Dope Girls

A drug panic. Murder. Terrifying and mysterious black and Chinese immigrants. Dope Kings. Jazz. War. An actress dead of an overdose. Dope Girls is about the transformation of drug use into a national menace. It revolves around the death in 1918, in the last furious stages of the First World War, of Billie Carleton, a West End-musical actress. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor, and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. Around them, in the streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and in Chinatown, swirled a raffish group of seedy and rebellious hedonists. And so the drug problem was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.

A talented young actress becomes fatally ensnared in London's mysterious and glittery drug culture of the early 20th century. Trina Robbins' comic book adaptation of Sax Rohmer's sensational 1919 novel. DOPE was both the first novel to speak openly about the world's international drug trade, and the first story to center around the death of a celebrity by drug overdose. As for the art, it is considered by many (including Trina herself) to be her best work ever as an illustrator.

There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image involved the heroic peasants of The Good Earth and Dragon Seed fighting against Japanese invasion in wartime tributes to the West's ally, Nationalist China. The cinema's split level response is also traced through the images of the ultimate Oriental villain, the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and the timeless Chinese hero, the intelligent and benevolent detective Charlie Chan.Filling a longstanding gap in Cinema and Cultural History, the book is founded in fresh research into Hollywood's shifting representations of China and its people.

Born a dope baby, I became a college graduate, a mother of three, an entrepreneur, an Income Tax professional and an NFL wife. I was raised in the 80's and 90's amid the crack cocaine epidemic, the worst and deadliest drug surge the United States had ever seen that plagued predominantly low-income African American communities. This is a story of how the cheap drug caused devastating effects not only to the addict we come to know as Rose, but also to me, Rose's youngest child. Almost every encounter we have with a person who suffers from addiction focuses primarily on their failed attempts to achieve sobriety, a typical life of crime to support their habit, and in some positive cases, their re-acclimation back into society and the monstrous task of maintaining a drug free life. We almost never dissect what the family of an addict experiences. I felt moved to write this book to offer a deep and personal look into how drug addiction has detrimental effects on the family members of addicts as well, particularly their children. This is my story. Let's rummage through every human emotion from fear and terror, to hope and despair, and finally freedom.This book will help you embrace your own life's challenges and learn to shed the shame of circumstances you couldn't or can't control, as you navigate how to live with other people's choices.

'A brilliant cultural history.' Irish Examiner Girls behave badly. If they're not obscenity-shouting, pint-swigging ladettes, they're narcissistic, living dolls floating around in a cloud of self-obsession, far too busy twerking to care. And this is news. In this witty and wonderful book, Carol Dyhouse shows that where there's a social scandal or a wave of moral outrage, you can bet a girl is to blame. Whether it be stories of 'brazen flappers' staying out and up all night in the 1920s, inappropriate places for Mars bars in the 1960s or Courtney Love's mere existence in the 1990s, bad girls have been a mass-media staple for more than a century. And yet, despite the continued obsession with their perceived faults and blatant disobedience, girls are infinitely better off today than they were a century ago. This is the story of the challenges and opportunities faced by young women growing up in the swirl of the twentieth century, and the pop-hysteria that continues to accompany their progress.

A shop girl wins a newspaper competition and is transformed overnight into a transatlantic celebrity. An aristocrat swaps high society for the film studio when she 'consents' to perform in a series of films, thus legitimising acting for what some might have considered a 'low' art. Stories like these were the stuff of newspaper headlines in 1920s and reflected a 'craze' for the cinema. They also demonstrated radical changes in attitudes and values within society in the wake of World War I. Chris O'Rourke investigates the myths and material practices that grew up around film actors during the silent era. The book sheds light on issues such as the social and cultural reception of cinema, the participatory film culture expressed through fan magazines, instructional booklets and movie star competitions, and the working conditions encountered by actors behind-the-scenes of silent films. Drawing on extensive research and a wealth of archival materials, O'Rourke examines how dreams of stardom were fuelled and exploited in the interwar period, and reconstructs the personal narratives and experiences of the first generation to imagine making a living on screen.In doing so, he reveals a missing - and much sought after - piece of cinematic history to bring to life the developing industries, social attitudes and norms of a period of enormous change.

Scholarly interest in the history of crime has grown dramatically in recent years and, because scholars associated with this work have relied on a broad social definition of crime which includes acts that are against the law as well as acts of social banditry and political rebellion, crime history has become a major aspect not only of social history, but also of cultural as well as legal studies. This collection explores how the history of crime provides a way to study time, place and culture. Adopting an international and interdisciplinary perspective to investigate the historical discourses of crime in Europe and the United States from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, these original works provide new approaches to understanding the meaning of crime in modern western culture and underscore the new importance given to crime and criminal events in historical studies. Written by both well-known historians and younger scholars from across the globe, the essays reveal that there are important continuities in the history of crime and its representations in modern culture, despite particularities of time and place.

Behind the Eight Ball: Sex for Crack Cocaine Exchange and Poor Black Women documents an American tragedy that highlights the widening gap between social and economic classes. In their own words, poor black womennameless, faceless, and marginalized by povertyshare the details of their lives before and after crack cocaine invaded their communities, each recalling the circumstances of her introduction to the drug and her first experience using sex to support her addiction. These candid interviews expose the socioeconomic changes in inner-city neighborhoods that created the perfect conditions for a crack stronghold; the crack cocaine economy's impact on the lives of inner-city residents; and the social and familial consequences of crack addiction among poor, black women.