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The beat world is holy in its search of self, but barbarian in its total rejection of the so-called 'civilized' standards of success and morality. Mr. Lipton's book is the first complete and unbiased survey of the beat generation and its role in society. Here are the intimate facts about these people and their attitudes toward sex, dope, jazz, art, religion, parents, landlords, employers, politicians, draft boards, the law and, most important, toward...
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Some events that transform a nation are frozen in time. Others pass with little public awareness, and we only appreciate their momentous nature long after they occur. Regardless, these events are few and-almost always-far between. But in 1969, four such events took place within the span of only 100 days. In this book, cultural historian Harlan Lebo looks back at the first moon landing, the Manson family murders, Woodstock, and the birth of the Internet...
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Blazing hot meets icy cool in a momentous year in US history
On New Year's Day in 1967, the 200 million Americans who lived in the United States were about to experience a fascinating, exciting, and sometimes bewildering twelve months that for many formed an iconic portion of their lives. Despite the fact that the coming year produced no Black Friday, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11 attack, the nation still underwent dramatic changes in everything from support...
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This history of jazz, spanning the twentieth century, is the first to place it within the broad context of American culture. Burton Peretti argues persuasively that this distinctive American music has been a key thread in the tapestry of the nation's culture. The music itself, its players and its audience, and the critical debates it has prompted, tell us much about changes in American life since 1910. Mr. Peretti traces the emergence of jazz out...
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"Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet, by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White...
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In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling...
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Popular representations of the Vietnam War tend to emphasize violence, deprivation, and trauma. By contrast, in Armed with Abundance, Meredith Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, redrawing the landscape of the war so that swimming pools, ice cream, visits from celebrities, and other "comforts" share the frame with combat.To address a tenuous morale situation, military authorities, Lair reveals, wielded abundance...
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In 1969, the nearly nine-months pregnant celebrity Sharon Tate loses her life and the life of her unborn child horrifying hundreds of millions of Americans. Only 26 years old when she died, the story of Sharon's life becomes of less public interest than learning about the hippie lives of her murderers. Despite this, Sharon possesses a formidable arsenal of relatively unseen visual media for planners to work with. In the ensuing decades, the justice...
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A visual history of 100 years of filmmaking in New York City, featuring exclusive interviews with NYC filmmakers
Fun City Cinema gives readers an in-depth look at how the rise, fall, and resurrection of New York City was captured and chronicled in ten iconic Gotham films across ten decades: The Jazz Singer (1927), King Kong (1933), The Naked City (1948), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Taxi Driver (1976), Wall Street (1987),...
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A sweeping and masterful cultural history, "Here's to My Sweet Satan" tells how the Occult conquered the American imagination, weaving together topics as diverse as the birth of heavy metal, 1970s horror films, the New Age movement, Count Chocula cereal, the serial killer Son of Sam, and more. Cultural critic George Case explores how the Occult craze permanently changed American society, creating the cultural framework for the political power of the...
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Today it is widely recognized that gay men played a prominent role in defining the culture of mid-twentieth-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 antihomosexual attitudes....
13) The Einstein effect: how the world's favorite genius got into our cars, our bathrooms, and our minds
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"Albert Einstein's face is still one of the most recognizable in the world and he's widely considered to be the first modern-day celebrity. While many of his discoveries continue to define our daily lives, it's not just his genius that continues to shape our world. Today, more people know Einstein as an icon rather than a theorist-decades after his death, he's a celebrity with a massive online following. The Einstein Effect shows all the ways his...
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Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance...
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The 1960s to early '70s was a pivotal time for American culture, and New York City was ground zero for seismic shifts in music, theater, art, and filmmaking. The Downtown Pop Underground takes a kaleidoscopic tour of Manhattan during this era and shows how deeply interconnected all the alternative worlds and personalities were that flourished in the basement theaters, dive bars, concert halls, and dingy tenements within one square mile of each other....
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"A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century...
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In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world's premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, the burgeoning transnational elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war's refugees, but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those...
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"Winner of the 2015 SHARP DeLong Book History Book Prize, The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing" Paula Rabinowitz is professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism.
A richly illustrated cultural history of the midcentury pulp paperback
"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."-a...
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Owsley and Me is a love story set against the background of the Psychedelic Revolution of the '60s. Owsley "Bear" Stanley met her in Berkeley in 1965, when LSD was still legal and he was the world's largest producer and distributor of LSD. Rhoney found herself working in an LSD laboratory, and the third corner in a love triangle. We all know the stories from the '60s but never from the point of view of a woman finding her way through twisted trails...
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TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty...
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