This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland. How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations. This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.

Marvel Studios' approach to its Cinematic Universe-beginning with the release of Iron Man (2008)-has become the template for successful management of blockbuster film properties. Yet films featuring Marvel characters can be traced back to the 1940s, when the Captain America serial first appeared on the screen. This collection of new essays is the first to explore the historical, textual and cultural context of the larger cinematic Marvel universe, including serials, animated films, television movies, non-U.S. versions of Marvel characters, films featuring characters licensed by Marvel, and the contemporary Cinematic Universe as conceived by Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios. Films analyzed include Transformers (1986), Howard the Duck (1986), Blade (1998), Planet Hulk (2010), Iron Man: Rise of Technovore (2013), Elektra (2005), the Conan the Barbarian franchise (1982-1990), Ultimate Avengers (2006) and Ghost Rider (2007).

This book explores ways in which screen-based storyworlds transfix, transform, and transport us imaginatively, physically, and virtually to the places they depict or film. Topics include fantasy quests in computer games, celebrity walking tours, dark tourism sites, Hobbiton as theme park, surf movies, and social gangs of Disneyland. How physical, virtual, and imagined locations create a sense of place through their immediate experience or visitation is undergoing a revolution in technology, travel modes, and tourism behaviour. This edited collection explores the rapidly evolving field of screen tourism and the affective impact of landscape, with provocative questions and investigations of social groups, fan culture, new technology, and the wider changing trends in screen tourism. We provide critical examples of affective landscapes across a wide range of mediums (from the big screen to the small screen) and locations. This book will appeal to students and scholars in film and tourism, as well as geography, design, media and communication studies, game studies, and digital humanities.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today. Batman's foe has cropped up in thousands of comics, numerous animated series, and three major blockbuster feature films since 1966. Actually, the Joker debuted in DC comics Batman 1 (1940) as the typical gangster, but the character evolved steadily into one of the most ominous in the history of sequential art. Batman and the Joker almost seemed to define each other as opposites, hero and nemesis, in a kind of psychological duality. Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. As the first volume that examines the Joker as complex cultural and cross-media phenomenon, this collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. Connecting the Clown Prince of Crime to bodies of thought as divergent as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, contributors demonstrate the frightening ways in which we get the monsters we need.

This volume collects a wide-ranging sample of fresh analyses of Spider-Man. It traverses boundaries of medium, genre, epistemology, and discipline in essays both insightful and passionate that move forward the study of one of the world's most beloved characters. The editors have crafted the book for fans, creators, and academics alike. Foreword by Tom DeFalco, with poetry and an afterword by Gary Jackson (winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize).

Contributions by Jerold J. Abrams, Jose Alaniz, John Carey, Maurice Charney, Peter Coogan, Joe Cruz, Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Stefan Danter, Adam Davidson-Harden, Randy Duncan, Stephen Graham Jones, Richard Hall, Richard Heldenfels, Alberto Hermida, Victor Hernandez-Santaolalla, A. G. Holdier, Tiffany Hong, Siegfried Kracauer, Naja Later, Ryan Litsey, Tara Lomax, Tony Magistrale, Matthew McEniry, Cait Mongrain, Grant Morrison, Robert Moses Peaslee, David D. Perlmutter, W. D. Phillips, Jerod Poon, Duncan Prettyman, Vladimir Propp, Noriko T. Reider, Robin S. Rosenberg, Hannah Ryan, Lennart Soberon, J. Richard Stevens, Lars Stoltzfus-Brown, John N. Thompson, Dan Vena, and Robert G. Weiner. The Supervillain Reader, featuring both reprinted and original essays, reveals why we are so fascinated with the villain. The obsession with the villain is not a new phenomenon, and, in fact, one finds villains who are "super" going as far back as ancient religious and mythological texts. This innovative collection brings together essays, book excerpts, and original content from a wide variety of scholars and writers, weaving a rich tapestry of thought regarding villains in all their manifestations, including film, literature, television, games, and, of course, comics and sequential art. While The Supervillain Reader focuses on the latter, it moves beyond comics to show how the vital concept of the supervillain is part of our larger consciousness. Editors Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner collect pieces that explore how the villain is a complex part of narratives regardless of the original source. The Joker, Lex Luthor, Harley Quinn, Darth Vader, and Magneto must be compelling, stimulating, and proactive, whereas the superhero (or protagonist) is most often reactive. Indeed, whether in comics, films, novels, religious tomes, or videogames, the eternal struggle between villain and hero keeps us coming back to these stories over and over again.

At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside-national standards, high-stakes tests, charismatic individual saviors-the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Begun in 1982, the Algebra Project is transforming math education in twenty-five cities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities-parents, teachers, and especially students-to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity.
Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: 'Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want.'
We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. Teachers use innovative techniques. And we see the remarkable success stories of schools like the predominately poor Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city's middle-class flagship school in just three years.
"Radical Equations" provides a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools.

Retrieved after World War II from metal boxes and milk cans buried beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oyneg Shabes Ringelblum Archive was clandestinely compiled between 1940 and 1942 under the leadership of historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Members of the secret Oyneg Shabes organization gathered thousands of testimonies from natives of Warsaw and refugees from hundreds of other localities, creating a documentary record of the wartime fate of Polish Jewry. Now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the archive comprises some 35,000 pages, including documents, materials from the underground press, photographs, memoirs, belles lettres, and much more. This first comprehensive description of its contents is meticulously indexed to facilitate location of documents and information. By aiding access to this unique archival treasure, the catalog and guide advance study of the daily lives, struggles, and sufferings of Polish Jews at a crucial time and place in the history of the Holocaust."

In his comprehensive examination of the Lodz Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1962, historian Isaiah Trunk sought to describe and explain the tragedy that befell the Jews imprisoned in the first major ghetto imposed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in 1939. Lodz had been home to nearly a quarter million Jews. When the Soviet military arrived in January 1945, they found 877 living Jews and the remains of a vast industrial enterprise that had employed masses of enslaved Jewish laborers. Based on an exhaustive study of primary sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, and Russian, Isaiah Trunk, a former resident of Lodz, reconstructs the organization of the ghetto and discusses its provisioning; forced labor; diseases and mortality; crime and deportations; living conditions; political, social, and cultural life; and resistance. Included are translations of the 141 documents that Trunk reproduced in his volume."

Contributions by Jerold J. Abrams, Jose Alaniz, John Carey, Maurice Charney, Peter Coogan, Joe Cruz, Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, Stefan Danter, Adam Davidson-Harden, Randy Duncan, Stephen Graham Jones, Richard Hall, Richard Heldenfels, Alberto Hermida, Victor Hernandez-Santaolalla, A. G. Holdier, Tiffany Hong, Siegfried Kracauer, Naja Later, Ryan Litsey, Tara Lomax, Tony Magistrale, Matthew McEniry, Cait Mongrain, Grant Morrison, Robert Moses Peaslee, David D. Perlmutter, W. D. Phillips, Jerod Poon, Duncan Prettyman, Vladimir Propp, Noriko T. Reider, Robin S. Rosenberg, Hannah Ryan, Lennart Soberon, J. Richard Stevens, Lars Stoltzfus-Brown, John N. Thompson, Dan Vena, and Robert G. Weiner. The Supervillain Reader, featuring both reprinted and original essays, reveals why we are so fascinated with the villain. The obsession with the villain is not a new phenomenon, and, in fact, one finds villains who are "super" going as far back as ancient religious and mythological texts. This innovative collection brings together essays, book excerpts, and original content from a wide variety of scholars and writers, weaving a rich tapestry of thought regarding villains in all their manifestations, including film, literature, television, games, and, of course, comics and sequential art. While The Supervillain Reader focuses on the latter, it moves beyond comics to show how the vital concept of the supervillain is part of our larger consciousness. Editors Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner collect pieces that explore how the villain is a complex part of narratives regardless of the original source. The Joker, Lex Luthor, Harley Quinn, Darth Vader, and Magneto must be compelling, stimulating, and proactive, whereas the superhero (or protagonist) is most often reactive. Indeed, whether in comics, films, novels, religious tomes, or videogames, the eternal struggle between villain and hero keeps us coming back to these stories over and over again.

Along with Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman, the Joker stands out as one of the most recognizable comics characters in popular culture. While there has been a great deal of scholarly attention on superheroes, very little has been done to understand supervillains. This is the first academic work to provide a comprehensive study of this villain, illustrating why the Joker appears so relevant to audiences today. Batman's foe has cropped up in thousands of comics, numerous animated series, and three major blockbuster feature films since 1966. Actually, the Joker debuted in DC comics Batman 1 (1940) as the typical gangster, but the character evolved steadily into one of the most ominous in the history of sequential art. Batman and the Joker almost seemed to define each other as opposites, hero and nemesis, in a kind of psychological duality. Scholars from a wide array of disciplines look at the Joker through the lens of feature films, video games, comics, politics, magic and mysticism, psychology, animation, television, performance studies, and philosophy. As the first volume that examines the Joker as complex cultural and cross-media phenomenon, this collection adds to our understanding of the role comic book and cinematic villains play in the world and the ways various media affect their interpretation. Connecting the Clown Prince of Crime to bodies of thought as divergent as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, contributors demonstrate the frightening ways in which we get the monsters we need.