What do Franklin Roosevelt, Dr. Seuss, the U.S. Navy, and Mr. Magoo have in common? They are all part of the surprising story of the pioneering cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America). Throughout the 1950s, a group of artists ran a business that broke all the rules, pushing animated films beyond the fluffy fantasy of the Walt Disney Studio and the crash-bang anarchy of Warner Bros. Instead, UPA’s films were innovative and graphically bold—the cartoon equivalent to modern art. When Magoo Flew is the first book-length study to chronicle the complete story of this unique American enterprise. The book features cameo appearances by Aldous Huxley, James Thurber, Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Jim Backus, Eddie Albert, and Woody Allen, as well as a select filmography of the best of UPA. Ebook Edition Note: The ebook has three images redacted: figures 1, 2, and 51.
This book is about a lost world, albeit one less than 50 years old. It is the story of a grand plan to demolish most of Whitehall, London’s historic government district, and replace it with a ziggurat-section megastructure built in concrete. In 1965 the architect Leslie Martin submitted a proposal to Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, for the wholesale reconstruction of London’s ’Government Centre’. Still reeling from war damage, its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palaces stood as the patched-up headquarters of an imperial bureaucracy which had once dominated the globe. Martin’s plan - by no means modest in conception, scope or scale - proposed their replacement with a complex that would span the roads into Parliament Square, reframing the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The project was not executed in the manner envisaged by Martin and his associates, although a surprising number of its proposals were implemented. But the un-built architecture is examined here for its insights into a distinctive moment in British history, when a purposeful technological future seemed not just possible but imminent, apparently sweeping away an anachronistic Edwardian establishment to be replaced with a new meritocracy forged in the ’white heat of technology’. The Whitehall plan had implications well beyond its specific site. It was imagined by its architects as a scientific investigation into ideal building forms for the future, an important development in their project to unify science and art. For the political actors, it represented a tussle between government departments, between those who believed that Britain needed to discard much of its Victorian and Edwardian decoration in the name of ’professionalization’ and those who sought to preserve its ornate finery. Demolishing Whitehall investigates these tensions between ideas of technology and history, science and art, socialism and el
In the eighteenth century, audiences in Great Britain understood the term ’slavery’ to refer to a range of physical and metaphysical conditions beyond the transatlantic slave trade. Literary representations of slavery encompassed tales of Barbary captivity, the ’exotic’ slaving practices of the Ottoman Empire, the political enslavement practiced by government or church, and even the harsh life of servants under a cruel master. Arguing that literary and cultural studies have focused too narrowly on slavery as a term that refers almost exclusively to the race-based chattel enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans transported to the New World, the contributors suggest that these analyses foreclose deeper discussion of other associations of the term. They suggest that the term slavery became a powerful rhetorical device for helping British audiences gain a new perspective on their own position with respect to their government and the global sphere. Far from eliding the real and important differences between slave systems operating in the Atlantic world, this collection is a starting point for understanding how slavery as a concept came to encompass many forms of unfree labor and metaphorical bondage precisely because of the power of association.
This comprehensive guide covers all of the music used in Woody Allen's films from Take the Money and Run (1969) to Match Point (2005). Each film receives scene-by-scene analysis with a focus on how Allen utilized music.
In this engaging and nuanced political history of Northern communities in the Civil War era, Adam I. P. Smith offers a new interpretation of the familiar story of the path to war and ultimate victory. Smith looks beyond the political divisions between abolitionist Republicans and Copperhead Democrats to consider the everyday conservatism that characterized the majority of Northern voters. A sense of ongoing crisis in these Northern states created anxiety and instability, which manifested in a range of social and political tensions in individual communities. In the face of such realities, Smith argues that a conservative impulse was more than just a historical or nostalgic tendency; it was fundamental to charting a path to the future. At stake for Northerners was their conception of the Union as the vanguard in a global struggle between democracy and despotism, and their ability to navigate their freedoms through the stormy waters of modernity. As a result, the language of conservatism was peculiarly, and revealingly, prominent in Northern politics during these years. The story this book tells is of conservative people coming, in the end, to accept radical change.
Adam Sharr tells the story of how modern architecture developed and produced its powerful cultural images. Considering the new building materials and techniques which shaped the movement, such as innovations in steel and concrete and the advent of air conditioning, he concludes by asking whether contemporary architecture remains modern at heart.
Somewhere between 1910 and 1970, architecture changed. Now that modern architecture has become familiar (sometimes celebrated, sometimes vilified), it's hard to imagine how novel it once seemed. Expensive buildings were transformed from ornamental fancies which referred to the classical and medieval pasts into strikingly plain reflections of novel materials, functions, and technologies. Modern architecture promised the transformation of cities from overcrowded conurbations characterised by packed slums and dirty industries to spacious realms of generous housing and clean mechanised production set in parkland. At certain times and in certain cultures, it stood for the liberation of the future from the past. This Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened-up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. Adam Sharr shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air conditioning and lighting. While architects weren't responsible for these innovations, they were among the first to appreciate how they could make the world look and feel different, in connection with imagery from other spheres like modern art and industrial design. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, Sharr discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. Considering the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape modern architecture, he demonstrates how the field owes as much to its storytellers as to its buildings. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
The Press and the People is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation's first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The study demonstrates just how much more of this literature was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated hitherto. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular culture in early modern Scotland and Britain more widely.
Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish - and European - Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary travel literature, Ferguson offers a complex model of historical advance which challenges both Hume's and Smith's embrace of modernity and the primitivism of Rousseau. Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of the emergence of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtues. Central to Ferguson's theory of citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation and military valour. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active, virtuous citizenship and apply it to the modern state.
National Book Critics Circle Award—2017 Nonfiction Finalist “Nothing less than a tour de force—a heady amalgam of science, history, a little bit of anthropology and plenty of nuanced, captivating storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice A National Geographic Best Book of 2017 In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away—until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present.
The American Civil War was by far the bloodiest conflict in American history. Arising out of a political crisis over the expansion of slavery, the war set the stage for the emergence of the modern American nation-state. This new interpretation of one of the most mythologized events in modern history combines narrative with analysis and an up-to-date assessment of the state of Civil War scholarship. The American Civil War: - Emphasizes the importance of Northern public opinion in shaping the meaning and outcome of the crisis - Argues that the war exposed deep social and political divisions within, as well as between, North and South - Explores the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, and the political and cultural context in which they lived - Sets this distinctively American crisis over slavery and nationhood in the wider context of the nineteenth-century world Concise and authoritative, this is an indispensable introduction to a critical period in modern American history.
Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends. A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioural conditioning of soldiers through the distribution of a mind-altering drug that was later hailed as one of the army’s “fathers of victory.” The daily wine ration arose from an unexpected set of factors including the demoralization of trench warfare, the wine industry’s fear of losing its main consumers, and medical consensus about the benefits of wine drinking. The army’s related practice of distributing distilled alcohol to embolden soldiers was a double-edged sword, as the men might become unruly. The army implemented regulations and surveillance networks to curb men’s drinking behind the lines, in an attempt to ensure they only drank when it was useful to the war effort. When morale collapsed in spring 1917, the army lost control of this precarious system as drunken soldiers mutinied in the thousands. Discipline was restored only when the army regained command of soldiers’ alcohol consumption. Drawing on a range of archives, personal narratives, and trench journals, A Thirst for Wine and War shows how the French army’s intoxication of its soldiers constituted a unique exercise of biopower deployed on a mass scale.
The concern today about suburban sprawl is not new. In the decades after World War II, the spread of tract-house construction changed the nature of millions of acres of land, and a variety of Americans began to protest against the environmental costs of suburban development. By the mid-1960s, indeed, many of the critics were attempting to institutionalize an urban land ethic. The Bulldozer in the Countryside was the first scholarly work to analyze the successes and failures of the varied efforts to address the environmental consequences of suburban growth from 1945 to 1970. For scholars and students of American history, the book offers a compelling insight into two of the great stories of modern times - the mass migration to the suburbs and the rise of the environmental movement. The book also offers a valuable historical perspective for participants in contemporary debates about the alternatives to sprawl.
Horror cinema is a genre that is undergoing constant evolution, from the sub-genre of 'found footage,' to post-cinematic new media forms such as Youtube horror, horror video games and cinematic virtual reality horror. By investigating how these new forms alter the dynamics of spectatorship, this book charts how cinema's affective capacities have shifted in relation to these modifications in the forms of cinematic horror. It applies a rich theoretical synthesis of phenomenological and Deleuzian approaches to a number of case studies, including films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Creep as well as video games such as Alien: Isolation and new media forms such as Youtube horror and virtual reality horror.
Raising the Dead dives into the expansive, extraordinary body of work found in Romero's archive, going beyond his iconic zombie movies into a deep and varied trove of work that never made it to the big screen. Based on years of archival research, the book moves between unfilmed scripts and familiar classics, showing the remarkable scope and range of Romero's interests and the full extent of his genius. Raising the Dead is a testament to an extraordinarily productive and inventive artist who never let the restrictions of the film industry limit his imagination.
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