Part of
This collection contains book-length works authored and edited by Virginia Tech undergraduate and graduate students in collaboration with VT Publishing. Often these books are the culmination of class projects for advanced or capstone courses. The book provides to students the opportunity to write, edit, and ultimately publish their own book for the world to learn from and enjoy.
Politics, Propaganda, and Pop Culture is a senior capstone book project that examines the role of television in projecting, shaping, and amplifying Cold War ideologies.
In the context of the global Cold War, television became the most important medium of communicating ideologies, values, and worldviews to citizens at home and societies abroad. The essays in this volume examine this truism at a variety of discrete historical moments, including the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; the broadcast of experimental nuclear detonations in the American desert; the persistence of fascism in the resurrection of the postwar Italian television service; and coverage of the 1972 World Chess Championship. The authors show that television intervened in social questions such as the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, and shifting representations of gender, but not always in the ways that we might expect. The volume demonstrates that programming can indeed shape attitudes, but just as important are the structures that underpin shifting industrial conditions of television production, distribution and reception.
Book Details
The saying goes that well-behaved women rarely make history. For centuries, American women have been carving out spaces of their own in a male-dominated world. From politics, to entertainment, to their personal lives, women have been making their mark on the American landscape since the nation’s inception, often ignored or overlooked by those creating the record. This collection takes the long view of the American woman and examines her transgressive behavior through the decades. Including stories of women enslaved, early celebrities, engineers, and more, these essays demonstrate how there is no such thing as an “average” woman, as even those ordinary women are found doing extraordinary things. This collection comes at a particularly poignant time, as August 2020 markedthe 100th anniversary of the ratification and adoption of the19th amendment, which – in a landmark for women’s right – granted American women the right to vote.
Book Details
Deejaying, emceeing, graffiti writing, and breakdancing. Together, these artistic expressions combined to form the foundation of one of the most significant cultural phenomena of the late 20th century — Hip-Hop. Rooted in African American culture and experience, the music, fashion, art, and attitude that is Hip-Hop crossed both racial boundaries and international borders.
The Foundations of Hip-Hop Encyclopedia is a general reference work for students, scholars, and virtually anyone interested in Hip-Hop’s formative years. In thirty-six entries, it covers the key developments, practices, personalities, and products that mark the history of Hip-Hop from the 1970s through the early ‘90s. All entries are written by students at Virginia Tech who enthusiastically enrolled in a course on Hip-Hop taught by Dr. Anthony Kwame Harrison, author of Hip Hop Underground, and co-taught by Craig E. Arthur. Because they are students writing about issues and events that took place well before most of them were born, their entries capture the distinct character of young people reflecting back on how a music and culture that has profoundly shaped their lives came to be. Future editions are planned as more students take the class, making this a living, evolving work.
Book DetailsStandpoints: Black Feminist Knowledges contains essays that explore Black feminist thought through a diverse set of lenses. The essays are divided among sections on localized framing and stereotypes, global perspectives, and the future. The first section of the book analyzes the representations of Black women and the stereotypes that still confine African American women generations after enslavement. Then, the global oppression of Black women is discussed, along with its resistance. Lastly, the book encourages the reader to imagine a new future and engage with activist culture that rejects sexism and racism. This volume is edited by Dr. Andrea Baldwin, Dr. Ashley V. Reichelmann, and Dr. Anthony Kwame Harrison and authored by the students from Baldwin’s inaugural Black Feminisms graduate course in the Virginia Tech Department of Sociology.
Book Details
The 1960s was a time of reform and revolution in America, brought on by individuals willing to challenge political, social, and cultural norms. Politics, Power, & Playboy explores the American mindset during this turbulent and transformative time in American history. Each chapter examines instances of Americans confronting power, whether it be public support for President John F. Kennedy, antiwar protests at Virginia universities, the sexual revolution, or the Black Power and Black is Beautiful movements. Altogether, these chapters will help readers appreciate the crucial events and movements of a decade that would deeply shape the course of American history.
This is a volume in the Virginia Tech Student Publications series. Books in this series are authored and edited by Virginia Tech undergraduate or graduate students and published in collaboration with Virginia Tech Publishing. Politics, Power, & Playboy grew out of the Spring 2019 undergraduate capstone history research seminar, “America in the 1960s,” at Virginia Tech.
Book DetailsOrganized, authored, and edited over the course of five months by a class of eighteen Virginia Tech undergraduate students, Welcome to the Beatles represents their collective contribution to the larger scholarship on the most important band in rock history. The chapters build upon the work of noted author and historian Mark Lewisohn and take into account many of the recurring issues in Beatles historiography. The student authors have the advantage of being generations apart from the Beatles and can reexamine the band without any first-hand experience with the Fab Four. The result is a book that raises significant issues about the whole of Beatles history.
Book Details
In 2013 the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG) launched the online essay series “RE: Reflections and Explorations” for Virginia Tech graduate students to share articles and commentaries about their evolving research, interests, and experiences on topics relevant to the VTIPG mission. The “RE: Reflections and Explorations” book series features essays from the online platform selected and edited by VTIPG Director Max Stephenson Jr. and affiliated research faculty member Lyusyena Kirakosyan.
This volume, the second in the “RE: Reflections and Explorations” series, treats dimensions of the broader trends of policy and governance at all scales of analysis, examining the elemental issue of democratic agency and obstacles to its exercise, the difficulties inherent for self-governance in inter-governmental cooperation and in racial, ethnic, and religious diversity and the antagonisms resulting from rapid widespread economic, social, and technological shifts. These chapters investigate the dynamics of political change and movements in a time when the prevailing social imaginary makes such action, always difficult, especially tough to achieve.
The book is divided into seven sections, each of which addresses a discrete topical concern. In one form or another, however, the chapters all address the consequences for Western liberalism of its embrace of neoliberalism’s elevation of capitalism to a governing role and its view of freedom as atomistic individualism. By illuminating deeper political trends in the United States, the authors both give hope and signal the alarm that social change is necessary if self-governance is to be preserved.
Book Details
