Media & Pop Culture

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

I wrote this book because on a good day, I see myself as a collector or a pack rat and on a bad day, as a hoarder. I am increasingly...

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...

I first became interested in pseudo-history during the late 1980s when I was a faculty member at Lamar University. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas...

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

I hope readers would start with the first few pages of the book. In the introduction, I recount the story of how the American Legion advocated for passage of the...

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

Death of a Pirate tells a story about the politics of media from the 1920s to the present. Broadcasting was something radically new when it arrived after World War I, and...

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove...

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

The Lolita Effect addresses the media sexualization of young girls. In the book, I draw a distinction between healthy, age-appropriate concepts of sexuality that should develop as children mature, and...

The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...

Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...

My work aims to make postmodern and media theory more accessible by using the Kardashian family as the ultimate exemplar. I also aim to utilize postmodern and media theory to help explain how the Kardashians managed to make such a massive, inescapable cultural impact. Some people view my project as parasocial. Others view it as pretentious.

There are a bunch of really good books that take up the “What’s changed?” question at a big scale. When I first started working on this project, I didn’t think...

Many of Springsteen's songs are built around characters caught in situations where it's difficult to know what the right decision is. These aren't "big" heroic stories — they're stories about failure, exclusion, disappointment, and hope that often goes nowhere, all grounded in very concrete everyday situations. Just listen to any song on "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and you will immediately be drawn into these emotions.

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

Manga’s First Century is about the history of manga. It says 1905 to 1989 in the subtitle, but actually it jumps back immediately to the 1860s, when periodicals first emerged in Japan. It is about 125 years, give or take, which is a long time for a modern history. I am making the argument that manga is a modern thing that emerges out of modernity in Japan. Exploring where periodicals started in Japan, and what...

This book is about a seemingly crazy idea that turned into one of the most remarkable publishing successes of the twentieth century. In 1967, Jann Wenner, a 20-year-old Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, a 50-year...

Why do inefficient, fragile, expensive things — vinyl, board games, used paperbacks — keep winning us back in an age of frictionless digital everything? A personal, argument-free investigation that trades abstract philosophy for a bottom-up hunt through one collector's own shelves, and lands on three values hiding inside the objects we choose to keep.

We know how to picture an aging blues or jazz musician — stalwart, gravitas, late style. We have no such image for a seventy-year-old B-boy, even though the culture is past fifty and its pioneers were teenagers when they built it. Drawing on interviews with Grandmaster Caz, Sha-Rock, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa and Yo-Yo, an argument that hip-hop's ageism runs inward, generation against generation, and always has.

Most of us don’t understand the profound impact copyright law has on our lives. Most have a sense that copyright protection should be designed to incentivize new creations, but we...

Battling Pornography chronicles the formation and development of an American feminist anti-pornography movement from 1976 to 1986. The book emphasizes the internal movement dynamics and external structural factors that supported...

I imagine that a curious reader browsing through the book would first be intrigued by the pictures. Identifying, gathering, and preserving pictures important to the early history of mass visual...

I would be happy for the reader to land anywhere in the book; it is written to engage him or her at any point. But any reader might as well begin...

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

Modernist America is a history of American culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literature, painting, architecture, advertising and design, classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals, movies,...

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism. Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires. Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from...

The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was 1965 and the author was annoyed by transistor radios.

Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens. Most British and French...

My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...

Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s. Given our current media obsessions with unusual...

Most likely someone flipping through On Tarzan at a bookstore will first notice the photographs introducing each chapter and the epigraphs. I hope this potential reader sees the humor here.There’s...

After teaching jazz history for years, several independent observations led me to the concept of a book on jazz icons. I began to see how the behaviour of musicians was tied to broader...

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

Music and television is a pairing so obvious it has gone almost entirely unexamined. Not just the musical episodes and specials and series, but soundtracks, synergistic network deals, and the programs that once carried music to viewers who had no other way of hearing it.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a biography and a cultural history. It charts a woman’s life through several significant eras in American history: the deprivations of the Great Depression, the...

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

The French philosopher Henri Bergson famously described laughter as a “social gesture.” It’s a quote that has been a watchword in my own thinking about comedy. Why people laugh, who...

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

Part of the backdrop to the Commission on Freedom of the Press is the acrimonious relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the press. I knew a bit about...

I wrote this book because on a good day, I see myself as a collector or a pack rat and on a bad day, as a hoarder. I am increasingly...

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Chapter 4, “From Market Share to Mindshare,” is about the new discipline of neuromarketing. The ability to monitor consumers’ biological responses to commercials in real time has led to more...

I first became interested in pseudo-history during the late 1980s when I was a faculty member at Lamar University. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas...

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I...

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

I hope readers would start with the first few pages of the book. In the introduction, I recount the story of how the American Legion advocated for passage of the...

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion...

The most contentious of the standards and conventions of “real” journalism, as I’ve found in my dual career as historian and journalist, has long been the ideal of objectivity. Having...

We need to move away from a mechanistic, materialist, interest-based view of political struggles. Every class, every ethnicity, every gender—and every political campaign—has a fair amount of free space to...

Death of a Pirate tells a story about the politics of media from the 1920s to the present. Broadcasting was something radically new when it arrived after World War I, and...

The Real Real Thing shows early 21st-century culture wrestling with new media, technology, and science. The book is the third in a loose trilogy that began with The Scandal of...

I have to say the first pages in the book should be read first because I deliberately wrote them in order to draw the reader in. They tell of an...

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

The Internet is a technology based on control systems, yet it is also a mass medium celebrated as fostering personal and political freedom. How? Why? What dreams and desires drove...

I make two basic claims in the book. First, I argue that the dominant mode of understanding conspiracy theory is flawed. Academics and journalists have wrongly assumed that conspiracy theories...

The Lolita Effect addresses the media sexualization of young girls. In the book, I draw a distinction between healthy, age-appropriate concepts of sexuality that should develop as children mature, and...

The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...

Selling the American Way is about the ways that the U.S. government defined and disseminated official narratives about American society, politics, and culture during the early Cold War. Using radio...

My work aims to make postmodern and media theory more accessible by using the Kardashian family as the ultimate exemplar. I also aim to utilize postmodern and media theory to help explain how the Kardashians managed to make such a massive, inescapable cultural impact. Some people view my project as parasocial. Others view it as pretentious.

There are a bunch of really good books that take up the “What’s changed?” question at a big scale. When I first started working on this project, I didn’t think...

Many of Springsteen's songs are built around characters caught in situations where it's difficult to know what the right decision is. These aren't "big" heroic stories — they're stories about failure, exclusion, disappointment, and hope that often goes nowhere, all grounded in very concrete everyday situations. Just listen to any song on "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and you will immediately be drawn into these emotions.

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

Manga’s First Century is about the history of manga. It says 1905 to 1989 in the subtitle, but actually it jumps back immediately to the 1860s, when periodicals first emerged in Japan. It is about 125 years, give or take, which is a long time for a modern history. I am making the argument that manga is a modern thing that emerges out of modernity in Japan. Exploring where periodicals started in Japan, and what...

This book is about a seemingly crazy idea that turned into one of the most remarkable publishing successes of the twentieth century. In 1967, Jann Wenner, a 20-year-old Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, a 50-year...

Why do inefficient, fragile, expensive things — vinyl, board games, used paperbacks — keep winning us back in an age of frictionless digital everything? A personal, argument-free investigation that trades abstract philosophy for a bottom-up hunt through one collector's own shelves, and lands on three values hiding inside the objects we choose to keep.

We know how to picture an aging blues or jazz musician — stalwart, gravitas, late style. We have no such image for a seventy-year-old B-boy, even though the culture is past fifty and its pioneers were teenagers when they built it. Drawing on interviews with Grandmaster Caz, Sha-Rock, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa and Yo-Yo, an argument that hip-hop's ageism runs inward, generation against generation, and always has.

Most of us don’t understand the profound impact copyright law has on our lives. Most have a sense that copyright protection should be designed to incentivize new creations, but we...

Battling Pornography chronicles the formation and development of an American feminist anti-pornography movement from 1976 to 1986. The book emphasizes the internal movement dynamics and external structural factors that supported...

I imagine that a curious reader browsing through the book would first be intrigued by the pictures. Identifying, gathering, and preserving pictures important to the early history of mass visual...

I would be happy for the reader to land anywhere in the book; it is written to engage him or her at any point. But any reader might as well begin...

This book traces the antecedents, origins, major figures, and tactics of the white nationalist movement commonly known as the Alt-Right. Although the Alt-Right’s ideology is not new, it is much...

Modernist America is a history of American culture in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It focuses on literature, painting, architecture, advertising and design, classical music, jazz, Broadway musicals, movies,...

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate...

This book tells the story of one of the greatest showmen in the history of zoos and circuses. Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913) may not be well-known today, but his name was...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism. Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have...

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Today, on just about every desk there is a gray box emitting a range of wires. Eighty years ago, this data processing box was less conspicuous, non-electronic, and made from...

The New York Times once published a piece that described mobile device users as a “cretins” who “lovingly hug” their devices “with a look of rapt idiocy.” The year was 1965 and the author was annoyed by transistor radios.

Heroes of Empire tells the story of five colonial figures, two British and three French, who made imperial conquest exciting, even exhilarating, for millions of ordinary citizens. Most British and French...

My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...

Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s. Given our current media obsessions with unusual...

Most likely someone flipping through On Tarzan at a bookstore will first notice the photographs introducing each chapter and the epigraphs. I hope this potential reader sees the humor here.There’s...

After teaching jazz history for years, several independent observations led me to the concept of a book on jazz icons. I began to see how the behaviour of musicians was tied to broader...

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France. But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that...

Music and television is a pairing so obvious it has gone almost entirely unexamined. Not just the musical episodes and specials and series, but soundtracks, synergistic network deals, and the programs that once carried music to viewers who had no other way of hearing it.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a biography and a cultural history. It charts a woman’s life through several significant eras in American history: the deprivations of the Great Depression, the...

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

The French philosopher Henri Bergson famously described laughter as a “social gesture.” It’s a quote that has been a watchword in my own thinking about comedy. Why people laugh, who...