This fresh interpretation explains how an untutored musician changed music while at the same time playing an inadvertent role in the youth rebellion that has shaped the Baby Boomer generation into the 21st century.
Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a two-room house in Tupelo, MS, on January 8, 1935. He died at his Memphis home, Graceland, on August 16, 1977. In those 42 years, Elvis made an indelible impression on pop culture the world over. Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel: His Life and Our Times probes both the man and his influence, delving deeply into the personality of its protagonist, his needs and motivations, and the social and musical forces that shaped his career.
Elvis's musical talents and liabilities are explored, as are his records, films, and live performances and his relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, whom he allowed to manipulate him as a money-making machine. Readers will learn about Elvis's personal life, his devotion to conventional religious and political beliefs, and his decline into self-destruction and death. Finally, the book explores Elvis's impact on the musical and racial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, his legacy, and his importance in shaping a generation of Baby Boomers.
 • Photographs 
• A bibliography

Elvis Presley, Reluctant Rebel His Life and Our Times

Jeansonne, Glen

Luhrssen, David

Sokolovic, Dan

Humor & Entertainment

Praeger

An Armenian national raised in Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987) studied in the influential Stanislavski studio, renowned as the source of the "method" acting technique. Shortly after immigrating to New York in 1926, he created a sensation with an all-black production of Porgy (1927). He then went on to direct the debut Broadway productions of three of the most popular shows in the history of American musical theater: Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), and Carousel (1945). Mamoulian began working in film just as the sound revolution was dramatically changing the technical capabilities of the medium, and he quickly established himself as an innovator. Not only did many of his unusual camera techniques become standard, but he also invented a device that eliminated the background noises created by cameras and dollies. Seen as a rebel earlier in his career, Mamoulian gradually gained respect in Hollywood, and the Directors Guild of America awarded him the prestigious D. W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1983. In this meticulously researched biography, David Luhrssen paints the influential director as a socially conscious artist who sought to successfully combine art and commercial entertainment. Luhrssen not only reveals the fascinating personal story of an important yet neglected figure, but he also offers a tantalizing glimpse into the extraordinarily vibrant American film and theater industries during the twenties, thirties, and forties.

Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen (Screen Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University Press of Kentucky

Examining one of the most popular and enduring genres of American music, this encyclopedia of classic rock from 1965 to 1975 provides an indispensable resource for cultural historians and music fans.
More than movies, literature, television, or theater, rock music set the stage for the cultural shifts that occurred from 1965 to 1975. Led by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, rock became a self-conscious art form during these years, daring to go places unimaginable to earlier rock and roll musicians. The music and outspokenness of classic rock artists inspired and moved the era's social, cultural, and political developments with a power once possessed by authors and playwrights―and influenced many artists in younger generations of rock musicians. This single-volume work tracks the careers of well-known as well as many lesser-known but influential rock artists from the period, providing readers with a handy reference to the music from a critical, groundbreaking period in popular culture and its enduring importance.
The book covers rock artists who emerged or came to prominence in the period ranging 1965–1975 and follows their careers through the present. It also specifically defines the term "classic rock" and identifies the criteria that a song must meet in order to be considered as within the genre. While the coverage naturally includes the cultural importance and legacy of most well-known American and British bands of the era, it also addresses the influence of artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Readers will grasp how the music of the classic rock era was notably more sophisticated than what preceded it―an artistic peak from which most of contemporary rock has descended.
 • Provides readers with summaries of the careers of all significant rock artists during a peak period in the music's history
• Proposes a theory for understanding the development and history of rock music
• Presents the necessary historical and socioeconomic context to help readers more fully understand how rock music developed as it did during its formative decade
• Offers information in an easily searchable A–Z format accompanied by sidebars, a bibliography, and a timeline that serves students' research projects

Encyclopedia of Classic Rock

Larson, Michael

Greenwood

Vietnam War on Film illustrates how to employ film as a teaching tool. It also stands on its own as an account of the war and the major films that have depicted it.• Provides a unique guide to the Vietnam War experience for film history buffs, students and scholars of history, and fans of the cinema• Offers equal emphasis on the films themselves and the historical events depicted• Presents carefully researched and highly informative coverage • Stimulates debate over the various ways the war was interpreted and experienced

The Vietnam War on Film (Hollywood History)

Movies

ABC-CLIO

World War II on Film examines the war through the lens of 12 films. The movies selected include productions made during World War II and in each succeeding decade, providing a sense of how different generations perceive the war. World War II on Film provides a succinct yet well-grounded appraisal of that war as seen through 12 representative films. The book separates fact from fiction, showing where the movies were accurate and where they departed from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Each movie chosen represents a particular aspect of the conflict, including the air war over Europe, the condition of prisoners of war, Nazi atrocities, and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Unlike most histories of Hollywood during World War II or the genre of war movies, World War II on Film examines in depth the relation between the depictions of events, beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life as seen on film with reality as documented by historians or recorded by journalists or eye-witnesses to the war. The volume will appeal to high school and college readers, as well as general interest readers and film buffs. <ul> <li>Provides readers with the perspectives of non-American combatants</li> <li>Gives readers an understanding of American perspectives on the war</li> <li>Looks at the importance of the decisions made by individuals as well as the social forces that shaped the war</li> <li>Arms readers with an understanding of how ideology helped determine the decisions of wartime leaders</li> </ul>

World War II on Film (Hollywood History)

Reference

The Great Depression on Film (Hollywood History)

Encyclopedia of Punk Rock and New Wave: 1975–1985

Arts & Photography

Music

Bloomsbury Academic

Public interest in Adolf Hitler and all aspects of the Third Reich continues to grow as new generations ponder the moral questions surrounding Nazi Germany and its historical legacy. One aspect of Nazism that has not received sufficient attention from historians of the Third Reich is the doctrine’s origins in the Thule Society and its covert activities. A Munich occult group with a political agenda, the Thule Society was led by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a German commoner who had been adopted by nobility during a sojourn in the Ottoman Empire. After returning to Europe, Sebottendorff embraced a form of theosophy that stressed the racial superiority of Aryans. The Thule Society attempted to establish an anti-Semitic, working-class front for disseminating its esoteric ideas and founded the German Workers’ Party, which Hitler would later transform into the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. Several of the society’s members eventually assumed prestigious posts in the Third Reich. David Luhrssen has written the first comprehensive study of the society’s activities, its cultural roots, and its postwar ramifications in a historical-critical context. Both general readers and academics concerned with European cultural and intellectual history will find that Hammer of the Gods opens new perspectives on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe.

Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism

History

Europe

POTOMAC BOOKS

Grounded in extensive historical research, this eye-opening survey reveals the long-undervalued role secret societies have played in American history.• Based on scholarly research, this book appeals to both academics and the general public• Sheds light on familiar figures from American history• Includes photographs

Secret Societies and Clubs in American History

Business & Money

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Americans have been almost constantly at war since 1917. In addition to two world wars, the United States has fought proxy wars, propaganda wars, and a “war on terror,” among others. But even with the constant presence of war in American life, much of what Americans remember about those conflicts comes from Hollywood depictions. 
In War on the Silver Screen Glen Jeansonne and David Luhrssen vividly demonstrate how war movies have burned the images and impressions of those wars onto the American psyche more concretely than has the reality of the wars themselves. That is, our feelings about wars are generated less by what we learn through study and discourse than by powerful cinematic images and dialogue. Films are compressed, intense, and immediate and often a collective experience rather than a solitary one. Actors and drama provide the visceral impact necessary to form perceptions of history that are much more enduring than those generated by other media or experiences. 
War on the Silver Screen draws on more than a century of films and history, including classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Apocalypse Now, and The Hurt Locker, to examine the legacy of American cinema on twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes about war.

War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America's Perception of History

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Books by Luhrssen, David