Books published by University of Wisconsin Press

The educational opportunities of the new millennium are endless if our efforts are informed. If not, they will be catalogs of failures or half-successes. The essays in this collection, written by some of the leading scholars in Popular Culture Studies, turn the page on the new millennium to see what are the directions of approach and the opportunities to be gained in recognition of the compelling need for studies in everyday cultures. These essays help chart the course for themes and directions of such studies into the new world that is waiting to be born. Their value is indispensable.

The author of this book describes in detail the chronology of the year 1927, when the great New York Yankees became The Wonder Team - probably baseball's best team ever. That club included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, Tony Lazzeri, Earle Combs, Herb Pennock, Bob Meusel, and Wilcy Moore. Also part of the narrative are owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, manager Miller Huggins, business manager Ed Barrow, and scout Paul Krichell. No participant of that great team is omitted. The author's chronicle is thoroughly buttressed by interviews, research, and records. In detailing the events leading to the 1927 World Series, Trachtenberg weaves players' profiles and histories, along with those of the Yankee owner, management, coaches, scouts, trainer, and batboy/mascot. The reader becomes acquainted with players' personalities, baseball skills, records, and hijinks on and off the field. Players' backgrounds, how they became involved in the great ball club, how they were viewed by the press, how their careers flourished and waned - all of this is covered in The Wonder Team. Also included are 1927 stats, photos from Yankee archives, and biographical sketches.

This volume contains fourteen essays by authoritative academics studying the field of mystery and detective fiction. The essays all concentrate on the first novels in established series, analyzing ways in which the opening books of the series do or do not create patterns followed in succeeding novels.

This is the first study of Hollywood by an anthropologist. Jorja Prover examines how different groups of individuals, separated from one another superficially by ethnicity, race, and sex, function as writers in Hollywood. She describes the white "majority" Hollywood writers and explores their concerns and creative processes, and then discusses other writers who, until recently, have been virtually invisible in the entertainment industry--women, the physically challenged, gays, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians. In detailing their efforts at gaining professional acceptance, these writers introduce new, previously unmentioned issues involving access, advancement, talent, sexual harassment, and discrimination.

Even before the 1889 baseball season began, battle lines had been drawn. In the National League, the Players Brotherhood, challenged the insulting classification system devised by league owners. While American Association players had no Brotherhood, they proved capable of organizing impromptu responses to abusive treatment by owners.

This work emphasizes the particularly American variant of this marginal youth movement and the damage it has caused to society.

The doctor as the main character of a novel is largely a phenomenon of the 1900s. Noting the great popularity of the doctor novel and its contribution to literature, the author of this study characterizes and examines a significant subtype the medical research novel, whose protagonist is the doctor or medical student searching for answers to underlying medical questions or for cures or pain relief through research. Through close examination of seven novels and citations from eleven others, the author illustrates how this subtype of literature deals with basic psychological, moral, and metaphysical questions as well as medical and scientific ones."

This book looks at the character types and plot patterns found in the urban stories of William Potter (known as O. Henry), analyzing how these elements structure his tales and contribute to his popular formulas. Karen Charmaine Blansfield considers how the turbulent conditions of New York at the turn of the century helped to launch his career.

This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this book's focus is on a central and dominant feature humor and comedy."

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes.

Private Eyes is the complete map to what Raymond Bhandler called "the mean streets," the exciting world of the fictional private eye. It is intended to entertain current PIfans and to make new ones."

Ed McBain is a master of tone. He turns his material just a little off-axis. George Dove s study of McBain s imaginary city is both insightful and realistic. He gets at the heart of this major writer of police procedurals by examining the geography, the day-to-day happenings, and literary quality."

This is the first collection of short stories by W.T. Ballard. This volume is just a sampling of Ballard's most famous character Bill Lennox, a selection for both the connoisseur of crime and the lover of good, fast-moving crime/adventure stories.

Greyhound, the largest and most enduring bus company in the US, had its beginning in the 1920s in the frigid climes of northern Minnesota. This work shows how the Greyhound Corporation has turned into a multimillion-dollar company.

This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.

A Pillar of Fire to Follow concerns the Indian dramas, a series of popular, nineteenth-century American melodramas that deal with the interaction of Indians and Anglo-Europeans. Priscilla Sears has analyzed these works from a mythological point of view, concentrating on the myths of Indian and Anglo-European identity and destiny and the ways in which they relieve the guilt emanating from contemporary Indian policy and the symbolic betrayal of fathers.

This collection of insightful essays by outstanding artists, anthropologists, historians, classicists and humanists was developed to broaden the study of popular culture and to provide instances of original and innovative interdisciplinary approaches.Its first purpose is to broaden the study of popular culture which is too often regarded in the academic world as the entertainment and leisure time activities of the 20th century. Second, the collection gives recognition to the fact that a number of disciplines have been investigating popular phenomena on different fronts, and it is designed to bring examples of these disciplines together under the common rubric of "popular culture." Related to this is a third purpose of providing instances of original and innovative interdisciplinary approaches. Last, the collection should be a worthwhile contribution to the component disciplines as well as to the study of popular culture.

This collection of essays probes the values in a variety of authors who have had in common the fact of popularity and erstwhile reputation. Why were they esteemed? Who esteemed them? And what has become of their reputations, to readers, to the critic himself? No writer here has been asked to justify the work of his subject, and reports and conclusions about this wide variety of creative writers vary, sometimes emphasizing what the critic believes to be enduring qualities in the subject, in several cases finding limitations in what that writer has to offer us today.

Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.

This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

The ""Study Smart"" series, designed for students from junior high school through lifelong learning programmes, teaches skills for research and note-taking, provides exercises to improve grammar, and reveals secrets for putting these skills together in essays.

This text contends that Helen of Troy, and in particular the use of her image, is a crucial emblem for much of Western thought and literature and suggests that it has been stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted and coveted throughout the course of history.

Deals with acids and bases and liquids, solutions, and colloids, giving detailed descriptions of lecture demonstrations for college and secondary school chemistry classes.

An autobiography of Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese American who came to this country as a twenty-year-old graduate student and stayed to become one of America's most innovative intellectuals, whose work has explored the aesthetic and moral dimensions of human relations with landscape, nature, and environment.