Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

History repeats itself as the Battles of Lexington and Concord play out in modern-day Virginia. The Virginia National Guard is ordered to Culpeper County to impose gun confiscation on a defiant population. Culpeper County has declared itself a Second Amendment sanctuary and the popular sheriff there has deputized hundreds of citizens to defend their right to keep and bear arms. Scenes of desperate fighting on social media galvanize support for the deputized citizens. Reinforcements arrive as thousands of people travel from around Virginia and surrounding states. The news media and BLM also converge on Culpeper County, directed by powerful forces behind the scenes. As the fighting escalates, everyday Americans are forced to pick a side, and to decide for themselves how far they will go to defend their values and their way of life. BLOOD OF TYRANTS, Watering the Tree of Liberty, is a fast-paced action thriller inspired by true events and the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause of liberty.

There is growing enthusiasm in the scientific community about the prospect of mapping and sequencing the human genome, a monumental project that will have far-reaching consequences for medicine, biology, technology, and other fields. But how will such an effort be organized and funded? How will we develop the new technologies that are needed? What new legal, social, and ethical questions will be raised? Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome is a blueprint for this proposed project. The authors offer a highly readable explanation of the technical aspects of genetic mapping and sequencing, and they recommend specific interim and long-range research goals, organizational strategies, and funding levels. They also outline some of the legal and social questions that might arise and urge their early consideration by policymakers.