Recounts the Spanish conquest, describes Aztec culture and beliefs, and surveys findings from recent archaeological excavations

Offers a guide to the locations of significant popular culture events, including the crash of the Hindenburg, the 'Saturday Night Fever' disco, the first MacDonald's location, and the 'American Bandstand' studio.

How media versions of Cooper's classic frontier novel have perpetuated the myth of "America."

Product Description: This book should be of interest to students of communication and media studies.

Product Description: Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave...read more

Provides an entertaining and informative journey inside America's pop culture landmarks and events, including the salon where Marilyn Monroe first dyed her hair blonde and the birthplace of the hot fudge sundae, among other not-to-be-missed locales. Original.

The author takes readers on a tour of his personal museum of natural oddities and optical illusions as he explores the imaginative origins of art and science, in a work nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Presents a close-up look at malls and their strong role in American culture, from their architectural design and alluring displays to the hidden security cameras and the illusions created to attract shoppers, in an instructive, historical view of American values, consumerism, and the myth surrounding the obsession with consumption. 15,000 first printing. (Business & Finance)

Product Description: Loved and hated, visited and avoided, seemingly everywhere yet endlessly the same, malls occupy a special place in American life. What, then, is this invention that evokes such strong and contradictory emotions in Americans? In many ways malls represent the apotheosis of American consumerism, and this synthetic and wide-ranging investigation is an eye-popping tour of American culture's values and beliefs...read more

Celebrating the lively dance music that draws together generations of Polish Americans, "Polka Happiness" captures the energy, excitement, and shared sense of belonging embodied in polka sociability. With rich descriptive material and 150 historical and contemporary illustrations, the book focuses on the musicians, the fans and the cultural institutions that keep the polka party going. From family gatherings and weddings to local fan clubs, night spots and churches to national and regional festivals, the polka scene is a year-round carnival, full of high jinks, hilarity, ethnic pride and tears an intensely felt experience drawn from sources deep in Polish America. The testimony of musicians and fans, old timers and young enthusiasts, tells how polka culture has resisted the melting pot for more than a century. Interviews, memorabilia and photographs spotlight the stars of the polka world Li'l Wally, Walt Solek, Eddie Blazonczyk, Frankie Yankovic, the Dyna-Tones as well as the many regional favorites in Buffalo, Milwaukee and Chicago that have delighted millions of fans. "Polka Happiness" chronicles the immense popularity of the music in nineteenth century Europe and its enduring popularity in the United States. After tracing the history of polka's spread throughout the world, the authors focus on the emergence and intense rivalry of the Chicago and Eastern styles in the United States. The book also traces the role of the International Polka Association in establishing networks, promoting events and providing an environment in which Polish Americans can celebrate and nourish their cultural heritage. For twenty years, the authors have been part of the social world of polka music and dancing in the bars, church halls and ballrooms of Rust Belt America; their exuberant descriptions reflect the enthusiasm of wholehearted participants. Author note: Charles Keil is Professor of American Studies at State University of New York, Buffalo, and the author of "Tiv Song and Urban Blues". Angeliki V. Keil is a writer and researcher and the compiler of an autobiography of Markos Vamvakaris. Dick Blau is Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Product Description: From the Brownies and the Yellow Kid to Spider-Man and SpongeBob SquarePants and everything in between, Geppi's Entertainment Museum offers an unprecedented look back at over two centuries of American pop culture through the characters and personalities we have grown to love...read more

Popular Culture in American History collects the most widely cited and important writings on three hundred years of American popular culture. Each of the ten essays serves as a case study of a particular moment, issue, or form of popular culture, from seventeenth-century chapbooks to hip hop. Pedagogical features include further reading lists, contextualizing editorial introductions, discussion questions and chronologies of key events.

Does technology alter our ways of being in and perceiving the world, or does it merely serve as a conduit for predetermined patterns of culture? In addressing this question, Popular Modernity in America examines a broad range of related cultural and technological phenomena from Bing Crosby to Ice Cube, from the invention of the telegraph to the celebratory heralding of the internet in the 1990s that have helped shape American popular culture over the past 150 years. Throughout, it avoids the binaries that label popular culture as inherently liberatory or subtly oppressive, arguing instead for the triadic relationship of experience, technology, and myth, each of which has an active role to play in how we interact with popular culture." (view table of contents)

Looks at the early newspaper accounts of football, and argues that football came to embody ideals of order, teamwork, and manliness (view table of contents)