In this cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we've made sense of the technology's sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like You've Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy with comp...

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.Teaching Politically address...

American liberalism after the Second World War turned against the legacies of the New Deal era. Rather than extending the reforms of the 1930s, many expressions of postwar liberal thought recast organizational politics as enfeebling, alienating, or tyrannical. Land of Tomorrow examines the ideas and cultural sensibilities that caused this radical shift in the tenor of American liberalism. To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of...