The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television's formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen.Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of ...

The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television's formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen.Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of...

Although we tend to think of television primarily as a household fixture, TV monitors outside the home are widespread: in bars, laundromats, and stores; conveying flight arrival and departure times in airports; uniting crowds at sports events and allaying boredom in waiting rooms; and helping to pass the time in workplaces of all kinds. In Ambient Television Anna McCarthy explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community...

Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media.Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to ...

How do you forgive the unforgiveable? Is it possible to truly be free from what others have done to you? Each of us has a story and has experienced hurt in some area of our lives. Whether in childhood, adolescence or adulthood, we all have experienced pain and disappointment. If not dealt with, these wounds begin to impact our everyday life at a crippling rate. We live bound by fear, insecurities, anger and jealousy; often chalking it up as “normal”. Yet, in reality, we are being held captiv...

Media Space explores the importance of ideas of space and place to understanding the ways in which we experience the media in our everyday lives. Essays from leading international scholars address the kinds of space created by media and the effects that spacial arrangements have on media forms. Case studies focus on a wide variety of subjects and locales, from in-flight entertainment to mobile media such as personal stereos and mobile phones, and from the electronic spaces of the ...

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the...

This primer for prospective and practicing teachers asks students to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, reflect on their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to educate, and to become educated in the present moment in the places we inhabit.Not only the implementation of objectives to be assessed by standardized tests, curriculum is communication among older and younger generations, informed by academic knowledge, and charac...

For a century and a half, journalists made a good business out of selling the latest news or selling ads next to that news. Now that news pours out of the Internet and our mobile devices—fast, abundant, and mostly free—that era is ending. Our best journalists, Mitchell Stephens argues, instead must offer original, challenging perspectives—not just slightly more thorough accounts of widely reported events. His book proposes a new standard: "wisdom journalism," an amalgam of the more rarifie...

The past fifteen years have seen renewed interest in the civil rights movement. Television documentaries, films and books have brought the struggles into our homes and classrooms once again. New evidence in older criminal cases demands that the judicial system reconsider the accuracy of investigations and legal decisions. Racial profiling, affirmative action, voting districting, and school voucher programs keep civil rights on the front burner in the political arena. In light of this, ther...

Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility.Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans...

In the early part of the 20th century, state and corporate propagandists used the mass media to promote the valor and rightness of ascending U.S. hegemony on the global stage. Critics who challenged these practices of mass persuasion were quickly discredited by the emergent field of communication research - a field explicitly attempting to measure and thereby improve the efficacy of media messages.Three strains of critical cultural and media theory were especially engaged with the ...