In Murder on the Reservation, Ray B. Browne surveys the work of several of the best-known writers of crime fiction involving Indian characters and references virtually every book that qualifies as an Indian-related mystery. Browne believes that within the genre of crime fiction all people are equal, and the increasing role of Indian characters in criminal fiction proves what an important role this genre plays as a powerful democratizing force in American society. He endeavors to both analyze and evaluate the individual work of the authors, and at the same time, provide a commentary on...

Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture is John G. Cawelti's discussion of American popular culture and violence, from its precursors in Homer and Shakespeare to the Lone Ranger and Superman. Cawelti deciphers the overt sexuality, detached violence, and political intrigue embedded within Batman and .007. He analyzes the work of such famous pop-culture icons as Alfred Hitchcock, the Beatles, and Andy Warhol, and looks at a range of films, from Psycho and Dances with Wolves, and literature, from The Waste Land to Catch 22.
Examples from popular movies,...

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From the Puritans' conviction that a thousand preternatural beings appear every day before our eyes, to today's resurgence of spirits in fiction and film, the culture of the United States has been obsessed with ghosts. In each generation, these phantoms in popular culture reflect human anxieties about religion, science, politics, and social...

For more than sixty years, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans personified the romantic, mythic West that America cherished well into the modern age. Blazing a trail through every branch of the entertainment industry--radio, film, recordings, television, and even comic books--the couple capitalized on their attractive personas and appealed to the nation's belief in family values, an independent spirit, community.
King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West presents these two celebrities in the most comprehensive and inclusive account to date. Part narrative, part reference, this impeccably...

The histories of baseball and country music ran in parallel tracks through most of the twentieth century. America s sport and America s music moved from the fringes to the mainstream, gaining exposure and building heroes, first via radio broadcasts and then on the television screen. Both evolved with American society through wartime, the Civil Rights movement, and into the age of multimillion dollar superstars. Don Cusic offers an engaging and insightful analysis that addresses race, gender, class, ethnicity, business practices and marketing, performance, media, and the cult of celebrity."

Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy,...