The Avengers was a unique, genre-defying television series which blurred the traditional boundaries between 'light entertainment' and disturbing drama. It was a product of the constantly-evolving 1960s yet retains a timeless charm. The creation of The New Avengers, in 1976, saw John Steed re-emerge, alongside two younger co-leads: sophisticated action girl Purdey and Gambit, a 'hard man' with a soft centre. The cultural context had changed - including the technology, music, fashions, cars, fighting styles and television drama itself - but Avengerland was able to re-establish itself. Nazi invaders, a third wave of cybernauts, Hitchcockian killer birds, a sleeping city, giant rat, a deadly health spa, a skyscraper with a destructive mind...The 1970s series is, paradoxically, both new yet also part of the rich, innovative Avengers history. Avengerland Regained draws on the knowledge of a broad range of experts and fans as it explores the final vintage of The Avengers.
In the early 1960s, civil rights activists and the Kennedy administration engaged in parallel, though not always complementary, efforts to overcome Mississippi’s extreme opposition to racial desegregation. In The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964, James P. Marshall uncovers this history through primary source documents that explore the legal and political strategies of the federal government, follows the administration’s changing and sometimes contentious relationship with civil rights organizations, and reveals the tactics used by local and state entities in Mississippi to stem the advancement of racial equality. A historian and longtime civil rights activist, Marshall collects a vast array of documents from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and excerpts from his own 1960s interviews with leading figures in the movement for racial justice. This volume tracks early forms of resistance to racial parity adopted by the White Citizens’ Councils and chapters of the Ku Klux Klan at the local level as well as by Mississippi congressmen and other elected officials who used both legal obstructionism and extra-legal actions to block efforts meant to promote integration. Quoting from interviews and correspondence among the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members, government officials, and other constituents of the Democratic Party, Marshall also explores decisions about voter registration drives and freedom rides as well as formal efforts by the Kennedy administration—including everything from minority hiring initiatives to federal litigation and party platform changes—to exert pressure on Mississippi to end segregation. Through a carefully curated selection of letters, interviews, government records, and legal documents, The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Administration, 1960–1964 sheds new light on the struggle to advance racial justice for African Americans living in the Magnolia State.
Throughout history, Christians have prayed for the dead - both for continual growth of the faithful and for their advancement from purgatory, and sometimes, even, for the deliverance of the unsaved from hell. Understanding Prayer for the Dead defends all three kinds of prayer. It challenges Protestants, who seldom pray for the dead, to begin doing so - and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who pray only for the Christian dead, to include the unsaved as well. James B. Gould addresses the biblical credentials of prayer for the dead and provides a historical overview of such prayers from ancient Christianity to the current practice of the three main branches of the Church. He also discusses the logical assumptions prayer for the dead requires - that prayer is effective, that the dead are conscious, and that the afterlife involves change - and lays out a theological framework for such prayers. Prayer for the departed raises the most basic of theological questions, matters that go to the centre of God's purpose in creating spiritual beings and redeeming sinful humankind. The argument, while revisionary in some respects, is orthodox, ecumenical, and integrative, engaging a range of academic disciplines so as to be biblically accurate, historically informed, and philosophically reasoned.
The biographer—so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts—comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers’ lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.” (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)
Comprehensive and richly illustrated, Close Harmony traces the development of the music known as southern gospel from its antebellum origins to its twentieth-century emergence as a vibrant musical industry driven by the world of radio, television, recordings, and concert promotions. Marked by smooth, tight harmonies and a lyrical focus on the message of Christian salvation, southern gospel--particularly the white gospel quartet tradition--had its roots in nineteenth-century shape-note singing. The spread of white gospel music is intricately connected to the people who based their livelihoods on it, and Close Harmony is filled with the stories of artists and groups such as Frank Stamps, the Chuck Wagon Gang, the Blackwood Brothers, the Rangers, the Swanee River Boys, the Statesmen, and the Oak Ridge Boys. The book also explores changing relations between black and white artists and shows how, following the civil rights movement, white gospel was influenced by black gospel, bluegrass, rock, metal, and, later, rap. With Christian music sales topping the $600 million mark at the close of the twentieth century, Close Harmony explores the history of an important and influential segment of the thriving gospel industry.
Soon after film came into existence, the term epic was used to describe productions that were lengthy, spectacular, live with action, and often filmed in exotic locales with large casts and staggering budgets. The effort and extravagance needed to mount an epic film paid off handsomely at the box office, for the genre became an immediate favorite with audiences. Epic films survived the tribulations of two world wars and the Depression and have retained the basic characteristics of size and glamour for more than a hundred years. Length was, and still is, one of the traits of the epic, though monolithic three- to four-hour spectacles like Gone with the Wind (1939) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) have been replaced today by such franchises as the Harry Potter films and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Although the form has evolved during many decades of existence, its central elements have been retained, refined, and modernized to suit the tastes of every new generation. The Encyclopedia of Epic Films identifies, describes, and analyzes those films that meet the criteria of the epic—sweeping drama, panoramic landscapes, lengthy adventure sequences, and, in many cases, casts of thousands. This volume looks at the wide variety of epics produced over the last century—from the silent spectacles of D. W. Griffith and biblical melodramas of Cecil B. DeMille to the historical dramas of David Lean and rollercoaster thrillers of Steven Spielberg. Each entry contains: Major personnel behind the camera, including directors and screenwriters Cast and character listings Plot summary Analysis Academy Award wins and nominations DVD and Blu-ray availability Resources for further study This volume also includes appendixes of foreign epics, superhero spectaculars, and epics produced for television, along with a list of all the directors in the book. Despite a lack of overall critical recognition and respect as a genre, the epic remains a favorite of audiences, and this book pays homage to a form of mass entertainment that continues to fill movie theaters. The Encyclopedia of Epic Films will be of interest to academics and scholars, as well as any fan of films made on a grand scale.
In the present volume, James Robinson shows how the Holiness movement contributed to the rise of Pentecostalism, with emphasis on those sectors that practiced divine healing. Although other scholars have undertaken to explore this story, Robinson's treatment is by far the most thorough examination to date. He draws productively on the burgeoning secondary literatures on Pentecostalism and healing, and brings to light frequently overlooked, yet revealing primary sources. The events narrated are fascinating in their own right, and are important to the histories of Pentecostalism and healing for how they clarify the processes by which divine healing was pursued, debated, and often disparaged. The text also contributes to larger medical and social histories, offering tantalizing glimpses of the roots of some of today's most popular and contested medical and religious responses to sickness and health.
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