Turning The Century: Essays In Media And Cultural Studies

Description

The essays in Turning the Century make a significant contribution to our understanding of America's love affairs with novelty and the mass media. The essays also show that neither the current communications revolution nor the response to it is unprecedented. Through this book, Carol Stabile provides a historical context within which scholars and students of American culture can interpret and understand end-of-the-millennium-fever --particularly, the claims of politicians, pundits, and even cultural studies scholars who maintain that recent information technology innovations make the present moment unique. Contemporary studies of mass media and popular culture reflect a similar emphasis on what is new, distinct, and therefore specific to contemporary culture. Claims of millennial transformation, however, are only possible insofar as the history of mass media can be forgotten or ignored. In Turning the Century, Carol Stabile analyzes those hidden, and now all but forgotten, conditions and relations of production that continue to shape and inform contemporary culture. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Sound Out of Time: Modernity’s Echo 2 Maintaining the Order of Things: Class, the Gospel of Scientific Efficiency, and the Invention of Policy Expertise in America, 1865–1921 3 Sensationalism, Objectivity, and Reform in Turn-of-the-Century America 4 “All Love Making Scenes Must Be Normal”: Pennsylvania Movie Censorship in the Progressive Era 5 Only Flossy, High-Society Dudes Would Smoke ’Em: Gender and Cigarette Advertising in the Nineteenth Century 6 Trotting Horses and Moving Pictures: A Sporting View of Early Cinema 7 “Girls Who Come to Pieces”: Women, Cosmetics, and Advertising in the Ladies' Home Journal, 1900–1920 8 Race Betterment and Class Consciousness at the Turn of the Century, or Why It’s Okay to Marry Your Cousin 9 Conspicuous Whiteness: The New Woman, the Old Negro, and the Vanishing Past of Early Brand Advertising 10 Constructions of Violence: Labor, Capital, and Hegemonic Struggle in the Pullman Strike of 1894 Afterword About the Editor and Contributors Index