What patterns emerge in media coverage and character depiction of Southern men and women, blacks and whites, in the years between 1954 and 1976? Allison Graham examines the ways in which the media, particularly television and film, presented Southerners during the civil rights revolution.

Antebellum Southern State Constitutionalism -- Secession, Sovereignty and state constitutional revision -- Framing the Southern Republic -- Presidential requests -- Congressional demands -- Reaction, retrenchment, an resistance

Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and, with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties 'white', the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), ‘failed states’ (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

Framing Borders addresses a fundamental disjuncture between scholastic portrayals of settler colonialism and what actually takes place in Akwesasne Territory, the largest Indigenous cross-border community in Canada. Whereas most existing portrayals of Indigenous nationalism emphasize border crossing as a site of conflict between officers and Indigenous nationalists, in this book Ian Kalman observes a much more diverse range of interactions, from conflict to banality to joking and camaraderie. Framing Borders explores how border crossing represents a conversation where different actors "frame" themselves, the law, and the space that they occupy in diverse ways. Written in accessible, lively prose, Kalman addresses what goes on when border officers and Akwesasne residents meet, and what these exchanges tell us about the relationship between Indigenous actors and public servants in Canada. This book provides an ethnographic examination of the experiences of the border by Mohawk community members, the history of local border enforcement, and the paradoxes, self-contradictions, and confusions that underlie the border and its enforcement.

The South was not always the South. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those below the Potomac River, for all their cultural and economic similarities, did not hold a separate political identity. How this changed, and how the South came to be a political entity that coheres to this day, emerges clearly in this book—the first comprehensive account of the Civil War Era and late nineteenth century state constitutional conventions that forever transformed southern politics. From 1860 to the turn of the twentieth century, southerners in eleven states gathered forty-four times to revise their constitutions. Framing the Solid South traces the consolidation of the southern states through these conventions in three waves of development: Secession, Reconstruction, and Redemption. Secession conventions, Paul Herron finds, did much more than dissolve the Union; they acted in concert to raise armies, write law, elect delegates to write a Confederate Constitution, ratify that constitution, and rewrite state constitutions. During Reconstruction, the national government forced the southern states to write and rewrite constitutions to permit re-entry into the Union—recognizing federal supremacy, granting voting rights to African Americans, enshrining a right to public education, and opening the political system to broader participation. Black southerners were essential participants in democratizing the region and reconsidering the nature of federalism in light of the devastation brought by proponents of states’ rights and sovereignty. Many of the changes by the postwar conventions, Herron shows, were undermined if not outright abolished in the following period, as “Redeemers” enshrined a system of weak states, the rule of a white elite, and the suppression of black rights. Southern constitution makers in all three waves were connected to each other and to previous conventions unlike any others in American history. These connections affected the content of the fundamental law and political development in the region. Southern politics, to an unusual degree, has been a product of the process Herron traces. What his book tells us about these constitutional conventions and the documents they produced is key to understanding southern history and the South today.

From its origins in the Midwest in the early nineteenth century, the technique of light timber framing-also known at the time as "Chicago construction"-quickly came to underwrite the territorial and ideological expansion of the United States. Softwood construction was inherently practical, as its materials were readily available and required little skill to assemble. The result was a built environment that erased typological and class distinctions: no amount of money can buy you a better 2 x 4. This fundamental sameness paradoxically underlies the American culture of individuality, unifying all superficial differences. It has been both a cause and effect of the country's high regard for novelty, in contrast with the stability that is often assumed to be essential to architecture. American Framing is a visual and textual exploration of the social, environmental, and architectural conditions and consequences of this ubiquitous form of construction. For architecture, it offers a story of an American project that is bored with tradition, eager to choose economy over technical skill, and accepting of a relaxed idea of craft in the pursuit of something useful and new-the forming of an architecture that enables architecture.

A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. This edition of Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest. Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.

"Treating landscape painting as yet another framing systems, in both the symbolic and material sense, this book examines sixteenth-century paintings of famous mountains by three major artists in the light of a diachronic account of the evolution of famous mountains over time and a synchronic account of the vogue for the grand tour in late Ming society." --Book Jacket.

Representations of first contact—the first meetings of European explorers and Native Americans—have always had a central place in our nation’s historical and visual record. They have also had a key role in shaping and interpreting that record. In Framing First Contact author Kate Elliott looks at paintings by artists from George Catlin to Charles M. Russell and explores what first contact images tell us about the process of constructing national myths—and how those myths acquired different meanings at different points in our nation’s history. First contact images, with their focus on beginnings rather than conclusive action or determined outcomes, might depict historical events in a variety of ways. Elliott argues that nineteenth-century artists, responding to the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the subject, used the visualized space between cultures meeting for the first time to address critical contemporary questions and anxieties. Taking works from the 1840s through the 1910s as case studies—paintings by Robert W. Weir, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt, along with Catlin and Russell—Elliott shows how many first contact representations, especially those commissioned and conceived as official history, speak blatantly of conquest, racial superiority, and imperialism. Yet others communicate more nuanced messages that might surprise contemporary viewers. Elliott suggests it was the very openness of the subject of first contact that allowed artists, consciously or not, to speak of contemporary issues beyond imperialism and conquest. Uncovering those issues, Framing First Contact forces us to think about why we tell the stories we do, and why those stories matter.