Meet the imperious aristocrat, the wily confidence man, the Napoleonic hero, and the soulless sinner-iconic figures on the Street since the days of the Revolution Wall Street: no other place on earth is so singularly identified with money and the power of money. And no other American institution has inspired such deep moral, cultural, and political ambivalence. Is the Street an unbreachable bulwark defending commercial order? Or is it a center of mad ambition? This book recounts the colorful history of America's love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types-the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist-all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.

"The View of the Courts from the Hill" explores the current interactions and relationship between the U.S. Congress and federal courts using a "governance as dialogue" approach, which argues that constitutional interpretation in the United States is a continuous and complex conversation among all the institutions of government. Expanding on his previous work on this important theme, Mark C. Miller has interviewed numerous key players specifically for this book. His subjects include members of Congress, federal judges, congressional staff, employees of the judicial branch, lobbyists, and others with an interest in the courts. Their candid and thorough comments provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars eager to explore the dynamics between congressional and judicial forces as they have evolved over the past two decades.

The book examines customary interactions between Congress and the federal courts--especially the U.S. Supreme Court--as well as extraordinary conflicts between the two branches of government both today and throughout American history. Miller gives special attention to recent attempts by social conservatives in Congress to silence the voice of the courts in the inter-institutional dialogue through the use of court-stripping measures, threats of impeachment of federal judges, and a proposal for an inspector general for the courts. Particular focus is placed on the interactions between the courts and the House Judiciary Committee under Republican control, as well as the approach taken by the Religious Right toward federal judges and the federal courts in general. The book concludes with a call for the protection of judicial independence in order to preserve the voice of the federal courts in the constitutional interpretation dialogue.

A portrait of America's most graceful and elegant male dancer and how he came to represent the essence of style, suavity, and charm Joseph Epstein's Fred Astaire investigates the great dancer's magical talent, taking up the story of his life, his personality, his work habits, his modest pretensions, and above all his accomplishments. Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, Fred Astaire provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist and how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, paradoxically, of democratic aristocracy. Tracing Astaire's life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late eighties in Hollywood, the book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern all delighted in composing for Astaire), and his many movie dance partners, among them Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Betty Hutton. A key chapter of the book is devoted to Astaire's somewhat unwilling partnership with Ginger Rogers, the woman with whom he danced most dazzlingly. What emerges from these pages is a fascinating view of an American era, seen through the accomplishments of Fred Astaire, an unassuming but uncompromising performer who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.

Informed, controversial, ranging from a melancholy study of rock and roll's descent into show business to a hilarious look at the spectacle that is the Jerry Lewis Telethon, these twenty essays offer an unusual and (ironically) entertaining study of American media by one of its foremost critics.

A "stinging indictment" of US foreign policy and covert operations in the Middle East from a former military attache and CIA operative (The Christian Science Monitor). After the close of World War II, former army intelligence agent Wilbur Crane Eveland trained as a military attache, specializing in the new focal point of global concern: the Middle East. In the decades that followed, he personally witnessed the evolution and many blunders of American Middle East policy from embassies of Arab states, inside the Pentagon and the White House, and as a principal CIA representative in the region. Finally, as a petroleum-engineering consultant, he lived with the results of America's errors. In Ropes of Sand, Eveland delivers a richly detailed assessment of the mistakes, miscalculations, and outright failures he observed. The governments the United States armed to defend the Middle East against Russia ended in collapse. American support of the Shah of Iran led to disastrous results. Many of the major crises the US faced, from the energy shortage to the border issues of Israel, had been forecast decades earlier. Eveland explains the country's failure to understand these problems and shows why every proposed solution, from the United Nations Partition Resolution for Palestine to the Camp David Accords, only added fuel to the fire. His insider critique is essential for understanding the Arab Spring, the threat of ISIS, and the ongoing conflicts we face in the region today. First released in 1980, this memoir was initially blocked from publication by the CIA for its revealing and critical discussion of numerous covert operations, some of which Eveland engaged in himself.

Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively small oeuvre--he directed only thirteen films during a career that spanned more than four decades--covers a broad range of the themes that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first: war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social surveillance and control.
In "Depth of Field," leading screenwriters and scholars analyze Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such groundbreaking classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" and later films whose critical reputations are still in flux. "Depth of Field "ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," placing it in the contexts of film history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work, "Depth of Field" is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.

A "devastating" expose of the United States' Latin American policy and the infamous career and assassination of agent Dan Mitrione (Kirkus Reviews). In 1960, former Richmond, Indiana, police chief Dan Mitrione moved to Brazil to begin a new career with the United States Agency for International Development. During his ten years with the USAID, Mitrione trained and oversaw foreign police forces in extreme counterinsurgency tactics-including torture-aimed at stomping out communism across South America. Though he was only a foot soldier in a larger secret campaign, he became a symbol of America's brutal interventionism when he was kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro rebels in Montevideo, Uruguay. In Hidden Terrors, former New York Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth chronicles with chilling detail Mitrione's work for the USAID on the ground in South America and Washington, DC, where he shared his expertise. Along the way, Langguth provides an authoritative overview of America's efforts to destabilize communist movements and prop up military dictators in South America, presenting a "powerful indictment of what the United States helped to bring about in this hemisphere" (The New York Times). Even today, the tactics Mitrione helped develop continue to influence operations in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and black sites around the globe.

"The Big House" is America's idea of the prison- a huge, tough, ostentatiously oppressive pile of rock, bristling with rules and punishments, overwhelming in size and the intent to intimidate. Stephen Cox tells the story of the American prison-its politics, its sex, its violence, its inability to control itself-and its idealization in American popular culture. This book investigates both the popular images of prison and the realities behind them : problems of control and discipline, maintenance and reform, power and sexuality. It conveys an awareness of the limits of human and institutional power, and of the symbolic and iconic qualities the "Big House" has attained in America's understanding of itself.

Director of some of the most controversial films of the twentieth century, Stanley Kubrick created a reputation as a Hollywood outsider as well as a cinematic genius. His diverse yet relatively small oeuvre--he directed only thirteen films during a career that spanned more than four decades--covers a broad range of the themes that shaped his century and continues to shape the twenty-first: war and crime, gender relations and class conflict, racism, and the fate of individual agency in a world of increasing social surveillance and control.
In "Depth of Field," leading screenwriters and scholars analyze Kubrick's films from a variety of perspectives. They examine such groundbreaking classics as "Dr. Strangelove" and "2001: A Space Odyssey "and later films whose critical reputations are still in flux. "Depth of Field "ends with three viewpoints on Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," placing it in the contexts of film history, the history and theory of psychoanalysis, and the sociology of sex and power. Probing Kubrick's whole body of work, "Depth of Field "is the first truly multidisciplinary study of one of the most innovative and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.

Read a newspaper or catch the news on television and you might get the impression that America's current leadership is "mainstream": perhaps a bit more conservative and in its foreign policy more belligerent than its predecessors, but still a federal authority that functions within America's political traditions. But as Mark Crispin Miller argues here with great clarity and effect, we are in fact living in a state that would appall the Founding Fathers: a state that is neither democratic nor republican, and no more "conservative" than it is liberal. He exposes the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet, and above all their emotional dependence on sheer hatefulness. Abraham Lincoln once observed that, if the United States should ever be subverted, "it will be conquered from within." And that is exactly what has happened."

"A particularly astute analysis of the television coverage of the campaign, the election, and the political aftermath."—Newsday

The Bush Dyslexicon is a raucously funny ride—whether it's Bush envisioning "a foreign-handed foreign policy" or Miller skewering vociferous cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney for their silence on Bush's particular "West Texas version of Ebonics." But there is also a strong undercurrent of outrage. Only because our elections have become so dependent on television and its emphatic emptiness, says Miller, could a man of such sublime and complacent ignorance assume the highest office in the land.

"Bracing, entertaining...behind the malapropisms, Miller finds a political and media malaise that's more worrisome than just having a President to whom it's all Grecian."—The New Yorker

"A sharp-edged polemic questioning the wisdom of how we elect our leaders."—Publishers Weekly

"This is a work of outrage. Never has the native intelligence of the 'ordinary' American been so assaulted as it's been by the recent presidential 'election,' and Mark Crispin Miller has sounded the tocsin of revolt. Unless we are suffering from a national Alzheimer's disease, this book will give us heart and voice, as well as a laugh or two along the way." —Studs Terkel

"Stinging in almost every line, this perceptive book reveals much about the capabilities of our new president, and about the unfairness of the process that exalted him." —Lawrence E. Walsh, independent counsel, Iran-Contra Investigation

"This is simply the finest, most comprehensive and masterfully annotated collection of Bushisms to date: a clear reminder to never 'misunderestimate' the ignorance, intellectual laziness, and sheer meanness of our first unelected president." —Barbara Ehrenreich

"Fiercely funny and insightful, The Bush Dyslexicon is also a rousing call to arms. It's the book Tom Paine would have written had he penned 'Common Sense' while channel-surfing his satellite dish. A must-read for all who take their citizenship seriously—whether left, right, or just plain disgusted." —Arianna Huffington

"Mark Crispin Miller is the smartest and funniest media critic in the business. He also has the courage to speak truth to power, which he does brilliantly in The Bush Dyslexicon—a witty, incisive, and wide-ranging critique of our unelected president, the interests he represents, and the media's role in promoting them. No one who cares about the future of democracy can afford to ignore this book." —Jackson Lears, Board of Governors Professor of History, Rutgers University

"This is no joke book, but a sobering and enlightening tour de force on the appalling state of our electoral politics. It should be required reading for those crazy souls who—like Mark Crispin Miller—still believe in this country." —Robert W. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times

"Mark Crispin Miller has written a book not only about our appointed President, but about the ramshackle state of American political conversation. Unlike Bush the younger, The Bush Dyslexicon will make you laugh and, more important, think, worry—and even start to scream for real reform."—Mark Lloyd, Executive Director, Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy

"If, like millions of Americans, you feel that you've been living through a real life version of "The Emperor Has No Clothes," this book is must reading. Miller's critique of how the media accepted—and even abetted—the Republican snow job on Bush's alleged fitness for office is brilliant and devastating." —Susan Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Mass Communication at the University of Michigan, author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media

Among the subjects treated in this book are the myth of George Bush's victory in Florida in 2000 and FOX News' key role in propagating it, Senator Max Cleland's dubious defeat in Georgia in 2002, Bush's 're-election' in 2004, and evidence that the Republicans will attempt to steal the presidential election in 2008.

From the author of It's Superman!, an exuberant and original exploration of America's most iconic comic book hero Since his first appearance in Action Comics Number One, published in late spring of 1938, Superman has represented the essence of American heroism. "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound," the Man of Steel has thrilled audiences across the globe, yet as life-long "Superman Guy" Tom De Haven argues in this highly entertaining book, his story is uniquely American. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the midst of the Great Depression, Superman is both a transcendent figure and, when posing as his alter-ego, reporter Clark Kent, a humble working-class citizen. An orphan and an immigrant, he shares a personal history with the many Americans who came to this country in search of a better life, and his amazing feats represent the wildest realization of the American dream. As De Haven reveals through behind-the-scenes vignettes, personal anecdotes, and lively interpretations of more than 70 years of comic books, radio programs, TV shows, and Hollywood films, Superman's legacy seems, like the Man of Steel himself, to be utterly invincible.

This elegantly written appreciation of the Empire State Building opens up the building's richness and importance as an icon of America. The book leads us through the facts surrounding the skyscraper's conception and construction, then enters into a provocative theoretical discussion of its function as an icon, its representation in pictures, literature, and film, and the implications of its iconic status as New York's most important architectural monument to ambition and optimism.
The Empire State Building literally cannot be seen in its totality, from any perspective. And paradoxically, this building of unmistakable solidity has been made invisible by familiarity and reproduction through imagery. Mark Kingwell encourages us to look beneath the strong physical presence of the building, to become aware of its evolving layers of meaning, and to see how the building lives within a unique imaginative space in the landscape of the American consciousness. He offers new ways of understanding the Empire State Building in all its complexity and surprising insights into its special role as an American icon.

An exploration of the book, the movie, and the author of one of the most captivating stories ever told How and why has the saga of Scarlett O'Hara kept such a tenacious hold on our national imagination for almost three-quarters of a century? In the first book ever to deal simultaneously with Margaret Mitchell's beloved novel and David Selznick's spectacular film version of Gone with the Wind, film critic Molly Haskell seeks the answers. By all industry predictions, the film should never have worked. What makes it work so amazingly well are the fascinating and uncompromising personalities that Haskell dissects here: Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick, and Vivien Leigh. As a feminist and onetime Southern adolescent, Haskell understands how the story takes on different shades of meaning according to the age and eye of the beholder. She explores how it has kept its edge because of Margaret Mitchell's (and our) ambivalence about Scarlett and because of the complex racial and sexual attitudes embedded in a story that at one time or another has offended almost everyone. Haskell imaginatively weaves together disparate strands, conducting her story as her own inner debate between enchantment and disenchantment. Sensitive to the ways in which history and cinema intersect, she reminds us why these characters, so riveting to Depression audiences, continue to fascinate 70 years later.

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers's shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948--that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage.

In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post-Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post-World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.

Now available in paperback, "one of the best short books we have on the ideas of racial equality" (George Bornstein, "Times Literary Supplement") In this assessment of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous 1963 speech, Eric J. Sundquist explores its origins, its place in the long history of American debates about equality and race, and why it is now hailed as the most powerful American address of the twentieth century. "The speech and all that surrounds it--background and consequences--are brought magnificently to life. . . . Sundquist has written about race and ethnicity in American culture. In this book he gives us drama and emotion, a powerful sense of history combined with illuminating scholarship."--Anthony Lewis, "New York Times Book Review" (Editor's Choice) "Each chapter of Sundquist's intelligent and important book focuses on one of several themes in the speech, unpacking the sources of the words and placing them within a broader civil rights context. His last chapter, 'Not by the Color of Their Skin, ' is one of the most incisive analyses of the affirmative action debate I have ever read."--Clay Risen, "Washington Post Book World" Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature, UCLA. He is author or editor of eight books on American literature and culture, including the award-winning volumes "To Wake the Nations" and "Strangers in the Land." Icons of America Icons of America is a series of short works written by leading scholars, critics, and writers, each of whom tells a new and innovative story about American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual, event, object, or cultural phenomenon. A Caravan Book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org

America has run on hamburgers for almost a century. This is the story of their sizzle and their symbolism, where they came from and how they conquered the world. What do Americans think of when they think of the hamburger? A robust, succulent spheroid of fresh ground beef, the birthright of red-blooded citizens? Or a Styrofoam-shrouded Big Mac, mass-produced to industrial specifications and served by wage slaves to an obese, brainwashed population? Is it cooking or commodity? An icon of freedom or the quintessence of conformity? This fast-paced and entertaining book unfolds the immense significance of the hamburger as an American icon. Josh Ozersky shows how the history of the burger is entwined with American business and culture and, unexpectedly, how the burger's story is in many ways the story of the country that invented (and reinvented) it. Spanning the years from the nineteenth century with its waves of European immigrants to our own era of globalization, the book recounts how German "hamburg steak" evolved into hamburgers for the rising class of urban factory workers and how the innovations of the White Castle System and the McDonald's Corporation turned the burger into the Model T of fast food. The hamburger played an important role in America's transformation into a mobile, suburban culture, and today, America's favorite sandwich is nothing short of an irrepressible economic and cultural force. How this all happened, and why, is a remarkable story, told here with insight, humor, and gusto.

Bob Dylan is an iconic figure in American musical and cultural history, lauded by Time magazine as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century. For nearly fifty years the singer-songwriter has crafted his unique brand of music, from his 1962 self-titled debut album to 2009's #1 hit Together Through Life, appealing to everyone from baby boomers to the twenty-somethings who storm the stage at his concerts. In Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, literary scholar and music critic David Yaffe considers Dylan from four perspectives: his complicated relationship to blackness (including his involvement in the civil rights movement and a secret marriage with a black backup singer), the underrated influence of his singing style, his fascinating image in films, and his controversial songwriting methods that have led to charges of plagiarism. Each chapter travels from the 1960s to the present, offering a historical perspective on the many facets of Dylan's life and career, exploring the mystery that surrounds the enigmatic singer and revealing the complete unknown Dylan.

From the author of It's Superman!, an exuberant and original exploration of America's most iconic comic book hero Since his first appearance in Action Comics Number One, published in late spring of 1938, Superman has represented the essence of American heroism. "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound," the Man of Steel has thrilled audiences across the globe, yet as life-long "Superman Guy" Tom De Haven argues in this highly entertaining book, his story is uniquely American. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the midst of the Great Depression, Superman is both a transcendent figure and, when posing as his alter-ego, reporter Clark Kent, a humble working-class citizen. An orphan and an immigrant, he shares a personal history with the many Americans who came to this country in search of a better life, and his amazing feats represent the wildest realization of the American dream. As De Haven reveals through behind-the-scenes vignettes, personal anecdotes, and lively interpretations of more than 70 years of comic books, radio programs, TV shows, and Hollywood films, Superman's legacy seems, like the Man of Steel himself, to be utterly invincible.

A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first--and the only--stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture--she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage--inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose. "Gypsy" is the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee's life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life.

Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winning "Striptease," gives us Gypsy's story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street. "Gypsy" tells how she did it, and why.