Liars Cheaters Evildoers

Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

In this compelling and cogent account Tom De Luca and John Buell chart the rise of what they rightly label as the demonization of American politics, showing how political campaigns often neglect debates over policy in favor of fights over the private character and personal lives of politicians.

One of the most enduring themes in American political discourse is the idea of decline. Since the very beginnings of the European settlement of North America there have been voices pointing to an inevitable regression of the people from the standards set by heroic ancestors. This discourse of decay has often taken the form of the jeremiad in which public intellectuals, pundits, and politicians point to the causes of decline and call for a return to older and nobler standards of conduct. The Jeremiad has seen a revival in the last 25 years. Jendrysik traces the history of this form of political discourse from its modern reinvention by Allan Bloom to its current uses by such figures as Bill O'Reilly and Hillary Clinton.

“This provocative, ambitious, and important book rewrites U.S. history, placing foundational leaders, unheralded prophets, insurgent social movements, pivotal judicial decisions, and central cultural values within an unfolding story of ongoing appeals to interracial mixing as a positive good. Deeply researched, deftly argued, and impressively able to move beyond the two categories of black and white, The United States of the United Races makes the mixed race movements of the recent past resonate with their many antecedents, showing the complex ways in which an emphasis on mixture has both deployed and destabilized racial categories.” —David Roediger, co-author of The Production of Difference Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America. Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America. Greg Carter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

If the twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democracy then something appears to have gone seriously wrong. Citizens around the world have become distrustful of politicians, sceptical about democratic institutions, and disillusioned about the capacity of democratic politics to resolve pressing social concerns. This shift in global attitudes has been explored in a vast body of writing that examines the existence of 'disaffected democrats' and 'democratic deficits'. Defending Politics meets this contemporary pessimism about the political process head on. In doing so, it aims to cultivate a shift from the bland and fatalistic 'politics of pessimism' that appears to dominate public life towards a more buoyant and engaged 'politics of optimism'. Matthew Flinders makes a highly unfashionable but incredibly important argument of almost primitive simplicity: democratic politics delivers far more than most members of the public appear to acknowledge and understand. If more and more people are disappointed with what modern democratic politics delivers then is it possible that the fault lies with those who demand too much, fail to acknowledge the essence of democratic engagement and ignore the complexities of governing in the twentieth century rather than with democratic politics itself? Is it possible that the public in many advanced liberal democracies have become 'democratically decadent' in the sense that they take what democratic politics delivers for granted? Would politics be interpreted as failing a little less if we all spent a little less time emphasising our individual rights and a little more time reflecting on our responsibilities to society and future generations? Democratic politics remains 'a great and civilizing human activity... something to be valued almost as a pearl beyond price in the history of the human condition', as Bernard Crick stressed in his classic In Defence of Politics fifty years ago. But it is also a far more fragile system of governing than many people appear to realize. By returning to and updating Crick's arguments, this book provides an honest account of why democratic politics matters and why we need to reject the arguments of those who would turn their backs on 'mere politics' in favour of more authoritarian, populist or technocratic forms of governing. In rejecting fashionable fears about the 'end of politics' and daring to suggest that the public, the media, pressure groups, academics and politicians are all part of the problem as well as part of the cure, this book provides a fresh, provocative, and above all optimistic view of the achievements and future potential of democratic politics.

"If you ask a federal prosecutor to describe an average day at work, chances are you will not hear about a jury trial. Yet when prosecutors talk about how they do their jobs and what their jobs mean to them, jurors seem to be everywhere. It is the figure and role of this 'make-believe' or 'imagined' juror in the professional lives of prosecutors that is the subject of this book. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of federal prosecutors, it explores this paradoxical feature of the federal legal landscape: though laypeople only infrequently participate in federal trials, make-believe jurors have an outsized presence in the decision-making and professional imagination of some of our most powerful legal actors. In their imagined jurors, prosecutors discover a critical resource for making sense of their ill-defined directives to seek justice and represent the United States. They also find a means of thinking of discussing mercy, acknowledging evolving community mores, and discovering themselves as moral actors rather than line attorneys carrying out supervisors' directives. Even in a period of infrequent jury trials, this book shows, the very existence of the jury system-and the possibility of facing a jury-use their discretion with reference to views of others. At the same time, it highlights the limitation of legal system where jurors are primarily imaginary, calling for reforms that would foster a more inclusive and effective American jury"--

Every war has refugees; every revolution has exiles. Most of the refugees of the French Revolution mourned the demise of the monarchy. Lessons from America examines an unusual group who did not. Doina Pasca Harsanyi looks at the American experience of a group of French liberal aristocrats, early participants in the French Revolution, who took shelter in Philadelphia during the Reign of Terror. The book traces their path from enlightened salons to revolutionary activism to subsequent exile in America and, finally, back to government posts in France&—illuminating the ways in which the French experiment in democracy was informed by the American experience.

Fascism and Political Theory offers both students and researchers a thematic analysis of fascism, focusing on the structural and ideological links between fascism, capitalism and modernity. Intended as a critical discussion of the origins and development of fascist ideology, each chapter deals with a core substantive issue in political theory relevant to the study of fascism and totalitarianism, beginning with an assessment of the current state of debate. The emphasis on formal ideology in contemporary Anglo-American historiography has increased our awareness of the complexity and eclectic nature of fascist ideologies which challenge liberalism and social democracy. Yet in too many recent works, a programmatic or essentialist reading of fascist ideology as a ‘secular religion’ is taken for granted, while researchers remain preoccupied with the search for an elusive ‘fascist minimum’. In this book Woodley emphasizes that many outstanding questions remain, including the structural and ideological links between fascism and capitalism, the social construction of fascist nationalism, and the origins of fascist violence in European colonialism. This volume consolidates the reader’s theoretical understanding and provides the interdisciplinary skills necessary to understand the concrete social, economic and political conditions which generate and sustain fascism. A timely critique of culturalist and revisionist approaches in fascism studies which provides a concise overview of theoretical debates between liberalism, Marxism and poststructuralism, this text will be of great interest to students of politics, modern history and sociology.