During the first half of the nineteenth century, the penny presses of the industrial East treated brothels as a mundane, if annoying, aspect of city life. But later in the century, reformers and mainstream papers began to push back against this repre...

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...

In an appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, 'including 'and' and 'the'. Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment...

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...

The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, w...

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...

There is a hunger for conspiracy news in America. Hundreds of Internet websites, magazines, newsletters, even entire publishing houses, disseminate information on invisible enemies and their secret activities, sub-versions, and coverups. Those who su...

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...