Alan Nadel's provocative new book reminds us that most of the images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm--particularly during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision of America.

Nadel depicts a time when television effectively hijacked and monopolized the nation's vision of itself to create a virtual but severely distorted civic space. On Cold War TV's three channels...

"Flatlining on the Field of Dreams takes a apart some of the most commercially successful films of the epoch, demonstrating how they reflected, debated, and played with the dominant ideology of the time. . . . cleverly and wittily written . . . . The book will work extremely well in the classroom."-Film Quarterly "From Back to the Future to Forrest Gump, Nadel shows not only how notions of cinematic time re-script political change but how our very conceptualizations of change are thematized by our experiences of watching movies. This is not simply film history, or film as history, but film...

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate...