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Forming the Public
Throughout United States history, journalists and media workers have mobilized to promote and oppose various movements in public life. But a single meaning of the public remains elusive. Frank D. Durham and Thomas P. Oates provide an eye-opening analysis of the role played by journalism in the ongoing struggle to shape and transform ideas about the public. Using historical episodes and news reports, Durham and Oates offer examples of the influential words and images deployed by not only journalists but by media workers and activists. Their analysis moves from the patriot-inflamed emotions of the revolutionary period to the conventional and creative ways the American Indian Movement confronted the mainstream with their grievances. Weaving eyewitness history through US history, Forming the Public reveals what understanding the journalism landscape can teach us about the nature of journalism's own interests in race, gender, and class while tracing the factors that shaped the contours of dominant American culture.
Football and Manliness
Women, African Americans, and gays have recently upended US culture with demands for inclusion and respect, while economic changes have transformed work and daily life for millions of Americans. The national obsession with the National Football League provides a window on this dynamic period of change, reshaping ideas about manliness to respond to new urgencies on and beyond the gridiron. Thomas P. Oates uses feminist theory to break down the dynamic cultural politics shaping, and shaped by, today's NFL. As he shows, the league's wildly popular product provides an arena for media producers to work out and recalibrate the anxieties, contradictions, and challenges that characterize contemporary masculinity. Oates draws from a range of pop culture narratives to map the complex set of theories about gender and race and to reveal a league and fan base in flux. Though longing for a past dominated by white masculinity, the mediated NFL also subtly aligns with a new economic reality that demands it cope with the shifting relations of gender, race, sexuality, and class. Indeed, pro football crafts new meanings of each by its canny mobilization of historic ideological processes.
Playing to Win
In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.
American Sports in an Age of Consumption
Sports are not what they used to be. New publicly funded stadiums resemble shopping malls. Fans compete for cash prizes in fantasy sports leagues. Sports video games are now marketing and public relations tools and team logos have become fashionable brands. The larger social meanings sports hold for fans are being eclipsed by their commercial function as a means to sell merchandise and connect corporate sponsors with consumers. This book examines how the American consumer culture affects professional and collegiate sports, reducing fans to consumers and trivializing sports themselves. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
The Color of Creatorship
The Color of Creatorship examines how copyright, trademark, and patent discourses work together to form American ideals around race, citizenship, and property. Working through key moments in intellectual property history since 1790, Anjali Vats reveals that even as they have seemingly evolved, American understandings of who is a creator and who is an infringer have remained remarkably racially conservative and consistent over time. Vats examines archival, legal, political, and popular culture texts to demonstrate how intellectual properties developed alongside definitions of the "good citizen," "bad citizen," and intellectual labor in racialized ways. Offering readers a theory of critical ra...
Performance and Professional Wrestling
Performance and Professional Wrestling is the first edited volume to consider professional wrestling explicitly from the vantage point of theatre and performance studies. Moving beyond simply noting its performative qualities or reading it via other performance genres, this collection of essays offers a complete critical reassessment of the popular sport. Topics such as the suspension of disbelief, simulation, silence and speech, physical culture, and the performance of pain within the squared circle are explored in relation to professional wrestling, with work by both scholars and practitioners grouped into seven short sections: Audience Circulation Lucha Gender Queerness Bodies Race A significant re-reading of wrestling as a performing art, Performance and Professional Wrestling makes essential reading for scholars and students intrigued by this uniquely theatrical sport.
The Desert
This unique anthology takes the reader on a devotional journey through Lent. Part I provides an introduction to desert spirituality and its place in the life and worship of the Church, past and present. Part II offers a collection of readings for every day in Lent from ancient and modern spiritual masters including the Desert Fathers, Thomas Merton, St. Teresa of Avila, Henri Nouwen, and R.S. Thomas.
Master of War
In this revelatory, dynamic biography, one of our finest historians, Benson Bobrick, profiles George H. Thomas, arguing that he was the greatest and most successful general of the Civil War. Because Thomas didn't live to write his memoirs, his reputation has been largely shaped by others, most notably Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, two generals with whom Thomas served and who, Bobrick says, diminished his successes in their favor in their own memoirs. Born in Virginia, Thomas survived Nat Turner's rebellion as a boy, then studied at West Point, where Sherman was a classmate. Thomas distinguished himself in the Mexican War and then returned to West Point as an instructor. When...
The NFL
"The NFL is the first collection of critical essays to focus attention on the NFL as a cultural force. The contributors and editors explore how the NFL is packaged for commercial consumption, the league's influence on American identity, and its relationship to state and cultural militarism, to provide a fuller understanding of football's role in shaping contemporary sport, media, and everyday life." -- back cover
