Ever since the fifties, when television became ascendent in American popular culture, it has become commonplace to bemoan its "bad" effects. Little or nothing, however, has been said about its "good" effects. With this observation, Henry Perkinson introduces his provocative and original analysis of television and culture. Rejecting the determinism inherent in most studies of the effects of television ("We are what we watch"), he insists that it is people that actively change culture, media having no agency to do so. Nevertheless, he argues that television did facilitate the changes we have made in our culture over the past thirty years.Perkinson describes how television helped us become critical of our existing culture, especially of the relationships that were commonly accepted between men and women, blacks and whites, politicians and voters, employers and employees, and between people and the environment. These criticisms have brought about dramatic changes in our social, political, and economic arrangements, as well as changes in our intellectual outlook. Since these changes came about through our efforts to eliminate or reduce discrimination, suffering, and injustice, Perkinson argues that our culture has become more moral in the age of television.In what amounts to a history of recent social change in America, Getting Better examines the role television has played in the rise of feminism, the black protest movement, the presidential elections, the Vietnam War, Watergate, environmentalism, religious fundamentalism, and the New Age movement. This book will be essential reading for students of communications and American culture, and for anyone who wants to make sense of the transformations of American life from the 1950s to the present. Even those who do not agree that things are "getting better" will find that Perkinson's analysis helps to make things more coherent.

Although attitudes toward the aged and their care are inherent in any society, gerontology itself is a relatively recent field of study and practice. "Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age" applies the methods of discourse analysis and textual analysis to texts and documents in this newly evolved and eclectic fi eld. Green explores and identifies the literary methods and discursive regularities through which aging and the aged have been made into objects of study and treatment, and which together form a mode of knowledge production that will infl uence future texts in the field.

Because such formats of representation limit rational diagnoses of problems and rational courses of ameliorative action, policy implications in the fi eld of gerontology are a major interest of this study. Another interest is methodological. Within the broader constructionist approach to social reality, Green takes the position of "constitutive realism" the notion that social reality is linguistically constructed, primarily in speech and writing.

The book's two aims are to describe analytically the fi eld of gerontology. The field is important both for its growing academic presence and for its practical eff ects on discourse and policy concerning old age. It also hopes to help develop possibilities of inquiry associated with the linguistic, literary, and rhetorical turns of social science in recent years. "Gerontology and the Construction of Old Age" is a substantive investigation, at considerable theoretical depth, of gerontology itself, as well as a methodological treatise with broader implications for social science as it focuses upon the discourse of various professional fields.

This is a new release of the original 1956 edition.

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In 1905 Mina Benson Hubbard became the first white woman to cross Labrador, completing the expedition that had led to her husband's death. The Woman Who Mapped Labrador makes available for the first time the unguarded and personal diary that was the basis for her famous book, A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador. Three specialists have combined their expertise to enhance the richness of this original source. Roberta Buchanan's annotation of Hubbard's expedition diary makes it accessible to contemporary readers. Anne Hart's biography illuminates an Edwardian woman's transformation from teacher, nurse, and devoted wife to courageous explorer and social activist. Bryan Greene's discussion of Hubbard's navigational, cartographic, and topographical techniques shows her to have been a serious explorer. His nineteen newly drawn maps make it possible to follow her journey in detail. In her diary Hubbard's full enthusiasm for the Labrador wilderness shines through her descriptions of the great caribou migration, the Montagnais/Naskapi Indians (Innu), and life at a Hudson's Bay post. She also reveals in frank detail the difficulties of asserting her authority as a female expedition leader and her satisfaction at beating out her male rival, Dillon Wallace.

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