At the turn of the past century, the main function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which readers could make sense of modern life and imagine how to order their daily lives. Among those menus in the mid-1910s were several that mediated the interests of movie manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors, and the rapidly expanding audience of fans. This writing about the movies arguably played a crucial role in the emergence of American popular film culture, negotiating among national, regi...

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts cu...

One of the most puzzling lapses in accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievements that followed the fifteenth century, when the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement, would have been impossible without Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world.Richard Abel follows the r...

Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life. Tapping a wealth of primary source material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and ...

The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States' repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers' westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what "American Progress" came to mean. Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of "empty land" provoked continual resistance fro...

A study of how the film industry came to flourish in Detroit in the early years as locals were lured into the new picture theaters.Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday...

Politics by Other Means explores the fundamental question of how law can constrain political power by offering a pathbreaking account of the triumphant final decade of the struggle against apartheid.Richard Abel presents case studies of ten major legal campaigns including: challenges to pass laws; black trade union demands for recognition; state terror; censorship; resistance to the "independent" homelands; and treason trials.

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts cur...

Chronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of the response to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election and bias future elections in their favor.In December 2020, Donald Trump invited supporters to DC for what he promised would be a “wild” demonstration against Biden’s victory. On January 6, 2021, he directed the mob he had sum...

Chronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of Trump’s assault on truth and his populist attacks on expertise, as well as scientific and legal opposition to them.This book is about the threat of autocracy, which antedated Donald Trump and will persist after he leaves the stage. Pandering to populists, autocrats attack professional expertise in an Orwellian world, where “ignorance is...

For more than a decade, American lawyers have bewailed the ethical crisis in their profession, wringing their hands about its bad image. But their response has been limited to spending money on public relations, mandating education, and endlessly revising ethical rules. In Lawyers in the Dock, Richard L. Abel argues that these measures will do little or nothing to solve the problems illustrated by the six disciplinary case studies featured in this book unless the legal monopoly en...

Chronicling and analyzing resistance to the threat that autocracy poses to American liberal democracy, this book provides the definitive account of the roles that courts and elections played in holding Trump accountable for his actions.This book describes the many lawsuits brought against Trump and his supporters for their autocratic actions. Trump was found liable in two civil lawsuits: for nearly $100 million for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll and for nearly $500 m...