By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds...

Preeminent film historian Thomas Doherty explores the blockbuster 1969 film adaptation of the Charles Portis novel True Grit, which stars John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning performance.The year 1969 was a tipping point for Hollywood cinema and a good year for Westerns. In 1968 the censorious Production Code was eliminated. American cinema responded immediately with a spree of theretofore unseen and unimaginable transgressions—one of which arrived in Henry Hathawa...

Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.To the unjaded viewersh...

In 1947, the Cold War came to Hollywood. Over nine tumultuous days in October, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings into alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. The blowback was profound: the major studios pledged to never again employ a known Communist or unrepentant fellow traveler. The declaration marked the onset of the blacklist era, a time when political allegiances, real or suspected, determined employment opportunities in the ent...

Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.; I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936), a sensational true tale of "a Holl...

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films―a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema―but the moral terrain is so o...

From 1934 to 1954 Joseph I. Breen, a media-savvy Victorian Irishman, reigned over the Production Code Administration, the Hollywood office tasked with censoring the American screen. Though little known outside the ranks of the studio system, this former journalist and public relations agent was one of the most powerful men in the motion picture industry. As enforcer of the puritanical Production Code, Breen dictated "final cut" over more movies than anyone in the history of American cinema...

Climate change anxiety is one of the biggest mental health threats of our times. If you find it hard to tear yourself away from doomscrolling, or it feels impossible not to worry about the world we are leaving to future generations, then you are not alone.Surviving Climate Anxiety is the essential guide to coping with the psychological toll of the environmental crisis.In this helpful and ground-breaking book, the world's leading climate anxiety expert, psychologist Dr Thoma...

In 1847, young Dr. Abraham Van Norstrand left Vermont to seek his fortune in the West, but in Wisconsin his business ventures failed, and a medical practice among hard-up settlers added little to his pocketbook. During the Civil War he organized and ran one of the army’s biggest hospitals but resigned when dark rumors surfaced about him. Back home, he accepted with mixed feelings the one prestigious position available to him: superintendent of the state’s first hospital for the insane....

The biggest crime story in American history began on the night of March 1, 1932, when the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was snatched from his crib in Hopewell, New Jersey. The news shocked a nation enthralled with the aviator, the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. American law enforcement marshalled all its resources to return “Little Lindy” to the arms of his parents—and perhaps even more energized were the legions of journalists catering to a publ...

The biggest crime story in American history began on the night of March 1, 1932, when the twenty-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was snatched from his crib in Hopewell, New Jersey. The news shocked a nation enthralled with the aviator, the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. American law enforcement marshalled all its resources to return “Little Lindy” to the arms of his parents—and perhaps even more energized were the legions of journalists catering to a publ...

Climate change anxiety is one of the biggest mental health threats of our times. If you find it hard to tear yourself away from doomscrolling, or it feels impossible not to worry about the world we are leaving to future generations, then you are not alone.Surviving Climate Anxiety is the essential guide to coping with the psychological toll of the environmental crisis.In this helpful and ground-breaking book, the world's leading climate anxiety expert, psychologist Dr Thoma...