Over the last two decades Oprah Winfrey's journey has taken her from talk show queen to-as Time Magazine has asserted-"one of the most important figures in popular culture." Through her talk show, magazine, website, seminars, charity work, and public appearances, her influence in the social, economic, and political arenas of American life is considerable and until now, largely unexamined. In The Age of Oprah, media scholar and journalist Janice Peck traces Winfrey's growing cultural impact...

Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga followed in a long trail of media exposures of the more personal details of the lives of public figures. Many commentators have seen stories like this, and TV shows like Jerry Springer's, as evidence of a decline in the standards of the mass media. This increasing interest in private lives and the falling off of coverage of serious news is often described as “tabloidization.” The essays in this book are the first serious scholarly studies of what is go...

Angela was living in an apartment with two friends she’d met at a Christian weekend while taking extra courses at her alma mater. They’d become counselors for teens in trouble and their first case, a girl who had tried to commit suicide and a child of parents involved with drugs, needed a place to live. The girl is attending college and sleeping on the couch in the apartment.Although Angela is to be married in ten days, she has volunteered to shadow the trou-bled teen while the cou...

When the reality of being a pastor’s wife settles in, Angela has taken on a burden of extra activities in addition to her career as a nursing assistant at the Community Care Home in Wilson Grove. Her plan to get a nursing license in the fall has been put aside because parish events need to be fit into an already busy life.  A girl finds her husband attractive which adds one more thing to the problems she needs to work out as she adapts to a life of missed meals, meetings, and situ...

Intimate Partner Sexual Violence (IPSV) is the most common type of sexual violence and a common component of domestic violence, yet most cases go unreported and service responses are often inadequate. This book brings together advice for all those professionals working with individuals who have experienced IPSV and puts forward recommendations to tackle this prevalent form of sexual violence.With contributions from leading experts on IPSV, Intimate Partner Sexual Violence is a comp...

The Handbook of Communication History addresses central ideas, social practices, and media of communication as they have developed across time, cultures, and world geographical regions. It attends to both the varieties of communication in world history and the historical investigation of those forms in communication and media studies. The Handbook editors view communication as encompassing patterns, processes, and performances of social interaction, symbolic production, m...