Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication

In The Making of American Audiences, Richard Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the colonial period to the modern day. Providing coverage of theatre, opera, vaudeville, minstrelsy, movies, radio and television, he examines the evolution of audience practices as each genre supplanted another as the primary popular entertainment. Based on original historical research, this volume exposes how audiences made themselves through their practices - how they asserted control over their own entertainments and their own behaviour. Importantly, Butsch articulates two long-term processes: pacification and privatization. Whereas during the nineteenth century, overactive audiences represented a threat to civic order through their unruly behaviour, in the twentieth century, audiences have become more passive, dependent upon and controlled by media messages. This timely study serves as an important contribution to communication research, as well as American cultural history and cultural studies.

Based on extensive primary research, this book makes a strong and compelling argument for collaboration between US television networks and government during the early years of the medium, and demonstrates how the Cold War was effectively 'sold' to the American public.

Steven Vaughn's book explores the relationship between the motion picture industry and American politics through the prism of Reagan's film career at Warner Bros.

A history of how the American film industry succeeded in dominating the film markets of Canada and Great Britain in the period 1920-1950 showing how efficiently it operated internationally.

The global expansion of Hollywood and American popular culture in the first decades of the twentieth century met with strong opposition throughout the world. This book investigates European efforts to overcome the American film industry's pre-eminence.

An analysis of the first and most comprehensive study of the influence of movies on American youth, the Payne Fund Studies. First published in 1933, these studies are intrinsically important for their insights and conclusions regarding the effects of movies on behaviour.

This is the first comprehensive study on the relationship of propaganda to participatory democracy in the United States during the twentieth century. This study critically examines various schools of thought in an effort to determine and understand the contribution and effects of propaganda in a democratic society.

Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and Catholic Legion of Decency archives here published for the first time, Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were censored to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s, the golden era of studio production.

This is the first full-length study of the protest-cum-resistance press and its role in the struggle for a democratic South Africa between the 1880s and 1960s. South Africa's alternative press played a crucial, but still largely undocumented role, in the making of modern South Africa.

Examines the role of American Jews in the entertainment industry. Steven Carr reconceptualizes Jewish involvement in Hollywood by examining prevalent attitudes towards Jews among American audiences, revealing a powerful set of assumptions concerning ethnicity and the influence of the media.