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During the past half century the Supreme Court has been a storm center of controversy. Since 1920 the Court has shattered precedent after precedent and has leveled a number of social, political, and economic landmarks. This perceptive study of the Court during that period received much critical acclaim when it was published in 1958 and revised ten years later. In this third edition, Alpheus Thomas Mason, one of the country’s leading authorities on the Court, updates his survey to include some of the most dramatic events in its history. In a new preface, Mason sets the tone for his treatment of the Burger Court, saying, “One thing seems certain: never before has the Supreme Court put its constitutional fingers in so many social, cultural, and political pies. The irony is that four of its present members were elected as ‘strict constructionist.’” Mason examines the dicta of various justices against the background of the times and the issues with which they were concerned: the judicial slaughter of legislation in the early thirties and Roosevelt’s retaliatory “courtpacking” attempt in 1937, judicially sanctioned federal interference in economic affairs, the bitterly contested integration decisions in 1954, and the explosive rulings of the 1960s supporting federal intervention in the fields of education, representation, and criminal justice. Mason also covers Earl Warren’s resignation as Chief Justice, the Senate’s refusal to confirm Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas for Chief Justice and Fortas’ later resignation under political pressure, the failure of two Nixon nominees—Haynesworth and Carswell—to receive Senate endorsement, the impeachment proceedings initiated against William O. Douglas, Nixon’s avowal to reverse the Warren Court’s protection of civil rights and liberties by appointing a “law and order” Court, and the implications of the Stanford Daily and Bakke cases. Professor Mason’s insight into the peculiar nature of the judicial function brings a deeper understanding of the Court as a creative force in American life.
Die Briten Charles Mason und Jeremiah Dixon, ein Astronom und ein Landvermesser, nehmen uns mit auf eine Grand Tour durch die dunklen Gefilde der Aufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert, von ihrer ersten gemeinsamen Expedition ans Kap der Guten Hoffnung ins vorrevolutionäre Amerika und wieder zurück nach England. Wir begegnen Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, einem chinesischen Feng-Shui-Meister, einem sprechenden Hund und einem Enten-Automaten. «Man liest und liest, stößt auf Stellen, Episoden und Sentenzen, bei denen einem der Mund offen stehen bleibt.» (Die Zeit) «Ein Roman wie eine gewaltige Symphonie aus der Neuen Welt, und ein Sprachkunstwerk von einem ganz Großen der US-Literatur.» (Stern)
Sarah Thomas's study moves beyond the image of the brooding, destructive man at odds with employers and his own star status to explore the complexity of Mason's career and star persona. Her analysis is structured around three strands central to understanding stardom: the star persona, industry and power, and screen performance. Thomas addresses the incredible range of Mason's star career – 1930s 'quota quickies'; 1940s Gainsborough melodramas; the desperate IRA man in Carol Reed's 'Odd Man Out' (1947); from the 1950s onwards, Hollywood classics including starring in Hitchcock's 'North by Northwest' (1959) and playing Humbert Humbert in Kubrick's 'Lolita' (1962). She also considers in depth his undervalued post-1962 career, off-screen celebrity status, non-film work, comic and vocal performances, and the star's own self-commentary. In doing so, she offers a new perspective on such subjects as power and powerlessness; public image and national identity, contextualizing Mason's career in wider histories of British, American and European transnational filmmaking.
An exploration of the enduring popularity of the television series Perry Mason and its universal reputation as the most formulaic program in the history of broadcast television. Perry Mason was one of the most successful television programs from the 1950s and remains one of the most influential crime melodramas from any period. The show's influence goes far beyond its nine-year tenure (1957–66), the millions of dollars it generated for its creators and for CBS, and the definitive identification it provided its star, Raymond Burr. Perry Mason has become a true piece of Americana, evolving through a formulaic approach that law professors continue to use today as a teaching tool. In his examination of Perry Mason, author Thomas Leitch looks at why this series has appealed to so many for so long and what the continued appeal tells us about Americans' attitudes toward lawyers and the law, then and now. Beginning with its roots in earlier detective fiction, stories of fictional attorneys, and the work of Erle Stanley Gardner (the show's creator), Leitch lays out the circumstances under which Perry Mason was conceived and marketed as a distinct franchise. The evolution of Perry Mason is charted here in an inclusive manner, discussing the show's broadcast history (ending with the series of two-hour telemovies that aired nearly twenty years after the original series ended) alongside its generic nature and place within popular culture, the show's ideological dynamic, and issues of authorship in the context of television. This concise study is an excellent tool for television and media scholars as well as fans of the Perry Mason series.
A novel that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Mason & Dixon - like Huckleberry Finn, like Ulysses - is one of the great novels about male friendship in anybody's literature." - John Leonard, The Nation Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse. Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason & Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment’s dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost. Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair—Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic—pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.
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