San Antonio College Library

"As alternative explanations of public choice, neither narrow self-interest nor altruism works because of the free-rider problem involved in large group decisions. Signaling Goodness develops an alternative explanation - the theory of asymmetric "goodness"--That successfully predicts both political behavior as well as the behavior of charity, the traditional bastion of altruistic theorizing. The authors show, for example, that the main conflicting...

Fara argues that Newton's posthumous fame was linked to the rise of science as a powerful cultural force, and that his escalating status for followers was used to promote the development of scientific reasoning in society.

Using photographs, films, television appearances, and materials from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, this text explores the ways in which Margaret Mead became an American cultural heroine.

"Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, stars represent the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. They are a peculiar form of public subjectivity that negotiates the tension between a democratic culture of access and a consumer capitalist culture of excess. This work questions the cultural forces behind the need to become endlessly embroiled with the construction and collapse of celebrities. Through detailed...

The American high school is a tribal place -- and often a cruel one. Divisions are drawn between jocks, cheerleaders, nerds, drama geeks, goths. But there is one person who exists outside of the cliques, who is never welcomed into any group. She is the girl with the reputation, the one boys are drawn to and other girls avoid. Many people remember her from their high school days -- some can even recall her name -- but few have thought about her significance:...

"David Haven Blake situates Walt Whitman in an expanse of nineteenth-century American popular culture that stretches from patent medicines to presidential politics, revealing the poet's complicated, often inconsistent views on poetry, commerce, and celebrity. Like his contemporary P.T. Barnum, Walt Whitman understood that, in the emergent culture of celebrity, fame was less a fact than a performance. He drew on the rhetoric of advertising not just...