Product Description: 1992 was a pivotal moment in African American history, with the Rodney King riots providing palpable evidence of racialized police brutality, media stereotyping of African Americans, and institutional discrimination. Following the twentieth anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, this time period allows reflection on the shifting state of race in America, considering these stark realities as well as the election of the country's first black president, a growing African American middle class, and the black authors and artists significantly contributing to America's cultural output...read more

Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer s cabin in South Carolina and young Andy Warhol s house in Pittsburgh to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover s recreation room in Washington, DC, and gangster Bumpy Johnson s Harlem apartment. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam as young Anne hid from the Nazis. For four consecutive years Shirley Temple was the world s box-office champion, a record never equaled. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, and hers was the second-most popular girl s name in the country. What distinguished Shirley Temple from every other Hollywood star of the period and everyone since was how brilliantly she shone. Amid the deprivation and despair of the Great Depression, Shirley Temple radiated optimism and plucky good cheer that lifted the spirits of millions and shaped their collective character for generations to come. Distinguished cultural historian John F. Kasson shows how the most famous, adored, imitated, and commodified child in the world astonished movie goers, created a new international culture of celebrity, and revolutionized the role of children as consumers. Tap-dancing across racial boundaries with Bill Bojangles Robinson, foiling villains, and mending the hearts and troubles of the deserving, Shirley Temple personified the hopes and dreams of Americans. To do so, she worked virtually every day of her childhood, transforming her own family as well as the lives of her fans.

Product Description: An entertaining trip through pop culture, for the "old fogeys" and "kids these days" Today's teens and twentysomethings have never seen a real airplane ticket. To them, point-and-shoot cameras are so last millennium and "Star Wars" is a movie, not a defense strategy...read more

Product Description: Exploring America in the 1970s: Celebrating the Self is an interdisciplinary humanities unit that looks at literature, art, and music of the 1970s to provide an understanding of how those living through the decade experienced and felt about the world around them...read more

Product Description: Welcome to Mars is a captivating look at the culture of postwar America and its dream of limitless technological and human development. Utilizing declassified government archives, newspaper records, ad campaigns, and B-movies of the period, Hollings weaves an intricate web of Cold War politics, UFO scares, psychedelic research, and 1950s pop culture...read more

Product Description: After the sexual revolution came the sexual explosionThe six years between 1968 and 1973 saw more sexual taboos challenged than ever before. Film, literature, and theater simultaneously broke through barriers previously unimagined, giving birth to what we still consider to be the height of sexual expression in our pop culture: Portnoy's Complaint, Myra Breckinridge, Hair, The Boys in the Band, Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, and Deep Throat...read more

Product Description: From our nation's best source of in-depth daily reporting comes this sweeping retrospective of the news, culture, and personalities of the decade of the 1980s, as told through hundreds of handselected articles and compelling original commentary in this unique and fascinating book...read more

Product Description: An illuminating view of the world as seen through the tinted lens of Hollywood’s most important chronicler of entertainment newsand show business. Variety is not only a fascinating look at the history of entertainment as reported by the world’s most highly regarded commentator of show business news, it is also a history of American popular culture and a record of the influence and confluence of art, life, and Hollywood...read more