Unlikely Fame

This unique book depicts the stories of Americans born in poverty, who achieved national or international fame. Accessible to students and lay readers, this scholarly study describes poverty as a disability that typically stunts important areas of growth in childhood. Wagner shows how poverty hampers individuals and groups for their entire lives, even many of those who emerge from poverty. Examples of individuals with difficult childhoods who faced residual lifelong challenges are presented in the stories of 27 Americans, including athlete Babe Ruth, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, singer Billie Holliday, author Jack London, actress Marilyn Monroe, black leader Malcolm X, singer Johnny Cash, comedian Richard Pryor, author Stephen King, and entertainer Oprah Winfrey. In over 200 engaging and accessible pages, Unlikely Fame yields insight into successful individuals and how they coped, adapted and ultimately achieved success.

Zambian born Joseph Kalimbwe writes about Africa downward spiral political leadership. He tells how the Reagan years in the 1980s must be used by African leaders to solve economic problems. Zambia President Rupiah Banda is condermed for his slow path economic policies and how the continent struggles to live up to the expectations of the 21st century. He also explains emotionally the impact of the loss of his mother on him and his long lost father who died when he was 2. He concludes with the factors affecting the education system including his time at the University of Namibia where he served as President.

During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such. Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.

Based on a comprehensive quantitative study, Julia Sinnig shows that the impact social media influencers have on brand-related outcomes depends on the identification of consumers with social media influencers. Additionally, the cultural characteristics of countries in which consumers live play a significant role as to how consumers’ identification with social media influencers impacts their purchase intentions for brands that are advertised by these influencers. Through these conceptually and empirically profound analyses, the author detects interesting implications for the management of brands in the context of social media and brand management. Especially when it comes to choosing the most suitable social media influencer for brand cooperations it is not the origin of fame that counts, but whether customers identify with the influencer in the right way.

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This book analyzes sensationalized Nazi and Holocaust representations in Anglo-American cultural and political discourses. Recognizing that this history is increasingly removed from contemporary life, it explains how irreverent representations can help rejuvenate the story for successive generations of new learners. Surveying seventy-five-years of transatlantic activities, the work erects counterposing categorizes of “constructive and destructive memorializing,” providing scholars with a new framework for elucidating both this history and its historicization.

A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with the slave trade and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, “Bostoners” aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America’s history.