San Antonio College Library

The scope and theme of Tooning In aim to insert into the debate surrounding so-called popular culture and its role in shaping society specific perspectives regarding popular culture and adolescents' lives. The authors suggest that popular culture is vital to how adolescents make sense of the world and educators should tap into it as a tool for imparting critical thinking skills and generally empowering students. Tooning In critically examines and...

The book explains how in the first three decades of the twentieth century the once-obscure motion picture industry spread from its immigrant, working class audience to become a central institution showing all Americans how to deal with the perplexing contemporary scene; and how innovative directors, charismatic players and imaginative businessmen generated a unique phenomenon -- mass culture.

Star-Spangled Kitsch is a lively round-up, in picture and text, of crass, ill-conceived, incongruous, trivial, muddle-headed, synthetic, meaningless, and embarrassing examples of taste in America. With verve and good humour, Curtis F. Brown discusses and displays mass-produced utilitarian and decorative items, as well as people, ideas, and lifestyles, in which the sublime collides with the banal to produce the ludicrous incongruity of elements that...

When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected to the United States in 1974, he announced that his hero as a dancer was Fred Astaire. Many Americans were surprised that a highly popular figure from the movies could inspire a classically trained European dancer, just as they would be surprised to hear Duke Ellington called a great composer in the same breath with Ravel. But these artists and others, writes Martin Williams, deserve such praise. Twentieth-century...

The last decade of the millennium was, in many ways, the most diverse and fascinating in the history of American culture. Alternative subcultures gained unprecedented exposure, manifest in such phenomena as grunge music, "gansta" rap, hip-hop fashion, raves, extreme sports, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Twelve narrative chapters depict the United States as brought to you by Generation X--a culture busting out in new and unforeseen...

Describes American popular culture in the 1900s, covering such aspects as advertising, architecture, food, leisure, music, and travel, and listing the prices of several products.

In his first book - a collection that launched its author as America's foremost entertainer with something to say-Tom Wolfe took a sharp-eyed look at the American scene of the early 1960s and zeroed in on the exotic forms of status-seeking that flourished across the country from New York to Los Angeles.