The Ku Klux Klan was reestablished in Atlanta in 1915, barely a week before the Atlanta premiere of The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's paean to the original Klan. While this link between Griffith's film and the Klan has been widely acknowledged, Tom Rice explores the little-known relationship between the Klan's success and its use of film and media in the interwar years when the image, function, and moral rectitude of the Klan was contested on the national stage. By examining rich arc...

Challenging established views and assumptions about traditions and practices of filmmaking in the African diaspora, this three-volume set offers readers a researched critique on black film.Volume One of this landmark series on African cinema draws together foundational scholarship on its history and evolution. Beginning with the ideological project of colonial film to legitimize the economic exploitation and cultural hegemony of the African continent during imperia...

This book explores the colourful past, present and future of an instrument that is, quite literally, close to our hearts. The stethoscope has become the symbol of medicine itself, but how did this come to be? What makes the stethoscope such a familiar and yet charismatic object?Drawing from a range of fields including history, anthropology, science, technology and sound studies, the book illustrates the variety of roles the stethoscope has played over time. It shows that the stethos...

Films for the Colonies examines the British Government’s use of film across its vast Empire from the 1920s until widespread independence in the 1960s. Central to this work was the Colonial Film Unit, which produced, distributed, and, through its network of mobile cinemas, exhibited instructional and educational films throughout the British colonies. Using extensive archival research and rarely seen films, Films for the Colonies provides a new historical perspective on the...

2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction“No one writes about medicine as a human subject as well as Atul Gawande. His stories about becoming a surgeon are scary, funny, absorbing....Complications is a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies.” —Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the MoonIn gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinchi...

In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes betwee...

This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy prod...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERIn Death Interrupted, ICU doctor Blair Bigham shares his first-hand experiences of how medicine has complicated the way we die and offers a road map for dying in the modern era.Doctors today can call on previously unimaginable technologies to help keep our bodies alive almost indefinitely. But this unprecedented shift in intensive care has created a major crisis. In the widening grey zone between life and death, ...

Winner of the National Book Award for NonfictionFinalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for HistoryFrom the leading historian and Guggenheim fellow, an electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle.Arc of Justice is a necessary contribution to what seems like an insoluble moral dilemma: race in America.” —Paul Hendrickso...

Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal towns in the era of the slave trade, to the poetry and fiction of townships and mine compounds in S...

A piercing and scientifically grounded look at the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and how it will change the way we live—"excellent and timely." (The New Yorker)Apollo's Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutt...

“Fascinating . . . a lively and perceptive cultural history.” —Annette Gordon-Reed, The New YorkerIn this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the...