As television grew more enticing for both viewers and filmmakers in the 1950s, several independent film producers with knowledge of making low-cost films and radio shows transferred their skills to producing shows for the small screen. Rather than funding live programs that were popular at the time, these producers saw the value in pre-taped shows, which created large financial returns through episode reruns. This low-cost, high-yield production model resulted in what are known and beloved as "B" television shows. Part historical account and part filmography, this book documents the careers of over a dozen "B" television producers. It chronicles the rise of situation comedies and crime dramas and explores the minds behind popular shows like My Little Margie, The Lone Ranger, Lassie, Highway Patrol and Sea Hunt. Divided into 14 chapters of producer profiles, this work is rich in both trivia and critical assessments of the first years of television. A chapter detailing the work of early female television producers rounds out the text.
A scathing satire about the current state of the consolidated mainstream broadcast media, an insight into the way the political parties have managed to convert broadcasting into a partisan screech-fest, and a spotlight on who and what really runs the media.
A stronghold of Scotch-Irish settlement, Augusta County commands great interest among genealogists because thousands of 18th- and 19th-century families passed through it en route to the West. J. Lewis Peyton's History of Augusta County, Virginia is the standard work on the county. It is essentially a narrative account of Augusta from its aboriginal beginnings and Spotswood's discovery of the Valley of Virginia through the Civil War. Genealogists will value the book, in part, as a companion volume to such Augusta County source record collections as Lyman Chalkley's Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia. Of greater importance to genealogists, however, are the genealogical and biographical sketches of a number pioneering Augusta County families found in the Appendix to the volume.
A masterful account of the Civil War's turning point in the tradition of James McPherson's Crossroads of Freedom. In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy—one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society. In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin, a renowned cultural historian, reexamines the challenges that Lincoln encountered during that anguished summer 150 years ago. In an original and incisive study of character, Slotkin re-creates the showdown between Lincoln and General George McClellan, the “Young Napoleon” whose opposition to Lincoln included obsessive fantasies of dictatorship and a military coup. He brings to three-dimensional life their ruinous conflict, demonstrating how their political struggle provided Confederate General Robert E. Lee with his best opportunity to win the war, in the grand offensive that ended in September of 1862 at the bloody Battle of Antietam.
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