Contributions by Phil Bevin, Blair Davis, Marc DiPaolo, Michele Fazio, James Gifford, Kelly Kanayama, Orion Ussner Kidder, Christina M. Knopf, Kevin Michael Scott, Andrew Alan Smith, and Terrence R. Wandtke In comic books, superhero stories often depict working-class characters who struggle to make ends meet, lead fulfilling lives, and remain faithful to themselves and their own personal code of ethics. Working-Class Comic Book Heroes: Class Conflict and Populist Politics in Comics examines working-class superheroes and other protagonists who populate heroic narratives in serialized comic books. Essayists analyze and deconstruct these figures, viewing their roles as fictional stand-ins for real-world blue-collar characters. Informed by new working-class studies, the book also discusses how often working-class writers and artists created these characters. Notably Jack Kirby, a working-class Jewish artist, created several of the most recognizable working-class superheroes, including Captain America and the Thing. Contributors weigh industry histories and marketing concerns as well as the fan community's changing attitudes towards class signifiers in superhero adventures. The often financially strapped Spider-Man proves to be a touchstone figure in many of these essays. Grant Morrison's Superman, Marvel's Shamrock, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, and The Walking Dead receive thoughtful treatment. While there have been many scholarly works concerned with issues of race and gender in comics, this book stands as the first to deal explicitly with issues of class, cultural capital, and economics as its main themes.

All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner. In Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks, Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Kersen argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves-a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. It is in these communities that communitas, or a deep social connection, emerges. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a facet of the Ozarks, and Kersen often compares two or more cases to generate new insights and questions. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li'l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music, and near communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.
Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.
Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.
Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series "Deadwood" makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.""

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Quebecois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.

AMERICA ANONYMOUS is the unforgettable story of eight men and women struggling with addictions. For nearly three years acclaimed journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis immersed himself in their lives as they battled drug and alcohol abuse, overeating, and compulsive gambling and sexuality. Alternating with their stories is Denizet-Lewis's candid account of his own recovery from sexual addiction and his compelling examination of our culture of addiction, where we obsessively search for new and innovative ways to escape the reality of the present moment and make ourselves feel better. Addiction is arguably this country's biggest public-health crisis, triggering and exacerbating many of our most pressing social problems, from crime to child abuse and neglect. But while cancer and AIDS survivors have taken to the streets and to the halls of Congress demanding to be heard, millions of addicts talk only to one another in the confines of anonymous Twelve Step meetings. Through the riveting stories in this book, Denizet-Lewis shines a spotlight on addiction and breaks through the shame and denial that still shape our understanding of it--and hamper our ability to treat it. As these eight addicts stumble, fall, and try again to make a different and better life, Denizet-Lewis records their struggles, and his own, with honesty and empathy.

IN LITTLE MORE THAN HALF A DECADE, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects--even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.
Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick had the full cooperation of Facebook's key executives in researching this fascinating history of the company and its impact on our lives. Kirkpatrick tells us how Facebook was created, why it has flourished, and where it is going next. He chronicles its successes and missteps, and gives readers the most complete assessment anywhere of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure in the company's remarkable ascent. This is the Facebook story that can be found nowhere else.
How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company that has transformed the Internet and how did he grow it to its current enormous size? Kirkpatrick shows how Zuckerberg steadfastly refused to compromise his vision, insistently focusing on growth over profits and preaching that Facebook must dominate (his word) communication on the Internet. In the process, he and a small group of key executives have created a company that has changed social life in the United States and elsewhere, a company that has become a ubiquitous presence in marketing, altering politics, business, and even our sense of our own identity. This is the Facebook Effect.

Authors in this illuminating book probe the social and spiritual contexts from which select iconic figures emerge as innovators and cultural leaders and draw material into forms that subsequent generations consider pioneering and emblematic. The book identifies creators such as novelists, poets, performers and dramatists who are leaders in their respective genres, and in culture and society at large, and examines the influence exerted on and by their works. Critics and admirers understand the cultural leaders discussed in this book as significant figures affecting social and political change. The chapters cover a range of genres, time periods and individuals, mixing literary and historical analysis with concerns relevant to leadership studies. The book includes a cross-disciplinary analysis focusing on its subjects' roles as leaders within and beyond their fields. Scholars and students of religion, history and popular culture with wide-ranging interests in the humanities will find this book a unique and fascinating look at cultural leadership. Contributors include: J.L. Airey, Y. Ariel, K.M.S. Bezio, W. Clark Gilpin, T. Fessenden, K. Lofton, E. Marienberg, C. McCracken-Flesher, S. Paulsell, C.N. Pondrom, J. Wiesenfarth

Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

Crossing Cultural Boundaries in East Asia and Beyond explores the personal complexities and ambiguities, and the successes and failures, of crossing borders and boundaries. While the focus is on East Asia, it universalizes cultural anxieties with comparative cases in Russia and the United States. The authors primarily engage the individual experiences of border-crossing, rather than more typically those of political or social groups located at territorial boundaries. Drawing on those individual experiences, this volume presents an array of attempts to negotiate the discomforts of crossing personal borders, and attends to the intimate experiences of border crossers, whether they are traveling to an unfamiliar cultural location or encountering the "other" in local settings such as the classroom or the coffee shop.

Just how did Jane Austen become the celebrity author and the inspiration for generations of loyal fans she is today? Devoney Looser's The Making of Jane Austen turns to the people, performances, activism, and images that fostered Austen's early fame, laying the groundwork for the beloved author we think we know. Here are the Austen influencers, including her first English illustrator, the eccentric Ferdinand Pickering, whose sensational gothic images may be better understood through his brushes with bullying, bigamy, and an attempted matricide. The daring director-actress Rosina Filippi shaped Austen's reputation with her pioneering dramatizations, leading thousands of young women to ventriloquize Elizabeth Bennet's audacious lines before drawing room audiences. Even the supposedly staid history of Austen scholarship has its bizarre stories. The author of the first Jane Austen dissertation, student George Pellew, tragically died young, but he was believed by many, including his professor-mentor, to have come back from the dead. Looser shows how these figures and their Austen-inspired work transformed Austen's reputation, just as she profoundly shaped theirs. Through them, Looser describes the factors and influences that radically altered Austen's evolving image. Drawing from unexplored material, Looser examines how echoes of that work reverberate in our explanations of Austen's literary and cultural power. Whether you're a devoted Janeite or simply Jane-curious, The Making of Jane Austen will have you thinking about how a literary icon is made, transformed, and handed down from generation to generation.

Few stories in the annals of American counterculture are as intriguing or dramatic as that of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Dubbed the "Hippie Mafia," the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary's mantra of "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process.

Just days after California became the first state in the union to ban LSD, the Brotherhood formed a legally registered church in its headquarters at Mystic Arts World on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, where they sold blankets and other countercultural paraphernalia retrieved through surfing safaris and road trips to exotic locales in Asia and South America. Before long, they also began to sell Afghan hashish, Hawaiian pot (the storied "Maui Wowie"), and eventually Colombian cocaine, much of which the Brotherhood smuggled to California in secret compartments inside surfboards and Volkswagen minibuses driven across the border.

They also befriended Leary himself, enlisting him in the goal of buying a tropical island where they could install the former Harvard philosophy professor and acid prophet as the high priest of an experimental utopia. The Brotherhood's most legendary contribution to the drug scene was homemade: Orange Sunshine, the group's nickname for their trademark orange-colored acid tablet that happened to produce an especially powerful trip. Brotherhood foot soldiers passed out handfuls of the tablets to communes, at Grateful Dead concerts, and at love-ins up and down the coast of California and beyond. The Hell's Angels, Charles Mason and his followers, and the unruly crowd at the infamous Altamont music festival all tripped out on this acid. Jimi Hendrix even appeared in a film starring Brotherhood members and performed a private show for the fugitive band of outlaws on the slope of a Hawaiian volcano.

Journalist Nicholas Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group's surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, "Orange Sunshine" explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia.

A popular sub-genre of fantasy and science fiction, steampunk re-imagines the Victorian age in the future, and re-works its technology, fashion, and values with a dose of anti-modernism. While often considered solely through the lens of literature, steampunk is, in fact, a complex phenomenon that also affects, transforms, and unites a wide range of disciplines, such as art, music, film, television, fashion, new media, and material culture. In Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology, Julie Anne Taddeo and Cynthia J. Miller have assembled a collection of essays that consider the social and cultural aspects of this multi-faceted genre. The essays included in this volume examine various manifestations of steampunk-both separately and in relation to each other-in order to better understand the steampunk sub-culture and its effect on-and interrelationship with-popular culture and the wider society. This volume expands and extends existing scholarship on steampunk in order to explore many previously unconsidered questions about cultural creativity, social networking, fandom, appropriation, and the creation of meaning. With a foreword by popular culture scholar Ken Dvorak, and an afterword by steampunk expert Jeff VanderMeer, Steaming into a Victorian Future offers a wide ranging look at the impact of steampunk, as well as the individuals who create, interpret, and consume it.

This book explores the development of a range of cults of popular music as a response to changes in attitudes to meaning, spirituality and religion in society. At a time when fundamentalism is on the rise, traditional religions are in decline and postmodernity has challenged any system that claims to be all-defining, young people have left their traditional places of worship and set up their own, in clubs, at festivals and within music culture. "Pop Cults" investigates the ways in which popular music and its surrounding culture have become a primary site for the location of meaning, belief and identity. It provides an introduction to the history of the interactions of vernacular music and religion, and the role of music in religious culture. Rupert Till explores the cults of heavy metal, pop stars, club culture and virtual popular music worlds, investigating the sex, drug, local and death cults of the sacred popular, and their relationships with traditional religions. He concludes by discussing how and why popular music cultures have taken on many of the roles of traditional religions in contemporary society.

This title provides a reading of the popular fiction of London historicized in its political and cultural contexts. From the early years of the nineteenth century, cultural pessimists imagined in fiction the political forces that might bring about the destruction of London. Periods of popular protest or radicalism generated novels that considered the methods insurgents might use to terrorise the metropolis. There has been a tendency to dismiss such writings as the lurid imaginings of pulp novelists but this book re-evaluates the contribution of popular fiction to the construction of the terrorist threat. It analyses the high-points for the production of such works, and locates them in their cultural and historical context. From the 1840s, when a fear of Chartist insurgency was paramount in the minds of authors, it moves through the anarchist thrillers of the 1890s, considers writers' fears about Bolshevik revolution in the East End of the 1920s and 1930s, explores fears of Fascism in the inter-war years, and assesses the concerns with underground counter-culture that feature in the thriller literature of the 1970s. It concludes with a re-evaluation of the metropolitan background to the figure of the Islamist terrorist.

"A History of Visual Culture" is a history of ideas. The recent explosion of interest in visual culture suggests the phenomenon is very recent. But visual culture has a history. Knowledge began to be systematically grounded in observation and display from the Enlightenment. Since them, from the age of industrialization and colonialism to today's globalized world, visual culture has continued to shape our ways of thinking and of interpreting the world. Carefully structured to cover a wide history and geography, "A History of Visual Culture" is divided into themed sections: Revolt and Revolution; Science and Empiricism; Gaze and Spectacle; Acquisition, Display, and Desire; Conquest, Colonialism, and Globalization; Image and Reality; Media and Visual Technologies. Each section presents a carefully selected range of case studies from across the last 250 years, designed to illustrate how all kinds of visual media have shaped our technology, aesthetics, politics and culture.

This collection of essays delves into the Coke brand to identify and decode its DNA. Unlike other accounts, these essays adopt a global approach to understand this global brand. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, Decoding Coca-Cola critically interrogates the Coke brand as well its constituent parts. By examining those who have been responsible for creating the images of Coke as well as the audiences that have consumed them, these essays offer a unique and revealing insight into the Coke brand and asks whether Coca-Cola is always has the same meaning. Looking into the core meaning, values, and emotions underpinning the Coca-Cola brand, it provides a unique insight into how global brands are created and positioned. This critical examination of one of the world's most recognisable brands will be an essential resource for scholars researching and teaching in the fields of marketing, advertising, and communication. Its unique interdisciplinary approach also makes it accessible to scholars working in other humanities fields, including history, media studies, communication studies, and cultural studies.

The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system.

"Fashion and Celebrity Culture" critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the nineteenth century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have transpired in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures.

With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, "Fashion and Celebrity Culture" is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.