San Antonio College Library

The author explores the mythology that grew up around John F. Kennedy who "was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideals."--Jacket.

This book focuses exclusively on struggles to define the "single girl" character in TV and film during a transformative period in American society. The author has scoured a wide range of source materials, unstudied film and television scripts, magazines, novels, and advertisements to demonstrate how controversial female characters pitted fears of societal breakdown against the growing momentum of the women's rights movement. The book focuses on the...

Nostalgia for the fifties depicts it as a golden time: Ike in the White House, peace and prosperity, jobs, education, and the good things in life for all. But it wasn't only "happy times" and Hula Hoops. We built the H-bomb. Sputnik rocketed us into the Space Age. We fought the Korean War and the Cold War. At home we had the Red Scare and McCarthyism, Little Rock and Montgomery, the Beatniks and the generation gap. Here is a panorama that highlights...

"A collection of essays on the sublime and the ridiculous in contemporary American culture and society."--Jacket.

"Flappers, speakeasies, and pulse-pounding music. Prohibition, the Red Scare, and radio evangelism. The period between World War I and the Great Depression in the United States was one of significant contradictions. But how were these volatile times experienced by everyday citizens? This volume looks at one of the most vibrant eras in U.S. history, a decade when American life was utterly transformed, often veering from freewheeling to fearful, from...

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.

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 to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's recreation room in Washington, DC. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. For four consecutive years Shirley...