Before fraternity songs, alma maters, and the rahs of college fight songs became commonplace, students sang. Students in the earliest American colleges created their own literary melodies that they shared with their classmates. As J. Lloyd Winstead documents in When Colleges Sang, college singing expanded in conjunction with the growth of the nation and the American higher education system.
 
While it was often simply an entertaining pastime, singing had other subtle and not-so-subtle effects. Singing indoctrinated students into the life of formal and informal student organizations as well as encouraged them to conform to college rituals and celebrations. University faculty used songs to reinforce the religious practices and ceremonial observances that their universities supported. Students used singing for more social purposes: students sang to praise their peer’s achievements (and underachievements), mock the faculty, and provide humor. In extreme circumstances, they sang to intimidate classmates and faculty, and to defy college authorities. Singing was, and is, an intrinsic part of campus culture.
 
When Colleges Sang explores the dynamics that inspired collegiate singing and the development of singing traditions from the earliest days of the American college. Winstead explores this tradition’s tenuous beginnings in the Puritan era and follows its progress into the present. Using historical documents provided by various universities, When Colleges Sang follows the unique applications and influences of song that persisted in various forms. This original and significant contribution to the literature of higher education sheds light on how college singing traditions have evolved through the generations and have continued to remain culturally relevant even today.
[more]
cover of When Frankie Went to Hollywood: Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity

When Frankie Went to Hollywood

Frank Sinatra and American Male Identity

Karen McNally

University of Illinois Press, 2007

This first in-depth study of Frank Sinatra’s film career explores his iconic status in relation to his many performances in postwar Hollywood cinema. When Frankie Went to Hollywood considers how Sinatra’s musical acts, television appearances, and public commentary impacted his screen performances in Pal Joey, The Tender Trap, Some Came Running, The Man with the Golden Arm, and other hits. A lively discussion of sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and male vulnerability in postwar American culture illuminates Karen McNally’s investigation into Sinatra’s cinematic roles and public persona. This entertainment luminary, she finds, was central in shaping debates surrounding definitions of American male identity in the 1940s and ’50s.

[more]
cover of When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

When Movies Mattered

Reviews from a Transformative Decade

Dave Kehr

University of Chicago Press, 2011

If you have ever wanted to dig around in the archives for that perfect Sunday afternoon DVD and first turned to a witty weekly column in the New York Times, then you are already familiar with one of our nation’s premier film critics. If you love movies—and the writers who engage them—and just happen to have followed two of the highest circulating daily papers in the country, then you probably recognize the name of the intellectually dazzling writer who has been penning pieces on American and foreign films for over thirty years. And if you called the City of the Big Shoulders home in the 1970s or 1980s and relied on those trenchant, incisive reviews from the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune to guide your moviegoing delight, then you know Dave Kehr. 

When Movies Mattered presents a wide-ranging and illuminating selection of Kehr’s criticism from the Reader—most of which is reprinted here for the first time—including insightful discussions of film history and his controversial Top Ten lists. Long heralded by his peers for both his deep knowledge and incisive style, Kehr developed his approach to writing about film from the auteur criticism popular in the ’70s. Though Kehr’s criticism has never lost its intellectual edge, it’s still easily accessible to anyone who truly cares about movies. Never watered down and always razor sharp, it goes beyond wry observations to an acute examination of the particular stylistic qualities that define the work of individual directors and determine the meaning of individual films.

From current releases to important revivals, from classical Hollywood to foreign fare, Kehr has kept us spellbound with his insightful critical commentaries. When Movies Mattered will secure his place among our very best writers about all things cinematic.

[more]
cover of When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras

When Sunday Comes

Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras

Claudrena N. Harold

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers.

Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.

[more]
cover of When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathé Exchange

When the Cock Crows

A History of the Pathé Exchange

Richard Lewis Ward

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Influential during Hollywood’s silent-film era, the Pathé Exchange was a multinational film company with a production and distribution model very different from the self-contained units of most major studios. When the Cock Crows: A History of the Pathé Exchange, by Richard Lewis Ward, tells the unconventional story of this unique company, examining its triumphs and failures on the margins of the Hollywood system and its legacy in the movie business.
 
Ward traces the company’s turbulent evolution from its roots as an American distributor for Pathé Frères, its French parent studio, through its many subsequent changes in ownership, to its final years under the controversial leadership of Joseph P. Kennedy and the eventual merger of the company’s production department with RKO. Included are the stories of the unlikely survival of Pathé’s nonproduction assets, such as Pathé Industries, Inc., Pathé-America Distributing Co., Inc., and Pathé Communications Corporation, which continued to operate as part of the industry long after the Exchange had ceased to exist. Ward also provides a fascinating glimpse into the silent movie era and the business and creative decisions that led the Exchange to fail.
 
Film historians have largely ignored the Pathé Exchange, despite its having produced some of the most famous early serials (including the series that began with The Perils of Pauline) and distributed the first films of comedy legends Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang. When the Cock Crows reveals the promise and peril of early Hollywood and establishes the company’s vital place in film history, creating a more vivid picture of this era. 
[more]
cover of When the Ocean Holds the Stage: Moby-Dick and Archipelagic Worlds

When the Ocean Holds the Stage

Moby-Dick and Archipelagic Worlds

Maurya Wickstrom

University of Michigan Press, 2027

When the Ocean Holds the Stage is a work in which Moby-Dick and Melville’s ocean dramaturgy is the deep thru-current and archipelagic structure, forming his brilliant watery excavation of the forces of containment and continentalization, capitalization, racialization, enslavement, species destruction, and white Christian supremacism. As such, it is an original and challenging political and aesthetic engagement with Melville and Moby-Dick. Melville’s Benito Cereno, Homer’s The Odyssey, and Dereck Walcott’s Omeros are also central studies. Wickstrom argues that the ocean and the ship emerge in these texts as new kinds of performance stages on which there is a unique freedom to bring critical thought to bear on many harmful systems, and to offer visions of ways to live differently. Introducing new practices in academic writing, Wickstrom works against the constraints of linear argumentation and toward archipelagic and poetic openness. Gatherings replace chapters and, in addition to the main texts, bring many artists, historical situations, contemporary crises, and political proposals into loose, archipelagic correspondences. Finally, the book is an important contribution from Theatre and Performance Studies to the vital and broad coalition of scholars, artists, and activists whose focus is on water.

[more]
cover of Where Does It Happen: John Cassavetes And Cinema At The Breaking Point

Where Does It Happen

John Cassavetes And Cinema At The Breaking Point

George Kouvaros

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

“A good movie,” John Cassavetes has remarked, “will ask you questions you don’t already know the answers to.” And in his films, Cassavetes is as good as his word. Taking up the radical question that Cassavetes’s films consistently pose—specifically, where is the line between actor and character, fiction and reality, film and life?—George Kouvaros reveals the unique and illuminating position that Cassavetes’s work occupies at the intersection of filmmaking and film theory.Central to any understanding of Cassavetes’s achievement is the issue of performance. Looking at the work of Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself in films such as Faces, A Woman under the Influence, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Kouvaros shows how performative instances—gestures, words, or glances—open up intimations of dramas belonging neither strictly to these films nor to the everyday worlds in which they are immersed. A major reassessment of the filmmaker as a formal experimenter, Where Does It Happen? gives Cassavetes his due as a filmmaker whose critical place in the modern cinema is only now becoming clear. George Kouvaros is senior lecturer in the School of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
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