Most Americans today live in the suburbs. Yet suburban voices remain largely unheard in sociological and cultural studies of these same communities. In Suburban Landscapes: Culture and Politics in a New York Metropolitan Community, Paul Mattingly provides a new model for understanding suburban development through his narrative history of Leonia, New Jersey, an early commuter suburb of New York City.

Although Leonia is a relatively small suburb, a study of this kind has national significance because most of America's suburbs began as rural communities, with histories that...

The new edition of James L. Baughman's successful book The Republic of Mass Culture examines the advent of television and the impact it had on the established mass media--radio, film, newspapers, and magazines. When television captured the largest share of the mass audience by the late 1950s, rival media were forced to target smaller, subgroup markets with novel content: rock 'n' roll for teenage radio listeners in the 1950s, sexually explicit films that began to appear in the 1960s, and analytical newspaper reporting in the 1970s and 1980s. The growing popularity of cable TV posed...

In this update to his landmark publication, William J. Reese offers a comprehensive examination of the trends, theories, and practices that have shaped America's public schools over the last two centuries.

Reese approaches this subject along two main lines of inquiry--education as a means for reforming society and ongoing reform within the schools themselves. He explores the roots of contemporary educational policies and places modern battles over curriculum, pedagogy, race relations, and academic standards in historical perspective.

A thoroughly revised epilogue outlines the...