Popular History

America is more than just a fast food nation. Food Americana is the inside story of how generations of Americans have formed a national cuisine with tastes from all over the world. Fried chicken was a distinctly Southern dish - now it's the Sunday night special at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. A Utah restaurant won Maine's annual Best Lobster Roll competition. And perhaps the ultimate all-American dish, pizza, is served up in 30 different styles, a total of three billion pies a year, an average of 23 pounds for each of us.

Now in audio - a fascinating work of popular science from a world-renowned expert on mosquitoes and a prize-winning reporter. In this lively and comprehensive portrait of the mosquito, its role in history, and its threat to mankind, Spielman and D'Antonio take a mosquito's-eye view of nature and man. They show us how mosquitoes breed, live, mate, and die and introduce us to their enemies, both natural and man-made.

In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.

Throughout the 1990s, Prince feuded with his record label, Warner Bros., over his rights as an independent recording artist - and made some of the most brilliant music of his career. During that time, Jim Walsh covered Prince for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and wrote about him passionately, thoughtfully, exhaustively. Here, in real-time, is that coverage: a look back at Prince in the '90s. Walsh's newly unearthed interviews, essays, columns, and reviews make Gold Experience an essential slice of history.

Operation Iraqi Freedom Veteran and former host of All Access, DC Comics' web show, Jason Inman, discusses the influence war has had on some of the most memorable superheroes in comics.

Forbes editor John Tamny uses entertaining stories from sports, movies, popular culture, and famous businesses to demonstrate the basic principles of economics. The Rolling Stones, the Dallas Cowboys, and Paris Hilton become examples of good and bad tax policy. The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and The Sopranos reveal the downside of antitrust regulation while the Michigan Wolverines' 2007 loss to Appalachian State explains why regulations often fail to achieve their intended purposes.

Originally published in France and long sought in English translation, Jean-Paul Gabilliet's Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books documents the rise and development of the American comic book industry from the 1930s to the present. The book intertwines aesthetic issues and critical biographies with the concerns of production, distribution, and audience reception, making it one of the few interdisciplinary studies of the art form.

Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society including military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, literature, and the arts. It has been condemned as the devil’s game by popes, rabbis, and imams, and lauded as a guide to proper living by different popes, rabbis, and imams. In his wide-ranging and ever fascinating examination of chess, David Shenk gleefully unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinity.

In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces.

Ice is everywhere: in gas stations, in restaurants, in hospitals, in our homes. Americans think nothing of dropping a few ice cubes into tall glasses of tea to ward off the heat of a hot summer day. Most refrigerators owned by Americans feature automatic ice machines. Ice on-demand has so revolutionized modern life that it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way—and to overlook what aspects of society might just melt away as the planet warms. In Ice, journalist and historian Amy Brady shares the strange and storied two-hundred-year-old history of ice in America

La contracultura en México se desplaza entre varios géneros, cubriendo los grandes movimientos y las manifestaciones contraculturales más importantes que ha tenido nuestro país, tales como los pachucos, los existencialistas, las pandillas juveniles o el rockanroll. En esta obra alucinante, el autor también da cuenta de las expresiones juveniles que han incidido en la música, la literatura, el teatro, el cine, la gráfica, la televisión y las publicaciones.

In Pop Masculinities, author Kai Arne Hansen investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early 21st century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That.

"In nome della mia ormai pluridecennale consuetudine con le piante, ho immaginato che queste care compagne di viaggio, come genitori premurosi, dopo averci reso possibile vivere, vengano a soccorrerci osservando la nostra incapacità a garantirci la sopravvivenza. Come? Suggerendoci una vera e propria costituzione su cui costruire il nostro futuro di esseri rispettosi della Terra e degli altri esseri viventi.

Cookbooks are not political in conventional ways. Yet, as repositories of human taste, cookbooks transmit specific blends of flavor, texture, and nutrition across space and time. Cookbooks both form and reflect who we are. Cookbook Politics argues that cookbooks highlight aspects of our lives we rarely recognize as political - taste, production, domesticity, collectivity, and imagination - and considers the ways in which cookbooks have or do politics, from the most overt to the most subtle.

The 1960s were a time of huge transformation, sustained and amplified by the music of that era: Rock and Roll. During the 19th and 20th centuries visionary and esoteric spiritual traditions influenced first literature, then film. In the 1960s they entered the realm of popular music, catalyzing the ecstatic experiences that empowered a generation. Exploring how 1960s rock and roll music became a school of visionary art, Christopher Hill shows how music raised consciousness on both the individual and collective levels to bring about a transformation of the planet.

A dispetto delle tante divisioni, storiche e attuali, c'è qualcosa che ci accomuna come italiani. Una serie di tratti che ci rendono immediatamente riconoscibili in qualsiasi luogo del mondo; nel male, ma anche nel bene. Corrado Augias ci accompagna in un viaggio alla scoperta di ciò che definisce il nostro carattere nazionale. Un viaggio particolare, che procede nello spazio e nel tempo, dall'attualità alla ricostruzione storica, passando per il racconto biografico.

An eight-year-old boy named James, aka the wannabe Cisco Kid, nearly lost his life as he searched for precious metal in a bone dry southwest Arizona gulley. He retrieved only pyrite before a desert flood swept away his world. Over the course of half a century James acquired several additional nicknames. They were reflections of his multiple personalities. His dad called him Traveler or Trav. Some coworkers referred to him as Point Man. A few colleagues labeled him Knowledge Navigator or Nav.

Americans, for all our talk of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, obsessively seek advice on matters large and small. Perhaps precisely because we believe in bettering ourselves and our circumstances in life, we ask for guidance constantly. And this has been true since our nation's earliest days: From the colonial era on, there have always been people eager to step up and offer advice, some of it lousy, some of it thoughtful, but all of it read and debated by generations of Americans.

"Quem nunca pecou que atire a primeira pedra", disse Jesus na Bíblia. Dependendo da intenção de quem a jogasse, este também seria considerado um pecador. Se lançasse a pedra com raiva, certamente teria agido com Ira. Se sentisse prazer com o ato, cairia na Luxúria. Se a pedrada fosse por causa de uma dívida, seria um gesto de Cobiça. Se fosse para ficar com os bens da vítima, seria Inveja. Se fosse para aparecer perante os outros, olha aí a Vaidade. Se precisasse beber para tomar coragem, cometeria a Gula.

How is it that comic books - the once-reviled form of lowbrow popular culture - are now the rage for Hollywood blockbusters, the basis for best-selling video games, and the inspiration for literary graphic novels? In Demanding Respect, Paul Lopes immerses himself in the discourse and practices of this art and subculture to provide a social history of the American comic book over the last 75 years.