Popular Abstracts is a reference tool providing access to information appearing in past issues of three journals published by the Bowling Green Popular Press. Abstracts are included for each article appearing in the first ten volumes of The Journal of Popular Culture (1967-1977), the first five volumes of The Journal of Popular Film (1972-1977), and the first four volumes of Popular Music and Society (1971-1975).

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association found a fixed canon and revolutionized the study of the humanities and social sciences in the United States and around the world by making that canon fluid. The full ramifications of this revolt against traditional academia not finished nor fully understood. This is a record of the goals and accomplishments of the pioneers in this field. The essays recall the barriers that the first pop culture scholars faced and tracks their achievements.

The twenty essays in this effort to bring new vitality to the humanities range through fields familiar in life but unfamiliar in the humanities canon. They include leisure, folk cultures, material culture, pornography, comics, animal rights, Black studies, traveling, and, of course, the bugbear of academics, television.

This collection of essays examines various rituals and ceremonies in American popular culture, including architecture, religion, television viewing, humor, eating, and dancing.

This volume presents archeological studies in conjunction with cultural anthropological studies as a means to enhance popular culture studies. Scholar Malcolm K. Shuman points out that the study of archeology must be careful to chart the total human content of an artifact, because archeology is a profoundly human (and humanizing) endeavor that cannot be divorced from the matrix of human life. The other ten essays cover aspects of archeology and cultural anthropology, and the authors are meticulous in studying their subject in context.

An investigation of society's heroes during any time period will reveal the personnel deemed worthy of being emulated at that particular time by that particular society. There will be many old and time-tested figures, sometimes with new faces and new profiles; there will also be a mix of new faces. Thus the hero--like history itself--is constantly in transition, and both the hero and the transition are fundamental to the study of a culture. These essays turn the pantheon of heroes around before our eyes and reveal the many complicated aspects of hero worship.

The humanities are the strongest dynamic that runs from the past into the future. Throughout history, except for the past one hundred fifty years, the strongest element in the humanities has been the culture of the folk. Now it is the everyday culture of a democratic society--popular culture, a key to people's understanding themselves and their society. These sixteen essays by leading popular culture scholars demonstrate how elements in our everyday life flourished in the past, came to flower today, and will continue to shape us in the future.

Author and educator Ray Browne combined interests in folklore, literature, and American Studies into a groundbreaking approach to the study of the humanities and social sciences, a field which eventually came to be known as popular culture studies. In addition to co-founding both the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of American Culture, Browne wrote and published over 80 articles and book chapters, authored eight books, and edited almost 50 other book-length volumes. This edited collection features key cultural studies writings by Browne, collected over his decades-long academic...

This collection provides a concentrated sampling of female detective stories from the Old Sleuth serials.