Popular History

In the late 1990s, Manchester was a city in upheaval. The devastation of the IRA bomb and the closure of the infamous Haçienda nightclub were seismic events that rocked the city’s confidence at a time when identikit bands were flooding its clubs and bars, fuelled on anthemic guitar rock and swagger. Stereotypes were everywhere, while the spirit of Manchester was silently suffocating. Mancunians: Where do we start, where do I begin? is the story of those who didn’t fit the typecast.

Updated information about every instrumental recording that reached number one on Billboard's popular recorded music charts from 1950 to the present. There is a great deal of information about every instrumental song that topped the pop charts, as well as every one of the recording artists, and each recorded song’s songwriters. The author conducted massive research to compile the interesting stories found in this book. The text covers the instrumentalists from Anton Karas’ recording of “Third Man Theme,” which reached number one in 1950, through Baauer reaching the top of the charts...

The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies, James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters’ inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness.

In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.

The funny, surprising, and exciting facts about your favorite musical instruments Musical instruments are more than just tools of creation. They are also historical artifacts and cultural symbols. Explore the music world and discover facts about instruments you never knew existed! We live in a world of technology and music. People use musical instruments to express themselves; others use them to build relationships and connect with different cultures. This project aims to teach people about musical instruments' fascinating history, structure, and importance in society today.

How can art help us make sense of the world? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. His singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples will change the way you listen to music and read poetry.

Her life began as a gutsy tomboy from a hardscrabble Arizona mining town — she was also a literary prodigy who published her first story at the age of ten. But then, in 1930, fifteen-year-old Jane Hall became an orphan; she soon found herself on Park Avenue, swept up in the surprising world of Depression-era debutantes, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s birthday balls, and the dazzling nightlife of Manhattan’s Café Society. Once her clever romances about life among the smart set began selling to national magazines, Hollywood’s top agent got her contract as a screenwriter with Metro-Goldwyn-...

The early history of Earth covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries and even millennia become virtually meaningless. The first four billion years of its development are known as the Precambrian period. For the first billion years or so, there was no life in Earth. Then the first single-celled life-forms, early bacteria and algae, began to emerge. We don’t know where they came from or even if they originated on this planet at all.

Accompanies BBC2's major new TV series and The Story of Music in 50 Pieces on Radio 3. Music is an intrinsic part of everyday life, and yet the history of its development from single notes to multi-layered orchestration can seem bewilderingly specialised and complex. In his dynamic tour through 40,000 years of music, from prehistoric instruments to modern-day pop, Howard Goodall does away with stuffy biographies, unhelpful labels and tired terminology.

Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for more than 50 years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary - a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints.

Who are you? It’s the most fundamental of human questions. Are you the type of person who tilts at windmills, or the one who prefers to view them from the comfort of an air-conditioned motorcoach? Our personalities are endlessly fascinating—not just to ourselves but also to our spouses, our parents, our children, our co-workers, our neighbors. As a highly social species, humans have to navigate among an astonishing variety of personalities.

How did the dollar come to play such a leading role in Argentina's national existence? How and why did this global currency become a local currency on the other end of the Western hemisphere? Through the reconstruction of the social and cultural history of the US dollar in Argentina, Luzzi and Wilkis provide original insight into this sidebar of the dollar's history, showing how it became a "local" currency even outside its country of origin.

Florence Maybrick was the first American woman to be sentenced to death in England - for murdering her husband, a crime she almost certainly didn't commit. Her 1889 trial was presided over by an openly misogynist judge who was later declared incompetent and died in an asylum. Hours before she was to be hanged, Queen Victoria reluctantly commuted her sentence to life in prison. In her opinion, a woman who would commit adultery, as Maybrick had admitted, would also kill her husband. Her children were taken from her; she never saw them again. Her mother worked for years to clear her name.

During its heyday, the Chelsea Hotel in New York City was a home and safe haven for Bohemian artists, poets, and musicians such as Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and Dee Dee Ramone. This oral history of the famed hotel peers behind the iconic facade and delves into the mayhem, madness, and brilliance that stemmed from the hotel in the 1980s and 1990s.

From USA Today bestselling Author Liz Gavin comes a fantasy like no other. Caught in a centuries-old war between Christians and Druids, a young High Priestess is Avalon’s last chance. Wise and powerful, Rowen is faithful to the Old Religion, but how can she obey the Goddess without betraying Caddaric? Can she trust Eochaid when he embodies everything she despises? Caddaric has been Rowen’s companion for countless lifetimes. Now she lives in the mortal plane, while he remains in mystic Avalon. Can Caddaric witness a flesh-and-blood man become Rowen’s protector? Will he risk losing ...

Is the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill ambassador or ugly American? Has baseball crafted its own image or instead been at the mercy of broader forces shaping our society and the globe? The Empire Strikes Out gives us the sweeping story of how baseball and America are intertwined in the export of “the American way."

How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic", as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? In Hope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture.

Texas legend has it that James Stephen Hogg, Governor of Texas from 1890 to 1894, named his daughters Ima and Ura, but that is only half-true: there never was a Ura. Ima had three brothers, Will, Mike, and Tom. Ima Hogg, who was born in 1882 and died in 1975 at age 93, became a legend in her own right, and this book is her story. It is also the story of the extraordinary bond between a father and a daughter.

Más que un libro, este objeto es un carnaval de cincuenta estaciones que desfila tras las bambalinas de la cultura mexicana. En él participan Tin Tan y Pita Amor, María Félix y Monsiváis, Piporro y Tongolele, Nahui Olin y Jorge Ibargüengoitia, los beats y Marilyn Monroe, Vitola y José Revueltas. Entre muchos, muchos otros. Mientras pasan, nos van contando de sus vicios, supersticiones, sus pleitos y apodos, los cuadrángulos amorosos que formaron y los cabarés que visitaron.

During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of the world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians who were trying to cope with the effect of communism on American society.