Entertainment Culture

Cinema emerged alongside the rules that ushered in boxing’s modern age and the “squared circle” proved the ideal stage for cinematic display. The public had its first taste of the new medium in 1894 through a heavyweight bout, recognized today as the world’s first feature film. Smash Hit: Race, Crime, and Culture in Boxing Films uses twenty films as the basis of a hard-nosed exploration as to how the genre held a bloody mirror to twentieth century America’s most prominent social anxieties, elucidating two conjoined mediums that serve as bellwether to an ever-shifting cultural zeitgeist.

At the peak of the civil rights movement, Lydia Abarca was the first ballerina in a Black ballet company to grace the cover of Dance magazine. Alongside founding members Shelia Rohan and Gayle McKinney-Griffith and first-generation dancers Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells, Abarca invited a bright light to shine on Black professional classical dancers. Grit, determination, and exquisite artistry propelled these swans of Harlem to dizzying heights as they performed around the world for audiences that included celebrities, dignitaries, and royalty.

In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

This Is Our Music, declared saxophonist Ornette Coleman's 1960 album title. But whose music was it? At various times during the 1950s and 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians, and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afrocentric race music, an extension of modernist innovation in other genres, a music of mass consciousness, and the preserve of a cultural elite. This original and provocative book explores who makes decisions about the value of a cultural form and on what basis.

Rachael Warren-Allen talks us through more than one hundred facts about The Simpsons, a show often considered to be the best animation of all time. Whether you’ve been a fan since the show first launched, or you’re only just now starting to enjoy the surreal humour somehow grounded in everyday life, you are sure to learn some fascinating new information about Homer, Bart and the rest of the gang.

Award-winning writer Bill Schelly relates how comics and fandom saved his life in this engrossing story that begins in the burgeoning comic fandom movement of the 1960s and follows the twists and turns of a career that spanned 50 years. Schelly recounts his struggle to come out at a time when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, how the egalitarian nature of fandom offered a safe haven for those who were different, and how his need for creative expression eventually overcame all obstacles.

"A diamond is forever." Who among us doesn't recognize this slogan and, with it, the fascination that diamonds hold in our collective imagination as emblems of royalty, glamor, and eternal love? Rachelle Bergstein's cultural biography illuminates the enticing, often surprising story of our society's enduring obsession with diamonds - and the people who have worked tirelessly to ensure their continued allure.

Despite the nearly universal fame of the Beatles, many people only know the fairytale version of the iconic group’s rise to fame. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Liverpool, Francis Kenny reveals the real John Lennon who preceded the legend, showing how his childhood shaped his personality, creative process, and path to success, and how it also destroyed his mental health, leading to the downfall of one of the most confident and brilliant musicians of the past century.

I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone chronicles Jim Dickinson's extraordinary life in the Memphis music scene of the fifties and sixties and how he went on to play with and produce a rich array of artists, including Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Duane Allman, Arlo Guthrie, and Albert King. With verve and wit, Dickinson (1941-2009) describes how his trip to Blind Lemon's grave on the Texas flatlands as a college student and how that encounter inspired his return to Memphis.

Elizabeth (Liz) Bradshaw is a successful writer from Chicago, visiting small-town America, Silver Ridge to include the town’s month-long festivities in her book about Valentine’s Day! Trent Hayworth is Silver Ridge’s top journalist. When he meets Liz, he is initially threatened by her presence, thinking that she’s there to compete with him for an exclusive piece. When he discovers the kindness and intelligence within her, he starts to fall hard for her in spite of his many scars from past experiences. And then Liz is accused of something unthinkable. How will Elizabeth deal with ...

Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-20th-century America, with such icons as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson defining much of what seemed distinctly "American" on the stage and screen. Even though few gay artists were "out," their sexuality caused significant anxiety during a time of rampant anti-homosexual attitudes.

New York City, uptown, Harlem. In the 1920s it was the most exciting place in the world. Poets, writers, dancers, and musicians all came together and invented a new American culture - a dazzling and revolutionary African American culture of music and poetry and art. Everyone who was anyone wanted to come to Harlem and hear the music of jazz genius Duke Ellington, the rap-like stylings of Langston Hughes, and the classical lyricism of Countee Cullen.

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith's profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life.

A top-10 list is nobody’s perfect tool, especially when trying to measure up 10 of the most significant and influential bands of the British Invasion. Nevertheless, this book presents 10 biographies of classic bands of the era widely regarded as the best of the best, putting their contributions to music in sharp focus. And what contributions they have made! Over half a century later, their songs still ring out on radios, their names are well-known to many, and songs released today are inspired by the music they produced.

Everybody’s Fly is a fast-moving, all-access pass to Fab’s extraordinary life—one that begins in a book- and jazz-filled Brooklyn home and takes us deep into New York's creative explosions from the 1970s to the 1990s. He didn’t just shape culture, he synthesized it—from highbrow to street, Harlem to SoHo, punk to rap, Warhol to Wild Style. Whether he’s skipping school to wander MoMA, painting subway cars that became moving masterpieces, or bringing hip-hop to downtown clubs for the first time, Freddy’s genius has always been in seeing what others couldn’t—until he made them see it too.

“Nowhere near famous but still infamous,” Psalm One is a legend to rap nerds, scholars, and “heads,” and has gone on to work with the brightest names in rap and have her work celebrated and taught around the globe. In Her Word Is Bond, Psalm One tells her own story, from growing up in Englewood, Chicago through her life as a chemist, teacher, and legendary rapper. Intrinsically feminist, this story is a celebration of the life and career of one artist who blazed the trail for women in hip hop.

It was a magical time enhanced by radio as well as the great live performances. Radio and music of the Big Band Era were made for each other, and the so-called Swing Years were a golden age of rhythm. It was not just music that made you want to dance. It was music that made you glow, music that made you want to sing, music that made you come alive, music for falling in love. And, despite the passage of time, it still is.

Sneaker Culture is Exploding! This book will challenge you to think critically about purpose, identity, materialism, and eternity. Sneakerheads own anywhere from 25-75 pairs and buy one to four pairs a month. Sneakers used to just be for sports but now they have become one of the biggest fashion items in the world.

Michael Jackson was once universally acclaimed as a song-and-dance man of genius; Wacko Jacko is now, more often than not, dismissed for his bizarre race and gender transformations and confounding antics, even as he is commonly reviled for the child molestation charges twice brought against him. Whence the weirdness and alleged criminality? How to account for Michael Jackson's rise and fall?