Since the Second World War, Europe has undergone a continual invasion: wave after wave of American popular culture. The diffusion of American culture in Europe is both a European story about America and an American story about Europe. This work examines this cross-cultural phenomenon from the European viewpoint. Nearly two dozen European experts in their respective fields offer an invigorating, engaging, and open-minded examination of America as perceived with the acute insight of the interested European outsider--a fruitful tradition that stretches back to Lafayette, de Tocqueville, and...

Motion pictures were first seen in 1894, when Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, a device for individually looking at film through a viewer. Over the next three years, Edison manufactured almost 1,000 Kinetoscopes and produced some 250 films to show in them. A million people worldwide first saw motion pictures through these devices.

This book describes in detail how Kinetoscopes worked and how they were sold, and describes the parlors to which the public flocked, fascinated by the novelty of moving images. It examines how the machines were copied by others and later eclipsed by...

The editors use the unique lens of the history of sports to examine ethnic experiences in North America since 1840. Comprised of 12 original essays and an Introduction, it chronicles sport as a social institution through which various ethnic and racial groups attempted to find the way to social and psychological acceptance and cultural integration. Included are chapters on Native Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Canadians, African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Hispanics, and several more, showing how their sports participation also provided these communities with some measure...