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"Documentary mass media United States History 20th century."
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Radio Utopia
As World War II drew to a close and radio news was popularized through overseas broadcasting, journalists and dramatists began to build upon the unprecedented success of war reporting on the radio by creating audio documentaries. Focusing particularly on the work of radio luminaries such as Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Norman Corwin, and Erik Barnouw, Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest traces this crucial phase in American radio history, significant not only for its timing immediately before television, but also because it bridges the gap between the end of the World Wars and the beginning of the Cold War._x000B__x000B_Matthew C. Ehrlich closely examines the production of audio documentaries disseminated by major American commercial broadcast networks CBS, NBC, and ABC from 1945 to 1951. Audio documentary programs educated Americans about juvenile delinquency, slums, race relations, venereal disease, atomic energy, arms control, and other issues of public interest, but they typically stopped short of calling for radical change. Drawing on rare recordings and scripts, Ehrlich traces a crucial phase in the evolution of news documentary, as docudramas featuring actors were supplanted by reality-based programs that took advantage of new recording technology. Paralleling that shift from drama to realism was a shift in liberal thought from dreams of world peace to uneasy adjustments to a cold war mentality._x000B__x000B_Influenced by corporate competition and government regulations, radio programming reflected shifts in a range of political thought that included pacifism, liberalism, and McCarthyism. In showing how programming highlighted contradictions within journalism and documentary, Radio Utopia reveals radio's response to the political, economic, and cultural upheaval of the post-war era.
eBook
Advancing the civil rights movement
Advancing the Civil Rights Movement: Race and Geography of Life Magazine's Visual Representation, 1954–1965 examines the way Life Magazine covered the civil rights movement visually and geographically. Michael Dibari addresses Life's visual impact and representation in the struggle for equal rights.
eBook
'I am an American' : filming the fear of difference
From Samuel Huntington's highly controversial Who Are We? to the urgent appeal of Naomi Wolf's The End of America, Americans are increasingly reflecting on questions of democracy, multiculturalism, and national identity. Yet such debates take place largely at the level of elites, leaving out ordinary American citizens, who have much to offer about the lived reality behind the phrase, \"I am an American.\"
Cynthia Weber set out on a journey across post-9/11 America in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American today. The result is this brave and captivating memoir that gives a voice to ordinary citizens for whom the terrorist attacks of 2001—and their lingering aftermath—live on in collective memory. Heartrending first-person testimonials reveal how the ongoing fear of terrorists and immigrants has betrayed America's core values of fairness and equality, which have been further weakened by polarizing international and domestic responses. Considered together, these portraits also provide a sharp contrast to the idealized vision of Americanness frequently spun by media and politicians.
Far more than a mere remembrance book about September 11, 'I am an American' offers precisely the kind of ground-level empathy needed to reignite a meaningful national debate about who we are and who we might become as a people and a nation.
eBook
WBCN and the American Revolution
The amazing untold story of the radical underground radio station WBCN-FM set against the profound social, political and cultural changes of the late-1960s and early-70s, using the actual sights, sounds and stories of those who connected through the station, exploding music and countercultural scenes, militant anti-war and civil rights protests and emerging women’s and LGBTQ-liberation movements.
Streaming Video
Sociology on Film
After World War II, Hollywood's \"social problem films\"-tackling topical issues that included racism, crime, mental illness, and drug abuse-were hits with critics and general moviegoers alike. In an era of film famed for its reliance on pop psychology, these movies were a form of popular sociology, bringing the academic discipline's concerns to a much broader audience.
Sociology on Filmexamines how the postwar \"problem film\" translated contemporary policy debates and intellectual discussions into cinematic form in order to become one of the preeminent genres of prestige drama. Chris Cagle chronicles how these movies were often politically fractious, the work of progressive directors and screenwriters who drew scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Yet he also proposes that the genre helped to construct an abstract discourse of \"society\" that served to unify a middlebrow American audience.
As he considers the many forms of print media that served to inspire social problem films, including journalism, realist novels, and sociological texts, Cagle also explores their distinctive cinematic aesthetics. Through a close analysis of films likeGentleman's Agreement,The Lost Weekend, andIntruder in the Dust, he presents a compelling case that the visual style of these films was intimately connected to their more expressly political and sociological aspirations.Sociology on Filmdemonstrates how the social problem picture both shaped and reflected the middle-class viewer's national self-image, making a lasting impact on Hollywood's aesthetic direction.
eBook
Celluloid Pueblo
The fiveCs of Arizona-copper, cattle, cotton, citrus, and climate-formed the basis of the state's livelihood and a readymade roster of subjects for films. With an eye on the developing national appetite for all things western, Charles and Lucile Herbert founded Western Ways Features in 1936 to document the landscape, regional development, and diverse cultures of Arizona, the U.S. Southwest, and northern Mexico.Celluloid Pueblotells the story of Western Ways Features and its role in the invention of the Southwest of the imagination. Active during a thirty-year period of profound growth and transformation, the Herberts created a dynamic visual record of the region, and their archival films now serve as a time capsule of the Sunbelt in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing upon a ten-year career with Fox, Western Ways owner-operator Charles Herbert brought a newshound's sensibility and acute skill at in-camera editing to his southwestern subjects. The Western Ways films provided counternarratives to Hollywood representations of the West and established the regional identity of Tucson and the borderlands.Jennifer L. Jenkins's broad-sweeping book examines the Herberts' work on some of the first sound films in the Arizona borderlands and their ongoing promotion of the Southwest. The book covers the filmic representation of Native and Mexican lifeways, Anglo ranching and leisure, Mexican missions and tourism, and postwar borderlands prosperity and progressivism. The story of Western Ways closely follows the boom-and-bust arc of the midcentury Southwest and the constantly evolving representations of an exotic-but safe and domesticated-frontier.
eBook
Envisioning Asia
The birth of cinema coincides with the beginnings of U.S. expansion overseas, and the classic Hollywood era coincides with the rise of the United States as a global superpower. In Envisioning Asia, Jeanette Roan argues that throughout this period, the cinema's function as a form of virtual travel, coupled with its purported \"authenticity,\" served to advance America's shifting interests in Asia. Its ability to fulfill this imperial role depended, however, not only on the cinematic representations themselves but on the marketing of the films' production histories—and, in particular, their use of Asian locations. Roan demonstrates this point in relation to a wide range of productions, offering an engaging and useful survey of a largely neglected body of film. Not only that, by focusing on the material practices involved in shooting films on location—that is, the actual travels, negotiations, and labor of making a film—she moves beyond formal analysis to produce a richly detailed history of American interests, attitudes, and cultural practices during the first half of the twentieth century.
eBook
Projecting race
Projecting Race presents a history of educational documentary filmmaking in the postwar era in light of race relations and the fight for civil rights. Drawing on extensive archival research and textual analyses, the volume tracks the evolution of race-based, nontheatrical cinema from its neorealist roots to its incorporation of new documentary techniques intent on recording reality in real time. The films featured include classic documentaries, such as Sidney Meyers'sThe Quiet One(1948), and a range of familiar and less familiar state-sponsored educational documentaries from George Stoney (Palmour Street, 1950;All My Babies, 1953; andThe Man in the Middle, 1966) and the Drew Associates (Another Way, 1967). Final chapters highlight community-development films jointly produced by the National Film Board of Canada and the Office of Economic Opportunity (The Farmersville Project, 1968;The Hartford Project, 1969) in rural and industrial settings. Featuring testimonies from farm workers, activists, and government officials, the films reflect communities in crisis, where organized and politically active racial minorities upended the status quo. Ultimately, this work traces the postwar contours of a liberal racial outlook as government agencies came to grips with profound and inescapable social change.
eBook
Coming together : the cinematic elaboration of gay male life, 1945-1979
In Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation-era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this generation of movie-making—which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender—provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.
eBook