Download or read book Television History and American Culture written by Mary Beth Haralovich and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In less than a century, the flickering blue-gray light of the television screen has become a cultural icon. What do the images transmitted by that screen tell us about power, authority, gender stereotypes, and ideology in the United States? Television, History, and American Culture addresses this question by illuminating how television both reflects and influences American culture and identity. The essays collected here focus on women in front of, behind, and on the TV screen, as producers, viewers, and characters. Using feminist and historical criticism, the contributors investigate how television has shaped our understanding of gender, power, race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the 1950s to the present. The topics range from the role that women broadcasters played in radio and early television to the attempts of Desilu Productions to present acceptable images of Hispanic identity, from the impact of TV talk shows on public discourse and the politics of offering viewers positive images of fat women to the negotiation of civil rights, feminism, and abortion rights on news programs and shows such as I Spy and Peyton Place. Innovative and accessible, this book will appeal to those interested in women's studies, American studies, and popular culture and the critical study of television. Contributors. Julie D'Acci, Mary Desjardins, Jane Feuer, Mary Beth Haralovich, Michele Hilmes, Moya Luckett, Lauren Rabinovitz, Jane M. Shattuc, Mark Williams
Download or read book Television and American Culture written by Jason Mittell and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Television and American Culture: An Overview introduces students to the study of television by looking at American television from a cultural perspective. The book is written for intermediate undergraduate and beginning graduate students for a range of television studies courses. Specifically, Mittell discusses television within the following contexts: the economics of the television industry, television's role within American democracy, the formal attributes of a variety of television genres, television as a site of gender and racial identity formation, television's role in everyday life, and the medium's technological and social impacts. The topical arrangement and comprehensive scope of the book differs from other television textbooks, arguing that we must incorporate a range of economic, political, aesthetic, and sociological perspectives to fully comprehend the medium of television.
Download or read book The Columbia History of American Television written by Gary Richard Edgerton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richly researched and engaging, The Columbia History of American Television tracks the growth of TV into a convergent technology, a global industry, a social catalyst, a viable art form, and a complex and dynamic reflection of the American mind and character. Renowned media historian Gary R. Edgerton follows the technological progress and increasing cultural relevance of television from its prehistory (before 1947) to the Network Era (1948-1975) and the Cable Era (1976-1994). He considers the remodeling of television's look and purpose during World War II; the gender, racial, and ethnic components of its early broadcasts and audiences; its transformation of postwar America; and its function in the political life of the country. In conclusion, Edgerton takes a discerning look at our current Digital Era and the new forms of instantaneous communication that continue to change America's social, political, and economic landscape.
Download or read book Television History the Peabody Archive and Cultural Memory written by Ethan Thompson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory is the product of a multiyear collaboration between the Peabody Awards program and over a dozen media scholars with the intent to uncover, explore, and analyze historical television programming contained in the Peabody Awards archives at the University of Georgia. It is an intentional effort to look both wider and deeper than the well-known canon of U.S. broadcast history that dominates popular memory of the relationship of television to American society. The Peabody Archive is especially suited to this project because it is an archive of programming produced and submitted not just by the big networks in New York or Los Angeles, but by stations and media producers across the nation and, more recently, around the world. This project asks, how might these programs change our understanding of television's past, and impact the ways we think about television's present and future? What new questions can we ask and what new approaches should we take as a result of seeing and experiencing this programming? The contributions in this volume offer a dramatic range of approaches for how scholars can productively engage the archive's media and physical holdings to examine and reconsider television history"--
Download or read book The Television History Book written by Michele Hilmes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of broadcasting and the infludence developments in broadcasting have had over our social, cultural and economic practices. Examining the broadcasting traditions of the UK and USA, 'The Television History Book' make connections between events and tendencies that both unite and differentiate these national broadcasting traditions.
Download or read book Genre and Television written by Jason Mittell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from Dragnet to The Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
Download or read book Cold War Cool Medium written by Thomas Doherty and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-10 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming. To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The "cool medium" permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed—and ultimately welcomed—his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings. By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.
Download or read book That s the Way It Is written by Charles L. Ponce de Leon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Newton Minow taught us sophisticates to bemoan the descent of television into a vast wasteland, the dyspeptic chorus of jeremiahs who insist that television news in particular has gone from gold to dross gets noisier and noisier. Charles Ponce de Leon says here, in effect, that this is misleading, if not simply fatuous. He argues in this well-paced, lively, readable book that TV news has changed in response to broader changes in the TV industry and American culture. It is pointless to bewail its decline. "That s the Way It Is "gives us the very first history of American television news, spanning more than six decades, from Camel News Caravan to Countdown with Keith Oberman and The Daily Show. Starting in the latter 1940s, television news featured a succession of broadcasters who became household names, even presences: Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings, Brian Williams, Katie Couric, and, with cable expansion, people like Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart, and Bill O Reilly. But behind the scenes, the parallel story is just as interesting, involving executives, producers, and journalists who were responsible for the field s most important innovations. Included with mainstream network news programs is an engaging treatment of news magazines like "60 Minutes" and "20/20, " as well as morning news shows like "Today" and "Good Morning America." Ponce de Leon gives ample attention to the establishment of cable networks (CNN, and the later competitors, Fox News and MSNBC), mixing in colorful anecdotes about the likes of Roger Ailes and Roone Arledge. Frothy features and other kinds of entertainment have been part and parcel of TV news from the start; viewer preferences have always played a role in the evolution of programming, although the disintegration of a national culture since the 1970s means that most of us no longer follow the news as a civic obligation. Throughout, Ponce de Leon places his history in a broader cultural context, emphasizing tensions between the public service mission of TV news and the quest for profitability and broad appeal."
Download or read book Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture written by Ethan Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original study, Thompson explores the complicated relationships between Americans and television during the 1950s, as seen and effected through popular humor. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture documents how Americans grew accustomed to understanding politics, current events, and popular culture through comedy that is simultaneously critical, commercial, and funny. Along with the rapid growth of television in the 1950s, an explosion of satire and parody took place across a wide field of American culture—in magazines, comic books, film, comedy albums, and on television itself. Taken together, these case studies don’t just analyze and theorize the production and consumption of parody and television, but force us to revisit and revise our notions of postwar "consensus" culture as well.
Download or read book Television in Black and white America written by Alan Nadel and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La couverture indique : "Alan Nadel's new book reminds us that most of the images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm - particularly during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision of America." "During this era, prime-time TV was dominated by "adult Westerns," with heroes like The Rebel's Johnny Yuma reincarnating Southern values and Bonanza's Cartwright family reinforcing the notion of white patriarchy - programs that, Nadel shows, bristled with Cold War messages even as they spoke to the nation's mythology. America had become visually reconfigured as a vast Ponderosa, crisscrossed by concrete highways designed to carry suburban white drivers beyond the moral challenge of racism, racial poverty, and increasingly vocal civil rights demands."
Download or read book Demographic Vistas written by David Marc and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Demographic Vistas, David Marc shows how we can take television seriously within the humanist tradition while enjoying it on its own terms. To deal with the barrage of messages from television's chaotic history, Marc adapts tools of theatrical and literary criticism to focus on key personalities and genres in ways that reward serious students and casual viewers alike. This updated edition includes a new foreword by Horace Newcomb and a new introduction by the author that discusses the ways in which the nature of television criticism has changed since the book's original publication in 1984. A new final chapter explores the paradox of the diminishing importance of over-the-air broadcasting during the period of television's greatest expansion, which has been brought about by complex technologies such as cable, videocassette recorders, and online services.
Download or read book Something Completely Different written by Jeffrey S. Miller and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Emma Peel and tire Ministry of Silly Walks British television had a significant impact on American popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. In Something Completely Different, Jeffrey Miller offers the first comprehensive study of British programming on American television, discussing why the American networks imported such series as The Avengers and Monty Python's Flying Circus; how American audiences received these uniquely British shows; and how the shows' success reshaped American television. Miller's lively analysis covers three genres: spy shows, costume dramas, and sketch comedies. In addition to his close readings of the series themselves, Miller considers the networks' packaging of the programs for American viewers and the influences that led to their acceptance, including the American television industry's search for new advertising revenue and the creation of PBS.
Download or read book Her Stories written by Elana Levine and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.
Download or read book America As Seen on TV written by Clara E. Rodríguez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2020 Latino Book Awards, Best Academic Themed Book The surprising effects of American TV on global viewers As a dominant cultural export, American television is often the first exposure to American ideals and the English language for many people throughout the world. Yet, American television is flawed, and, it represents race, class, and gender in ways that many find unfair and unrealistic. What happens, then, when people who grew up on American television decide to come to the United States? What do they expect to find, and what do they actually find? In America, As Seen on TV, Clara E. Rodríguez surveys international college students and foreign nationals working or living in the US to examine the impact of American television on their views of the US and on their expectations of life in the United States. She finds that many were surprised to learn that America is racially and economically diverse, and that it is not the easy-breezy, happy endings culture portrayed in the media, but a work culture. The author also surveys US-millennials about their consumption of US TV and finds that both groups share the sense that American TV does not accurately reflect racial/ethnic relations in the US as they have experienced them. However, the groups differ on how much they think US TV has influenced their views on sex, smoking and drinking. America, As Seen on TV explores the surprising effects of TV on global viewers and the realities they and US millennials actually experience in the US.
Download or read book A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting written by Aniko Bodroghkozy and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented in a single volume, this engaging review reflects on the scholarship and the historical development of American broadcasting A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting comprehensively evaluates the vibrant history of American radio and television and reveals broadcasting’s influence on American history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars on the topic, this wide-ranging anthology explores the impact of broadcasting on American culture, politics, and society from an historical perspective as well as the effect on our economic and social structures. The text’s original and accessibly-written essays offer explorations on a wealth of topics including the production of broadcast media, the evolution of various television and radio genres, the development of the broadcast ratings system, the rise of Spanish language broadcasting in the United States, broadcast activism, African Americans and broadcasting, 1950’s television, and much more. This essential resource: Presents a scholarly overview of the history of radio and television broadcasting and its influence on contemporary American history Contains original essays from leading academics in the field Examines the role of radio in the television era Discusses the evolution of regulations in radio and television Offers insight into the cultural influence of radio and television Analyzes canonical texts that helped shape the field Written for students and scholars of media studies and twentieth-century history, A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting is an essential and field-defining guide to the history and historiography of American broadcasting and its many cultural, societal, and political impacts.
Download or read book Comic Visions written by David Marc and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1997-10-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comic Visions, Second Edition is an update of the most influential critical history of American television comedy. Most comprehensive social and critical history of American television comedy Very engaging, lucid and entertaining writing style Approaches social criticism without being too scholarly and pedantic
Download or read book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars written by Wazhmah Osman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.
