Violence in American Popular Culture

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Violence in American Popular Culture is written by David Schmid and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1440832064 (ISBN 10) and 9781440832062 (ISBN 13).

This timely collection provides a historical overview of violence in American popular culture from the Puritan era to the present and across a range of media. Few topics are discussed more broadly today than violence in American popular culture. Unfortunately, such discussion is often unsupported by fact and lacking in historical context. This two-volume work aims to remedy that through a series of concise, detailed essays that explore why violence has always been a fundamental part of American popular culture, the ways in which it has appeared, and how the nature and expression of interest in it have changed over time. Each volume of the collection is organized chronologically. The first focuses on violent events and phenomena in American history that have been treated across a range of popular cultural media. Topics include Native American genocide, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and gender violence. The second volume explores the treatment of violence in popular culture as it relates to specific genres—for example, Puritan "execution sermons," dime novels, television, film, and video games. An afterword looks at the forces that influence how violence is presented, discusses what violence in pop culture tells us about American culture as a whole, and speculates about the future.