Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
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Tag: American Studies
Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America … by Steffen Hantke
The 1950s and 1960s were the decades when science-fiction movies boomed and during that time not so much technology, but disgust, shock, fear, basically all aspects of horror and horror movies, were used instead to give science fiction movies a certain direction by presenting miniature or giant creatures, mutants and every kind or harrowing creature […]
Yodeling and Meaning in American Music by Timothy E. Wise (2016)
Only for very short periods of time have yodeling and yodeling artists received critical attention and commercial success in the US. For most people, yodeling is not even close to singing; although the two forms of musical expression are very similar in a number of ways. And there are accounts of yodeling in (European) literature […]
Invasion USA: Anti-Communist Movies of the 1950s and 1960s by David J. Hogan (2017)
With motion pictures as one of the most powerful instruments to display the enemies’ (i.e. the USSR’s) efforts to destroy the trust of the American people in their country in the mid-1950s, a number of movies by US studios were produced. The plots centered mostly around Soviet spies, communist agents or Americans, who had lost […]
The Marvel Age of Comics 1961–1978 by Roy Thomas (2017)
Marvel Comics of New York, originally founded as Timely Publications in 1939, is one of the most important comic book publishers worldwide. Comic book fans all over the world are grateful for superheroes as Captain America or the Sub-Mariner. And particularly for superheroes of “a somewhat other kind,” as the mostly troubled, eccentric and characters […]
The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s by Robert Miklitsch (2017)
Film noir in the 1950s is a very special period in the genre‘s/style’s history, since for some experts film noir ended just then, while for others it almost died then and had finally vanished completely in the early 1960s. (To resurface as neo-noir in the early 1980s). In the book at hand the author tries […]
Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967 by Mike Bogue (2017)
„Both America and Japan produced a number of science fiction movies in the 1950s and 1960s directly or indirectly tied to the nuclear threat. … American […] films tended to suggest that it was possible to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. However, the Japanese science fiction films of the same era were […]
Tony Soprano’s America: Gangsters, Guns, and Money by M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh (2017)
The award-winning TV series The Sopranos (HBO) centered on the head of an American mafia family in New Jersey that ran between 1999 and 2007, is believed by many, many TV watchers to be the best series ever. It could draw from lots of talent in acting, writing, producing and was probably the most realistic […]
Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties by James Wierzbicki (2016)
What may come to mind first when we think about the music of the 1950s in the US are probably the styles of Rock’n’Roll, Doo Wop and Rhythm and Blues. Wierzbicki however, in his study points to the many other musical forms that evolved in that decade, since changes and developments in American politics, society, […]