Tells how to collect, trade, and display baseball cards, beer cans, records, postcards, teddy bears, dolls, toys, comic books, Hummels, clothing, trains, and ephemera

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman "Honest, funny, smart, and illuminating.” —Anna Drezen, co-head writer of SNL "If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book.” —Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell. Throw on your Von Dutch hats and join Grace on a journey back through the pop culture moments of the aughts, before the cataclysmic shift in LGBTQ representation and acceptance—a time not so long ago, which many seem to forget.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Bayreuth, language: English, abstract: This paper analyses the origins of popular culture and the so-called "Beatlemania" in Britain. Before the 1960s, the whole world had to recover from the Great War, for instance, in 1948 restrictions on rationed goods were gradually lifted three years after World War II had ended, the rationing of clothes ended the following year, and so on. Finally recovered, Great Britain stood before good times after in 1954 fourteen years of food rationing completely ended at midnight when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were lifted. The economy of Britain evolved quite successful as can be seen on manufacturing and export economy, above all the main industries steel, coal, automotive and textiles. Overall, it seemed to be a change not just in economy. Caused by the economical upswing, many people were employed and, consequently, obtained payment which increased their disposable income. That fact gave the Britons more freedom and therefore they were able to afford household items such as televisions, refrigerators, washing machines etc, as well as cars; even hire-purchases, i. e. arrangements for payment by installments, were usual. Also young adults or teenagers, who were working besides school mostly in part-time jobs, earned their own money in those days. Benefitted by that, they were able to purchase goods on their own, independent from their parents and other adults. In contrast to previous youth generations, especially pre-war generations, young people could enjoy the omnipresent music and fashion which was spread by mass-media such as magazines or television. With the new freedom and possibilities, the younger generation had the chance to develop their own identity instead of living like the other adults. But they were not just using this chance; they even rebelled and broke away from their parents, which resulted in the emergence of youth culture as well as popular culture.

Danesi employs the lens of history to explore the relationship between popular culture’s content and the means by which it is delivered. The third edition features new chapters on the commercial context of pop culture and explicitly focused on digital culture, as well as exercises and discussion prompts to deepen understanding.

Examines how the past is portrayed in later popular culture now that the cyclical rhythm of folk culture has been replaced by the linear acceleration of mass society. The 16 essays discuss such topics as the American theme park, popular music, Noah Webster, girl scouts, wars from 1914 to 1991, and shamanic elements in biker culture. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From Jurassic Park to Sue the T-Rex and Barney, our dino love affair is as real, as astonishing, and as incomprehensible as the gargantuan beasts themselves. At once reptilian and avian, dinosaurs enable us to imagine a world far beyond the usual boundaries of time, culture, and physiology. We envision them in diverse and contradictory ways, from purple friends to toothy terrors—reflecting, in part, our changing conceptions of ourselves. Not unlike humans today, dinosaurs seem at once powerful, almost godly, and helpless in the face of cosmic forces even more powerful than themselves. In Dinomania, Boria Sax, a leading authority on human-animal relations, tells the story of our unlikely romance with the titanic saurians, from the discovery of their enormous bones—relics of an ancient world—to the dinosaur theme parks of today. That discovery, around the start of the nineteenth century, was intimately tied to our growing awareness of geological time and the dawn of the industrial era. Dinosaurs’ vast size and power called to mind railroads, battleships, and factories, making them, paradoxically, emblems of modernity. But at the same time, their world was nature at its most pristine and unsullied, the perfect symbol of childhood innocence and wonder. Sax concludes that in our imaginations dinosaurs essentially are, and always have been, dragons; and as we enter a new era of environmental threats in which dinos provide us a way to confront indirectly the possibility of human extinction, their representation is again blending with the myth and legend from which it emerged at the start of the modern age. Fun and ferocious, and featuring many superb illustrations of dinosaurs from art, popular culture, film, and advertising, Dinomania is a thought-provoking homage to humanity's enduring dinosaur amour.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

A doctor's bold analysis of the cultural disease that afflicts us all. Despite an astonishing appetite for life, more and more Americans are feeling overworked and dissatisfied. In the world's most affluent nation, epidemic rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday existence they signal the American Dream gone awry. Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, grounds the extraordinary achievements and excessive consumption of the American nation in an understanding of the biology of the brain's reward system offering for the first time a comprehensive and physical explanation for the addictive mania of consumerism. American Mania presents a clear and novel vantage point from which to understand the most pressing social issues of our time, while offering an informed approach to refocusing our pursuit of happiness. Drawing upon rich scientific case studies and colorful portraits, "this fascinating and important book will change the way you think about American life" (Karen Olson, Utne Reader).

With Amusement for All contextualizes what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships among social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the ways in which the entertainment world has reflected, changed, or reinforced the values of American society.