Though we think of the 1960s and the early '70s as a time of radical social, cultural, and political upheaval, we tend to picture the action as happening on campuses and in the streets. Yet the rise of the underground newspaper was equally daring and...

As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science. And, indeed, television soon offered a breathtaking banquet of scientific images and ideas – both factu...

Across America, newspapers that have defined their cities for over a century are rapidly failing, their circulations plummeting even as opinion-soaked Web outlets like the "Huffington Post" thrive. Meanwhile, nightly news programs shock viewers with...

We live in a surveillance society. Anyone who uses a credit card, cell phone, or even search engines to navigate the Web is being monitored and assessed – and often in ways that are imperceptible to us. The first general introduction to the growing f...

Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891-1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that...

For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a "theater of the mind". This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In "Theater...

"How do we think?" N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition h...

Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography's ability to "touch" us t...

Previously only ever seen, briefly, at the scene of their demise, corpses have become a central part of many popular American television shows in the twenty-first century. From "CSI" to "Six Feet Under", extended portrayals of dead bodies – in the mo...

From the fundamental rights proclaimed in the American and French declarations of independence to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Hannah Arendt's furious critiques, the definition of what it means to be human has been hotly debated...