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Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll by James A. Cos

What historically led to the rise of American teenage youth culture and paved the way for rock’n’roll is the subject of James Cosby’s latest book. As examined against the subcultural background of post-war America, and the arrival of new musical impulses from African American culture, teenager’s unknown struggles for autonomy in an altogether anxious and […]

Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)

In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s  (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]

Bending Steel. Modernity and the American Superhero by Aldo J. Regalado (2015)

By examining interviews, trade magazines and even testimonies, letters, memoirs and other personal data author Regalado seeks direct impact of the superheroes on the real lives of actual people. Or rather, he aims to find out just how “the big forces of American modernity shaped the lives of Americans on an individual level and how […]

American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz (2014)

What actually was the idea of Englishman Allen Lane during WWII found its way to the United States: the invention of a small, affordable book format, available almost anywhere where you could buy chewing gum and cigarettes. Lane, after unsuccessfully searching for small-sized books to read on his daily train rides, in 1935 founded Penguin […]