American Cinematographers In The Great War 1914 1918

A history of American cameramen covering the news of World War I, from the dangerous front line and the risk of execution to red tape and censorship. At the start of hostilities in World War I, when the United States was still neutral, American newsreel companies and newspapers sent a new kind of journalist, the film correspondent, to Europe to record the Great War. These pioneering cameramen, accustomed to carrying the Kodaks and Graflexes of still photography, had to lug cumbersome equipment into the trenches. Facing dangerous conditions on the front, they also risked summary execution as supposed spies while navigating military red tape, censorship, and the business interests of the film and newspaper companies they represented. Based on extensive research in European and American archives, American Cinematographers in the Great War, 1914–1918 follows the adventures of these cameramen as they managed to document and film the atrocities around them in spite of enormous difficulties. “The first book to explore the work and working conditions of American cinematographers active on the different fronts of the First World War. It is a pioneering study which has already attracted a good deal of attention in the academic and archive world.” —Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Transatlantic Relations and the Great War explores the relations between the Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and the modern US democracy and how that relationship developed over decades until it ended in a final rupture. As the First World War drew to a close in late 1918, the Mid-European Union was created to fill the vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe as the old Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was falling apart. One year before, in December 1917, the United States had declared war on Austria-Hungary and, overnight, huge masses of immigrants from the Habsburg Empire became enemy aliens in the US. Offering a major deviation from traditional historiography, this book explains how the countdown of mostly diplomatic events in that fatal year 1918 could have taken an alternative course. In addition to providing a narrative account of Austrian-Hungarian relations with the US in the years leading up to the First World War, the author also demonstrates how an almost total ignorance of the affairs of the Dual Monarchy was to be found in the US and vice versa. This book is a fascinating and important resource for students and scholars interested in modern European and US history, diplomatic relations, and war studies.

Assesses how America’s film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period. This is the definitive account of how America’s film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. He traces the development of the war’s memory in films dealing with combat on the ground and in the air, the role of women behind the lines, returning veterans, and through the social problem and horror genres. Hammond first examines movies that dealt directly with the war and the men and women who experienced it. He then turns to the consequences of the war as they played out across a range of films, some only tangentially related to the conflict itself. Hammond finds that the Great War acted as a storehouse of motifs and tropes drawn upon in the service of an industry actively seeking to deliver clearly told, entertaining stories to paying audiences. Films analyzed include The Big Parade, Grand Hotel, Hell’s Angels, The Black Cat, and Wings. Drawing on production records, set designs, personal accounts, and the advertising and reception of key films, the book offers unique insight into a cinematic remembering that was a product of the studio system as it emerged as a global entertainment industry. “Hammond’s intelligent and insightful account of the formation of cinematic treatments of the Great War in America constitutes a major addition to the critical literature on film. It acts as a prism through which to see refracted multiple themes central to the social and cultural history of the interwar years.” — Jay Winter, author of War beyond Words: Languages of Memory from the Great War to the Present

The twentieth century generated tens of thousands of hours of American newsfilm but not the scholarly apparatus necessary to analyze and contextualize them. Assembling new approaches to the study of U.S. newsfilm in cinema and television, this book makes a long overdue critical intervention in the field of film and media studies by addressing the format’s inherent intermediality; its mediation of "events" for local, national, and transnational communities; its distinctive archival legacies; and, consequently, its integral place in film and television studies more broadly. This collection brings fresh, contemporary methodologies and analysis to bear on a vast amount of material that has languished in relative obscurity for far too long.

When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves--and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war. Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith Wharton, Nellie Bly, and more than thirty other American women who worked as war reporters. As Dubbs shows, stories by these journalists brought in women from the periphery of war and made them active participants--fully engaged and equally heroic, if bearing different burdens and making different sacrifices. Women journalists traveled from belligerent capitals to the front lines to report on the conflict. But their experiences also brought them into contact with social transformations, political unrest, labor conditions, campaigns for women's rights, and the rise of revolutionary socialism. An eye-opening look at women's war reporting, An Unladylike Profession is a portrait of a sisterhood from the guns of August to the corridors of Versailles. Purchase the audio edition.

This A–Z encyclopedia is a one-stop resource for understanding the history and evolution of the national anthem in American politics, culture, and mythology, as well as controversies surrounding its emergence as a lightning rod for political protests and statements. This reference work serves as a comprehensive resource for understanding all aspects of the national anthem and its significance in U.S. history and American life and culture. It covers the origins of the song and its selection as the nation's official anthem and acknowledges other musical compositions proposed as national anthems. It discusses famous performances of the anthem and details laws and court decisions related to its performance, and it also explains notable phrases in its lyrics, describes the meaning of the national anthem to different demographic groups, and surveys presentations and celebrations of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in popular culture. Moreover, it summarizes famous political protests undertaken during renditions of the national anthem, from the Black Power salutes by U.S. athletes during the 1968 Olympics to the kneeling protests undertaken by Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players to bring attention to racial inequality in America.