This timely collection provides a historical overview of violence in American popular culture from the Puritan era to the present and across a range of media. Few topics are discussed more broadly today than violence in American popular culture. Unfortunately, such discussion is often unsupported by fact and lacking in historical context. This two-volume work aims to remedy that through a series of concise, detailed essays that explore why violence has always been a fundamental part of American popular culture, the ways in which it has appeared, and how the nature and expression of interest in it have changed over time. Each volume of the collection is organized chronologically. The first focuses on violent events and phenomena in American history that have been treated across a range of popular cultural media. Topics include Native American genocide, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and gender violence. The second volume explores the treatment of violence in popular culture as it relates to specific genres—for example, Puritan "execution sermons," dime novels, television, film, and video games. An afterword looks at the forces that influence how violence is presented, discusses what violence in pop culture tells us about American culture as a whole, and speculates about the future.

For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and drag king, a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers. In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life s work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone s subjects have managed despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference to construct passionate, inspiring lives. Finalist, Foreword Magazine s Anthology of the Year Outstanding Book in the High School Category, selected by the American Association of School Libraries Best Book in Special Interest Category, selected by the Public Library Association "

In this cogent and well-researched book, Harold Schechter argues that, unlike the popular conception of the media inciting violence through displaying it, without these outlets of violence in the media a basic human need would not be met and would have to be acted out in much more destructive ways. Schechter demonstrates how violent images saturated the earliest newspaper, how art and disturbing images are not incompatible and how the demoaisation of comic books in the 1950s det up a pattern of equating testosterone fuelled entertainment with aggression.

This book examines the intersection of gender and violence in popular culture. Drawing on the latest thinking in critical international relations, media and cultural studies and gender studies, it focuses in particular on a number of popular TV shows including Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Generation Kill, The Corner and The West Wing. The book makes a unique theoretical contribution to the ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations by illustrating the ways in which popular culture and global politics are intertwined and how we make sense of our worlds through these two frames. Methodologically, the book enhances discourse-theoretical analysis in IR through its incorporation of methods from narratology and film studies. The book proposes an aesthetic ethicopolitical approach to global politics which challenges us to interrogate how it becomes possible that we think what we think, it challenges the truths that we hold to be self-evident and that which we take to be common sense. It demands that we think carefully, critically, uncomfortably, about our world(s) – even when we’re ‘only’ watching television.

Sadomasochism, Popular Culture and Revolt: A Pornography of Violence explores powerful connections between violent pornography and current gender wars, generational conflicts, political struggles, and racial and ethnic unrest. Long before these conflicts dominated headlines worldwide, they become embedded and contextualized in popular culture. Tracing the history of today’s popular porn genres, including torture porn, revenge porn, war porn, and fascist porn, Tom Pollard reveals a "sadomasochistic trope" of fictional and real sexual violence and sexual justice that had largely remained hidden and suppressed. Today it has exploded into public awareness by mass movements like #MeToo demanding justice for sexual assault victims. This movement joins other recent social movements, including Black Lives Matter and advocates of safety from gun violence, which, along with #MeToo, constitute a "revolt of submissives" no longer willing to endure unwanted violence. This thoughtful examination of the history and content of violent pornography reveals portentous patterns and developing trends. By examining pornography’s violent content, Pollard forces us to confront wider social and cultural violence. Sadomasochism, Popular Culture and Revolt will be of great interest to scholars of gay and lesbian studies and queer studies, while being a vital text for undergraduate and graduate instructors of social movement studies in sociology, political science, American Studies, and history.

Studies of varied aspects of Robin Hood legends and associated topics: the greenwood, archery, outlawry, and 20c response to the legends. The Robin Hood tradition has had a continuing appeal from the middle ages to the present day, the hero himself holding a distinctive place within popular culture, his exploits, and those of his companions, being celebrated in multiple forms, from the earliest rituals, plays and ballads to musical theatre, lyric poetry, modern popular fiction, cinema and TV. The essays in this volume provide a rich and coherent perspective on this enigmatic figure and the legends which have grown up around him, offering a wide range of approaches. Topics include place-name study; examinations of surviving manuscripts and their cultural context; appraisals of the links between Robin Hood and medievalarchery; other medieval outlaws; mythic figures such as the Green Man; patterns of masculine and feminine identity; and the popularity of Robin Hood on stage and screen, in comic books and videos, and in modern Japan. There are also extended overviews of the hero's origins and status; and the future of Robin Hood studies. Professor THOMAS HAHN teaches in the Department of English at the University of Rochester, New York. Contributors: THOMAS HAHN, FRANK ABBOTT, SARAH BEACH, LAURA BLUNK, KELLY DEVRIES, R.B. DOBSON, MICHAEL EATON, KEVIN J. HARTY, STUART KANE, STEPHEN KNIGHT, DAVID LAMPE, GARY YERSHON

This is a necessary and urgent read for anyone concerned about the United States' endless wars. Investigating multiple genres of popular culture alongside contemporary U.S. foreign policy and political economy, Imperial Benevolence shows that American popular culture continuously suppresses awareness of U.S. imperialism while assuming American exceptionalism and innocence. This is despite the fact that it is rarely a product of the state. Expertly coordinated essays by prominent historians and media scholars address the ways that movies and television series such as Zero Dark Thirty, The Avengers, and even The Walking Dead, as well as video games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops, have largely presented the United States as a global force for good. Popular culture, with few exceptions, has depicted the U.S. as a reluctant hegemon fiercely defending human rights and protecting or expanding democracy from the barbarians determined to destroy it.

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species? Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.” The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

A comprehensive resource, this book reviews current and historical examples of violence in film, television, radio, music, music videos, video games, and novels. Despite decades of attention and various attempts to enact legislation that limits violence in American popular culture, it remains ubiquitous across films, television, radio, music, music videos, video games, and popular fiction. Studies have shown that programs marketed to children are often remarkably violent and that viewing or otherwise consuming such violence has numerous negative effects on children's psychological health. This book sheds light on the scholarship related to violence in popular culture and compares historical and current examples, analyzing popular shows such as Game of Thrones, video games such as Mortal Kombat, young adult fiction including the trilogy The Hunger Games, and more. Not only does Violence in American Popular Culture provide a comprehensive review of the research about the effects of violence in media, but it also offers detailed assessments of violent content in various expressions of popular culture. In addition, it invites readers to compare violence in American popular culture with that globally via entries on violence in popular culture outside the United States. An appendix of additional resources and primary sources gives readers further tools for deepening their understanding of this complex and controversial issue.