Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Rudy Vallee these cultural icons whose fame spanned all the important mass media, also played a vital role in the origin and development of the crooning tradition. Crooning represented one of the most important musical styles of the twentieth century, intermingling with jazz and fronting the big band craze of the thirties and forties. Crooners spurred the rise of radio as home staple and the Golden Age of film musicals. When commercial television became a viable commodity, crooners anchored perhaps the first TV programming innovation, the variety show. It took the cataclysmic aesthetic and cultural changes ushered in by rock 'n' roll in the 1950s to finally bring crooners down from their pedestal. The Rise of the Crooners examines the historical trends and events that led to the emergence of the crooning style. Ian Whitcomb, a successful popular music vocalist himself for almost 40 years, provides a personal perspective on this phenomenon. The lives and careers of six pioneers of the style Bing Crosby, Russ Columbo, Gene Austin, Rudy Vallee, Johnny Marvin, and Nick Lucas are covered at length. With the exception of one entry devoted to Crosby possibly the greatest entertainer of the past century these biographies (appended by lengthy bibliographies and discographies) are more thorough and up-to-date than any treatment in print about these seminal artists.

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man traces efforts within American feminist utopias to imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and its attending masculinities constitute an overlooked site for mining new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias gained popularity -the early 1970s to the mid-2010s-these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist conceptions of masculinity and female experience. These texts vary in their focus but share an interest in replacing patriarchal masculinities with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of alternative masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist writers present new conceptions of manhood pivotal to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American masculinity.

In November 1997 English Heritage announced the discovery of a vast prehistoric temple in Somerset. The extraordinary wooden rings at Stanton Drew are the most recent and biggest of a series of remarkable discoveries that have transformed the way archaeologists think of the great monuments in the region including Stonehenge and Avebury. The results of these discoveries have not been published outside academic journals and no one has considered the wider implications of these finds. Here Mike Pitts who has worked as an archaeologist at Avebury, and has access to the unpublished English Heritage files, asks what sort of people designed and built these extraordinary structures - the biggest in Britain until the arrival of medieval cathedrals. Using computer reconstructions he shows what they looked like - and asks what they are for. This is the story of the discovery of a lost civilisation that spanned five centuries, a civilisation that now lies mostly beneath the fields of Southern England.

Kinship in the Fiction of N.K. Jemisin: Relations of Power and Resistance examines the work of N.K. Jemisin through the lens of kinship studies. In a world increasingly suffering the effects of climate change, currently undergoing a sixth mass extinction, and where anti-democratic, racist and misogynistic movements are gaining ground in many societies, there is an urgent need to re-imagine our most intimate relations and the webs of kinship that form our societies, but also connect us to the more-than-human world. The essays in this collection shed new light on the ways in which Jemisin's fiction does such re-imaginative work and explores both the contemporary moment and the potential for a future that is other than our present.

Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man traces efforts within contemporary American feminist utopias to imagine healthier conceptions of manhood. As this analysis illuminates, feminist works envisioning the improved society and its attending masculinities make up an overlooked site for mining new masculinities. During the years in which such utopias moved from the margins to the mainstream, the early 1970s to the mid-2010s, these novels grew more complex, challenging essentialist conceptions of masculinity and female experience. As this analysis demonstrates, these texts vary in their focus, but are united by an interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. This book analyzes the centrality of such alternative masculinities to these ideal societies and the ways feminist writers present in their fiction new conceptions of manhood pivotal to discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis of American masculinity.

This penetrating work, the first book-length study of Kate Smith to appear in print, offers a candid look at the life and show business career of one of the most beloved women of our time. Through her work as an entertainer, Kate Smith touched the pulse of the American public. The scope of her influence is chronicled in this book, which includes a biographical study, a discography, a filmography, a song index, lists of her stage and media appearances, sheet music and song books, and an annotated bibliography of works by and about Kate Smith.