Wired TV looks at the post–network television industry’s experiments with new forms of interactive storytelling that took place from 2005 to2010 as broadband was introduced into the majority of homes and the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter soared. Essays address such issues as the networks’ sporadic efforts to engage fans using transmedia storytelling, production inefficiencies, and the effect of corporate conglomeration on entrepreneurial creativity. The television franchises discussed include Lost, The Office, Entourage, and Battlestar Gallactica.

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. It documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters and the long road to protecting public health and the environment.

By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship. He traces the trajectory of writing about these towns, by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists, and others, to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and Jewish studies. 

Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions. The book offers a compelling argument for the significance of these blacklisted expats to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations.

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

This ground-breaking book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. It illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family.

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the few scholars who has done research during the Saddam Hussein regime, King offers a sensitive interpretation of the contradiction resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity, exploring the ways that residents connect socially through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories.

Health care is more expensive in the United States than in other wealthy nations, and access varies significantly across space and social classes. In this case study, James A. Schafer Jr. uses the city of Philadelphia in the early twentieth-century to show that these problems reflect the informal organization of health care in a free market system in which profit and demand, rather than social welfare and public health needs, direct the distribution and cost of crucial resources.

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces. It draws from early Internet ethnographies, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies to confront conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular.

This book provides a complex, insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing. It tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Ethnography is used to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality.

Borderlands Saints examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, the book traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Why are some cases of genocide prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? In this collection, contributors approach the question from a variety of perspectives and case studies, including the suppression of discussion about indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, the reasons why the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks long remained out of sight, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Look Closer examines contemporary media texts that use American suburbia not just as a setting, but as a central component of narrative and thematic development. It discusses the myth of suburban perfection popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements and explores how the directors and producers behind today’s films and television series use the spaces of suburbia to tell stories about America as well as critique the conservative ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.

This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.

In-depth interviews with participants in non-traditional families are used to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, Katrina Kimport contends that these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality. She provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.