Rerun Nation is a fascinating approach to television history and theory through the ubiquitous yet overlooked phenomenon of reruns. Kompare covers both historical and conceptual ground, weaving together a refresher course in the history of television with a critical analysis of how reruns have shaped the cultural, economic, and legal terrains of American television. Given the expanding use of past media texts not only in the United States, but also in virtually every media-rich society, this book addresses a critical facet of everyday life.

Rerun Era is a captivating, propulsive memoir about growing up in the environmentally and economically devastated rural flatlands of Oklahoma, the entwinement of personal memory and the memory of popular culture, and a family thrown into trial by lost love and illness that found common ground in the television. Told from the magnetic perspective of Joanna Howard's past selves from the late '70s and early '80s, Rerun Era circles the fascinating psyches of her part-Cherokee teamster truck-driving father, her women's libber mother, and her skateboarder, rodeo bull-riding teenage brother. Illuminating to our rural American present, and the way popular culture portrays the rural American past, Rerun Era perfectly captures the irony of growing up in rural America in the midst of nationalistic fantasies of small town local sheriffs and saloon girls, which manifested the urban cowboy, wild west theme-parks, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Written in stunning, lyric prose, Rerun Era gives humanity, perspective, humor, and depth to an often invisible part of this country, and firmly establishes Howard as an urgent and necessary voice in American letters.

Popular series such as "Gilligan's Island", "Get Smart", "The Brady Bunch", and "Mr. Ed" are relived through memorable episodes and revealing anecdotes in this tribute that features exclusive interviews and hundreds of photos.

With his first book, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam, Philip Beidler offered a pioneering study of the novels, plays, poetry, and "literature of witness" that sprang from the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Reviewing the book, the journal American Literature declared, "[It is] more than just an introductory act. It also sets forth what are sure to be lasting types of American literary response to Vietnam, and of the scholarly response to the emerging literature of the war." In Re-Writing America, Beidler charts the ongoing achievements of the men and women who first gained public notice as Vietnam authors and who are now recognized as major literary interpreters of our national life and culture at large. These writers--among them Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Winston Groom, David Rabe, John Balaban, Robert Stone, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson, and Frances Fitzgerald--have applied in their later efforts, says Beidler, "many of the hard-won lessons of literary sense-making learned in initial works attempting to come explicitly to terms with Vietnam." Beidler argues that the Vietnam authors have done much to reenergize American creative writing and to lead it out of the poststructuralist impasse of texts as endless critiques of language, representation, and authority. With their direct experience of a divisive and frustrating war--"a war not of their own making but of the making of politicians and experts, a war of ancient animosities that cost nearly everything for those involved and settled virtually nothing"--these writers in many ways resemble the celebrated generation of poets and novelists who emerged from World War I. Like their forebears of 1914-18, those of the Vietnam generation have undertaken a common project of cultural revision: to "re-write America," to create an art that, even as it continues to acknowledge the war's painful memory, projects that memory into new dimensions of mythic consciousness for other--and better--times. Beidler fills his book with detailed, illuminating analyses of the writers' works, which, as he notes, have moved across an almost infinite range of subject, genre, and mode. From David Rabe, for example, have come innovative plays in which overt statements on the traumas of Vietnam (The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers) have made way for broader commentaries on sex, power, and violence in American life (In the Boom Boom Room, HurlyBurly). Winstom Groom has moved from Better Times Than These, a rather traditional (even anachronistic) war novel, to further reaches of rambunctious humor in Forrest Gump. And journalist Michael Herr, whose Dispatches memorably defined a Vietnam landscape at once real and hallucinatory, carried his vision into collaborations on the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. As Beidler notes, the immense price that Vietnam exacted from the American soul continues to draw a plethora of interpretations and depictions. Vietnam authors remind us, in Tim O'Brien's words, of "the things they carried." But as Beidler makes clear, they now command us not only to remember but to imagine new possibilities as well.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios and record companies churned out films, albums, music videos and promotional materials that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the 1950s. Breaking from dominant wisdom that casts the trend as wholly defined by Ronald Reagan's politics or the rise of postmodernism, Back to the Fifties reveals how Fifties nostalgia from 1973 to 1988 was utilized by a range of audiences for diverse and often competing agendas. Films from American Graffiti to Hairspray and popular music from Sha Na Na to Michael Jackson shaped - and were shaped by - the complex social, political and cultural conditions of the Reagan Era. By closely examining the ways that "the Fifties" was remade and recalled, Back to the Fifties explores how cultural memories were fostered for a generation of teenagers trained by popular culture to rewind, record, recycle and replay.

A gorgeously illustrated collection featuring inspiring immigrants from every country in the world, celebrating the incredible range of what it means to be an American This dazzling volume brings American immigrant stories to life in short biographies written by award-winning writer Sara Nović, with charming full-color illustrations by Alison Kolesar. At a time when public debate is focused on who belongs in America, this book honors the crucial contributions of our friends and neighbors who have chosen to make this country their home. Featured within are war heroes and fashion designers, Supreme Court justices and pop stars, athletes and civil rights leaders, as well as: • the doctors who saved Ronald Reagan’s life • the creators of iconic American products like Levi’s, Chevy cars and trucks, and Nathan’s Famous hot dogs • the scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project • the architects behind landmarks of the American skyline like the World Financial Center in New York City, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and the Sears Tower in Chicago • Plus these familiar names from every walk of life: Madeleine Albright • Isabel Allende • Mario Andretti • Desi Arnaz • Isaac Asimov • George Balanchine • Sergey Brin • Gisele Bündchen • Willem de Kooning • Oscar de la Renta • Marlene Dietrich • Albert Einstein • Alfred Hitchcock • Arianna Huffington • Enrique Iglesias • Iman • Grace Jones • Henry Kissinger • Mila Kunis • Hedy Lamarr • Yo-Yo Ma • Miriam Makeba • Pedro Martínez • Joni Mitchell • Sidney Poitier • Wolfgang Puck • Rihanna • Knute Rockne • M. Night Shyamalan • Gene Simmons • Nikola Tesla • the von Trapps • Elie Wiesel • Anna Wintour

How conceptions of the American city changed in response to new media technologies

By the early 1930s America had one literary treasure that risked his life to please its readers. Richard Halliburton had already become a best-selling travel author and could have retired comfortably on the immense wealth gained from the sale of his first two books. Yet some men are born to dare, and Halliburton was one these. NEW WORLDS TO CONQUER was Halliburton’s third book and contains a knapsack full of that adventurer’s gold—dreams brought to reality by the alchemy of his courage and daring. The book details how Halliburton set off for Latin America in search of adventure, and find it he did. He dived to the bottom of the Mayan Well of Death, from which hundreds of skeletons had been dredged, then swam fifty miles down the length of the Panama Canal. Not content, he climbed to the crest of Mexico’s lofty Mount Popocatepetl, twice, and roamed over the infamous Devil’s Island. Yet his most amazing adventure occurred when he had himself marooned on the same island which had once held Robinson Crusoe captive. “Somewhere a lizard stirred the leaves...Furtively I looked about me, realizing that in the darkness the boa-constrictors would be abroad creeping forth from the ancient tombs and slinking down the leafy avenues,” Halliburton wrote. This is Halliburton at is best—fatalistic about his own safety, poetic about his chances of survival, and determined to bring home a hair-raising tale of adventure from the Latin lands of legend.

The Encyclopedia of Television, second edtion is the first major reference work to provide description, history, analysis, and information on more than 1100 subjects related to television in its international context. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Encyclo pedia of Television, 2nd edition website.