This book presents a sweeping view of boxing in the United States and the influence of the sport on American culture. Boxing has long been a popular fixture of American sport and culture, despite its decidedly seedy side (the fact that numerous boxing champions acquired their skills in prison or reform schools, the corruption and greed of certain boxing promoters, and the involvement of the mob in fixing the outcome of many big fights). Yet boxing remains an iconic and widely popular spectator sport, even in light of its decline as a result of the recent burgeoning interest in mixed martial arts (MMA) contests. What had made this sport so enthralling to our nation for such a long period of time? This book contains much more than simple documentation of the significant dates, people, and bouts in the history of American boxing. It reveals why boxing became one of America's leading spectator sports at the turn of the century and examines the factors that have swayed the public's perception of it, thereby affecting its popularity. In Boxing in America, the author provides a compelling view of not only the pugilist sport, but also of our country, our sources of entertainment, and ourselves. Includes information from the early "bare knuckles" era of boxing up to modern-day stars and matchups, presenting the history of boxing in a chronological fashion

Today medievalism is increasingly intelligible as a cultural lingua franca, produced in trans- and international contexts with a view to reaching popular international audiences, some of mass scope. This book offers new perspectives on international relations and how global concerns are made available through contemporary medievalist texts. It questions how research in medievalism may help us rethink the terms of internationalism and globalism within popular cultures, ideologies, and political formations. It investigates how the diverse media of medievalism (print; film and television; arts and crafts; fashion; digital media; clubs and fandom) affect its cultural meaning and circulation, and its social function, and engage questions of desire, gender and identity construction. As a whole, International Medievalism and Popular Culture differs from those studies which have concentrated on imaginative appropriations of the middle ages for domestic cultural contexts. It investigates rather how contemporary cultures engage with medievalism to map and model ideas of the international, the trans-national, the cosmopolitan and the global. This book includes examples from Europe, Britain, North America, Australia and the Arab world. It discusses the formation and the impact of popular medievalism in the globalised worlds of Braveheart, Disney and Harry Potter, but it also explores how the contemporary medieval imaginary generates international cultural perspectives, for example in considering Middle Eastern reception of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, the Byzantinism of Julia Kristeva, and Hedley Bull's postnationalist 'new medievalism'. International Medievalism in Popular Culture is an important contribution to medieval studies, cultural studies, and historical studies. It will be of value to undergraduate, postgraduate and academic readers, as well as to all interested in popular culture or medievalism.

The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture. What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing. This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries. Provides readers with an encyclopedic treatment of the afterlife in American popular culture, without any religious or moral biases Connects depictions of the afterlife with general social trends Contests the idea that Americans fear death by showing the plethora of examples of the afterlife shown in film, television, and more Presents a serious analysis of vampires, zombies, and other fictional archetypes without becoming hyper-academic or humorous

Contemporary public speaking remains an important part of our national life and a substantial force in shaping current events. Many of America's most important moments and issues, such as wars, scandals, election campaigns, September 11, 2001, have been defined by oratory. Here, over 50 essays cover a substantial and interesting group of major American social, political, economic, and cultural figures from the 1960s to the present. Each entry explains the biographical forces that shaped a speaker and his or her rhetorical approach, focuses mainly on a discussion of the orator's major speeches within the context of historical events, and concludes with an appraisal of the speaker and his or her contribution to American political and social life. All entries incorporate chronologies of major speeches, bibliographies including primary sources, biographies, and critical studies and archival collections or Web sites appropriate for student research.

Entries include high profile individuals such as: John D. Ashcroft, Elizabeth Dole, Jerry Falwell, Anita Hill, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Janet Reno, Gloria Steinem, Malcolm X; and many others. Excerpts of major speeches and sidebars complement the text. Ideal for researchers and students in public speaking classes, American history classes, American politics classes, contemporary public address classes, and rhetorical theory/criticism classes.

Providing an appealing chronology of "all things dinosaur," this book covers these ancient creatures' roles and surprising importance in science, religion, and society at large. This exhaustive, up-to-date book contains more than 2,000 entries about dinosaurs and dinosaur-related topics. It provides not only detailed information about their discovery, underlying science, and recent technologies and theories but also encompasses all of the facets of dinosaurs in society-for example, their use in consumer marketing and promotion, popularization of dinosaurs in the media, as "proof" for both evolutionists and creationists to substantiate their claims about life's origins, and as cultural artifacts. Organized chronologically, the book offers an informative and entertaining timeline of how dinosaurs have appeared in science, religion, and society since they were discovered in the 1800s, covering everything from dinosaur museum displays to how dinosaurs served advocates of young-Earth creationism. This fascinating work enables a broad appreciation for the surprising significance of dinosaurs in many aspects of our daily lives and modern society. Depicts the history, breadth, depth, and diversity of how humans have learned about, argued over, and made use of dinosaurs-a resource appropriate for public, school, or academic libraries Examines the events of the earliest discoveries of fossilized remains of dinosaurs and how those discoveries often became interwoven with religious ideas Includes photographs, a glossary, an appendix of geological time, and a detailed, cross-referenced index to assist researchers and general readers

The Great Art Hoax exposes the real fakery and hypocrisy of the art world: how art is manufactured and marketed; how the pathology of private possession drives up the price; and how false art is hyped as true art to the tune of millions of dollars. Jon Huer demonstrates convincingly that what the art market deals as art need not be art at all."

The success of the new settlements in what is now the United States depended on food. This book tells about the bounty that was here and how Europeans forged a society and culture, beginning with help from the Indians and eventually incorporating influences from African slaves. They developed regional food habits with the food they brought with them, what they found here, and what they traded for all around the globe. Their daily life is illuminated through descriptions of the typical meals, holidays, and special occasions, as well as their kitchens, cooking utensils, and cooking methods over an open hearth. Readers will also learn how they kept healthy and how their food choices reflected their spiritual beliefs. This thorough overview endeavors to cover all the regions settled during the Colonial and Federal. It also discusses each immigrant group in turn, with attention also given to Indian and slave contributions. The content is integral for U.S. history standards in many ways, such as illuminating the settlement and adaptation of the European settlers, the European struggle for control of North America, relations between the settlers from different European countries, and changes in Native American society resulting from settlements.

I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he wore kilts. But I see I shall have to amend that, because he was not a celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after I had left New York for the West. In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, which I can safely say he would have done had he written any at that time, and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity. Hence I am constrained to the belief that his eccentricity must have arrived with his genius, and both after the age of twenty-five. Far be it from me to question the talents of one upon whose head has been set the laurel of fame When I knew him he was a young man without frills or foibles, with an excellent head for business. He was starting in to practise law in a downtown office with the intention of becoming a great corporation lawyer. He used to drop into my chambers once in a while to smoke, and was first-rate company. When I gave a dinner there was generally a cover laid for him. I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me. I look upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man's shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper.

At the heart of Scriptures for a Generation are dozens of detailed entries discussing individual writers and the particular importance of their texts - bona fide '60s classics ranging from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves. Represented as well are such works of revered elders as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Beidler's coverage also extends to works of the early '70s that are clearly textual and spiritual extensions of the '60s: the Portola Institute's Last Whole Earth Catalog, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and others. An overview of reading and writing as both a product and prime mover of '60s culture precedes the main section. In his conclusion Beidler highlights the most notable efforts to document and interpret the era.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

Henry Jenkins at Authors@Google (video)

"Jenkins is one of us: a geek, a fan, a popcult packrat. He's also an incisive and unflinching critic. His affection for the subject and sharp eye for 'what it all means' are an unbeatable combination. This is fascinating, engrossing and enlightening reading."
--Cory Doctorow, author of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" and co-editor of "Boing Boing"

Henry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, media producers and advertisers, not to mention researchers and fans, take for granted the idea that the success of a media franchise depends on fan investments and participation.

Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins's progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, take up blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impactsmainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

Henry Jenkins at Authors@Google (video)

"Building on the tradition of social commentators such as Gilbert Seldes, Robert Warshow, and Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins brings his outstanding insight and compassionate counsel to contemporary cultural phenomena. Here not only media, but affect, matters. A delightful and helpful collection on popular pleasures."
--Janet Staiger, author of "Media Reception Studies"

aOffers a lively, diligently researched, and well-written account of one scholaras engagement with the emotional punch of media.a--"PsycCRITIQUES"

Vaudevillians used the term "the wow climax" to refer to the emotional highpoint of their acts--a final moment of peak spectacle following a gradual building of audience's emotions. Viewed by most critics as vulgar and sensationalistic, the vaudeville aesthetic was celebrated by other writers for its vitality, its liveliness, and its playfulness.

The Wow Climax follows in the path of this more laudatory tradition, drawing out the range of emotions in popular culture and mapping what we might call an aesthetic of immediacy. It pulls together a spirited range of work from Henry Jenkins, one of our most astute media scholars, that spans different media (film, television, literature, comics, games), genres (slapstick, melodrama, horror, exploitation cinema), and emotional reactions (shock, laughter, sentimentality). Whether highlighting the sentimentality at the heart of the Lassie franchise, examining the emotional experiences created by horror filmmakers like Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and avant garde artist Matthew Barney, or discussing the emerging aesthetics of videogames, these essays get to the heart of what gives popular culture its emotional impact.

The prospect of dinner and a movie is always an enticing one. Whether it is a date early on in a relationship with all the apprehension and barely contained frisson that that entails or an opportunity for a child free evening and the chance to watch a full length film of your choice without having to keep your finger on the remote to pause for toilet breaks, the combination of food and cinema is a winning one. Food is inextricably linked to all aspects of our lives, food for feasts, food to comfort, food to harm and always food to raise the sexual tension. Cinematographers know this too. So often there are dishes in a movie that deserve a mention in the credits so pivotal are they to the storyline. You only have to mention "Silence of the Lambs" for fava beans and chianti spring into the conversation and apple pie is often off or suddenly back on the menu for anyone who has recently watched American Pie for the first time. Let us get one thing straight here the dishes celebrated in this book are not physically available at the pictures. Food served in containers too large to be used as airline carryon baggage is not what this book is about. The recipes here are for those movie moments that made you step away from the popcorn bucket. Who doesn't want to slice garlic with a razor blade to create the garlicky spaghetti sauce so lovingly made in Goodfellas or jump through the screen to nibble absolutely everything in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (including Johnny Depp although that may be just my own fantasy) and every woman on this planet wants "what she's having" in When Harry met Sally! So this is your chance, if it was eaten on screen then the recipe for it may well be in this book. Unless of course you fancy making the chilled monkey brains from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which case I suggest you still buy the book but change your dessert plans. What about a nice Apple Strudel from the Sound of Music instead?

Mankind has been fascinated with and drawn to the macabre for many years. This is particularly evident in the growing popularity of dark tourism, which centers on locations known for death and suffering. Virtual Traumascapes and Exploring the Roots of Dark Tourism is a pivotal reference source featuring the latest scholarly research in which the rise of new technology platforms is not only changing tourism worldwide, but also facilitating the access to areas of war, mourning, and disaster. Including coverage on a number of topics such as sexual tourism, disaster recovery, and capitalism, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on concepts and methodologies of the dark tourism industry. Topics Covered: The many academic areas covered in this publication include, but are not limited to: Capitalism Consumption Cultural Theory Culture Dark Tourism Disaster Recovery Disaster Tourism Globalization Museums Politics Poverty Sexual Tourism Thana Tourism

Alan Rawsthorne was a British composer, film scorer, music editor, author, and radio talk show presenter. At the heart of his musical contribution was a unique blend of European and English 20th-century techniques which concentrated on instrumental rather than vocal music. While most of this volume is dedicated to Rawsthorne's original musical works, the reader's attention is also drawn to his articles, radio talks, and arrangements of works of other composers. His disposition placed his career in the background of others who were more public; his preference was to write music for its own sake rather than for notoriety and monetary gain. Through the guiding direction of other composers and radio leadership personnel, Rawsthorne created music for the next age as much as for his current time.

This bibliography is comprised of a listing of all known works (completed and uncompleted), premieres and selected other performances (highlighting venues, dates, and performers' names), a discography of both commercially available discs and archival tapes and discs, a 1500-item annotated set of citations of reviews, sections of books, articles and the like regarding the works, Rawsthorne's life and recordings, five appendices (song cycle and multi-section works components, alphabetical works list, Manchester manuscript collection details, chronological works list, works of other composers dedicated to Rawsthorne) and a 25-page index to the book.

Liverpool Football Club, in stark contrast to its competitors, remains locally owned, not a conglomerate or media business. Unlike its main rivals, the Liverpool club has been loathe to pursue global markets for merchandizing - though it attracts a huge fandom around the world - and its ambitions remain resolutely fixed on footballing success. No football club has ever had such an extended period of dominance in the English game, nor extended that dominance to Europe so effectively.
Many of the current crop of top young players are locally born and are a central feature of the city's nightlife, as well as national icons in pop/football/youth culture. But there are fears that the Club's great days have now passed. At the height of its powers in the 1980s, Liverpool FC was the site of two catastrophic crowd disasters, which effectively transformed the sport and added to wounding perceptions about the city's alleged sentimentality, fatalism and irreversible decline. The legacy of the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies continues to shape the self-image of the Club and those who support it. A seething rivalry with nearby corporate giant Manchester United is a constant reminder of football's new order.
Addressing all of these concerns, as well as Liverpool's global reputation as the home of the Beatles and the 'Mersey sound', this book takes an original approach to the study of football by examining its links with other important popular culture forms, especially pop music, but also television and youth styles. In particular, however, it looks at the very special meaning of football in Liverpool.

Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture considers the visual languages, politics, and poetics of personal appearance. Dandyism has been most closely associated with influential caucasian Western men-about-town, epitomized by the 19th century style-setting of Oscar Wilde and by Tom Wolfe's white suits. The essays collected here, however, examine the spectacle and workings of dandyism to reveal that these were not the only dandies. On the contrary, art historians, literary and cultural historians, and anthropologists identify unrecognized dandies flourishing among early 19th century Native Americans, in Soviet Latvia, in Africa, throughout the African-American diaspora, among women, and in the art world.

Moving beyond historical and fictional accounts of dandies, this volume juxtaposes theoretical models with evocative images and descriptions of clothing in order to link sartorial self-construction with artistic, social, and political self-invention. Taking into consideration the vast changes in thinking about identity in the academy, Dandies provides a compelling study of dandyism's destabilizing aesthetic enterprise.

Contributors: Jennifer Blessing, Susan Fillin-Yeh, Rhonda Garelick, Joe Lucchesi, Kim Miller, Robert E. Moore, Richard J. Powell, Carter Ratcliffe, and Mark Allen Svede.

"This is the most culturally sophisticated history of the Internet yet written. We can't make sense of what the Internet means in our lives without reading Schulte's elegant account of what the Internet has meant at various points in the past 30 years." -Siva Vaidhyanathan, Chair of the Department of Media Studies at The University of Virginia In the 1980s and 1990s, the internet became a major player in the global economy and a revolutionary component of everyday life for much of the United States and the world. It offered users new ways to relate to one another, to share their lives, and to spend their time-shopping, working, learning, and even taking political or social action. Policymakers and news media attempted-and often struggled-to make sense of the emergence and expansion of this new technology. They imagined the internet in conflicting terms: as a toy for teenagers, a national security threat, a new democratic frontier, an information superhighway, a virtual reality, and a framework for promoting globalization and revolution. Schulte maintains that contested concepts had material consequences and helped shape not just our sense of the internet, but the development of the technology itself. Cached focuses on how people imagine and relate to technology, delving into the political and cultural debates that produced the internet as a core technology able to revise economics, politics, and culture, as well as to alter lived experience. Schulte illustrates the conflicting and indirect ways in which culture and policy combined to produce this transformative technology.

This book provides an enlightening, representative account of how rappers talk about God in their lyrics-and why a sense of religion plays an intrinsic role within hip hop culture. Why is the battle between good and evil a recurring theme in rap lyrics? What role does the devil play in hip hop? What exactly does it mean when rappers wear a diamond-encrusted "Jesus" around their necks? Why do rappers acknowledge God during award shows and frequently include prayers in their albums? Rap and Religion: Understanding the Gangsta's God tackles a sensitive and controversial topic: the juxtaposition-and seeming hypocrisy-of references to God within hip hop culture and rap music. This book provides a focused examination of the intersection of God and religion with hip hop and rap music. Author Ebony A. Utley, PhD, references selected rap lyrics and videos that span three decades of mainstream hip hop culture in America, representing the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South in order to account for how and why rappers talk about God. Utley also describes the complex urban environments that birthed rap music and sources interviews, award acceptance speeches, magazine and website content, and liner notes to further explain how God became entrenched in hip hop. A bibliography of cited sources on rap music and hip hop culture An index of key terms and artists A discography of rap songs with religious themes

Running the Gauntlet-An Intimate History of the Modern Body Piercing Industry tells the story of how the author fathered the modern body piercing industry and in so doing gave birth to the larger body piercing movement.

A cultural history of fundamentalism's formative decades; Protestant fundamentalists have always allied themselves with conservative politics and stood against liberal theology and evolution From the start, however, their relationship with mass culture has been complex and ambivalent Selling the Old-Time Religion tells how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel Selectively, and with more sophistlcation than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institution of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of self-scrutiny that reveals the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Douglas Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofiness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues - from jazz to ""flappers"" - in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s ""were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith,"" Abrams concludes, ""but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core."" Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.