The dominant influences that forged curriculum policy in relation to the literacy curriculum in New Zealand during the 1930s can be seen to be enmeshed in the politics of the wider context of what de Castell and Luke have identified as the "literacy ideologies of the British Empire". It was these literacy ideologies and concerns over the…

This monograph presents a sampling of papers delivered at a multidisciplinary conference focused on two dominant entities in African American cinema: religion and music. Papers in the monograph are grouped into three sections: the scholar's involvement in the filmmaking process, early Black theater and film, and contemporary issues in Black cinema…

To effectively study the political, socioeconomic, and cultural effects of the media, it is important to examine the context of the community in which the media operates. To do this, students must think critically and develop a historical perspective of the changing role of each media within this community. The term community is used in the…

This monograph presents a critical essay and a comprehensive 454-item bibliography on the contemporary African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee. The essay, entitled "African-American Folklore and Cultural History in the Films of Spike Lee" (Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson), analyzes Lee's filmmaking approach from a cultural and historical…

The conservative position on the crisis in the humanities is fundamentally antidemocratic and poses a danger to popular culture studies. This can be demonstrated by taking issue with conservatives' usage of the terms "crisis" and "politics." A crisis is an urgent problem, but by labeling something a crisis which is not,…

This student newsletter issue speaks to the subject of baseball. The first article, on who rules baseball, discusses the problems that the developing sport had with gambling, and the struggle between the owners and gangsters for control of the game. The article describes the scandal involving the Chicago White Sox in the 1919 World Series and the…

The developmental writing program at Michigan State University offers special attention to students who enter the university at a competitive disadvantage with respect to their ability to express themselves in writing. The primary goal of the program is to seek to empower students so that they will be able to express themselves in writing for the…

Rock videos have their antecedents in film and television images, although music in films is usually background music. Television made possible the live transmission of musical numbers with visuals. The musical television commercial is an amalgam of conventions, with background music suddenly erupting into text, unheard by the characters but…

The research literature on city magazines can be divided into five primary sources: books on magazines, popular magazines/journals and newspapers, business magazines, scholarly journals, and unpublished theses. "The New Yorker," founded in 1925 specifically for a sophisticated, metropolitan audience, is considered a precursor of the…

The advent of electronic mass communications in the 1920s forever altered the rhetoric, the audience, and the echoes or responses of the State of the Union Address. Presidents thereafter would use the occasion to speak primarily to the public and secondarily to the Congress. The echoes of the speech that reverberate within the Congress, among the…

Theories of taste are efforts to understand the processes of signification by which cultural forms take on meaning, and how subjects are inserted into such processes. One of these theories is the notion of "taste cultures," set forth by Herbert Gans in the 1960s and continued by George Lewis into the 1980s. A taste culture is an…

This teaching guide reflects the belief that popular music is an effective tool for teachers to use in presenting social studies lessons to students. Titles of songs representative of popular music from 1955 to 1982 are listed by subject matter and suggest a possible lesson to be used in teaching that particular issue. Subject areas listed…

In order to determine some of the effects of children's television, a study investigated the communicative response repertoire of primary female characters in Saturday morning children's cartoons as perceived by children. Those perceptions were then compared with those of the researchers, formulated through previous studies, showing a relationship…

This paper begins by discussing the difference between genre and gender, defining the former as the study of a systemic totality, and the latter as the split in the totality, reversal, upturning, and break-up of any systemic logic. Also discussed are (1) the difference between nature and culture, and the quarrel between essentialist and…

The 1987 NFL players' strike provided an opportunity to evaluate the importance of media gratification and viewing involvement in the development of audience reactions to a major sports labor conflict that produced gratification denial. Two groups of viewers of professional football--183 adult males in the Memphis, Tennessee area, interviewed by…