21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television

21st Century Retro:
Author: Debarchana Baruah
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2021-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839457211

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the past but direct their energies towards history's non-events and anti-heroic subjectivities. Debarchana Baruah offers a vocabulary to discuss these, using Mad Men as a primary case study and supplementing the analysis with other examples from the US and around the world. She takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to studying film and television, drawing from history, memory, and nostalgia discourses, and layering them with theories of intertextuality, paratexts, and actor-networks. The book's compositions style invites discussions from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

Mad Men Unbuttoned

Mad Men Unbuttoned
Author: Natasha Vargas-Cooper
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2010-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0061991007

Mad Men Unbuttoned, footnotes to the show and the era, including these fascinating tidbits: Don Draper's character is based on the real-life Draper Daniels, protÉgÉ of Leo Burnett who started off as a copywriter and rose to creative director, eventually heading the team that launched the Marlboro Man. The iconic "Think Small" Volkswagen ad positioned the Beetle as an ugly but well-made car—a revolt against excess. Not only did unit sales top 500,000 cars a year, but the campaign succeeded in junking all the rules of car advertising. When barred from visiting Disneyland on a trip to the United States, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev threw a tantrum and left Los Angeles in a huff the very next day. The Group by Mary McCarthy, the novel Betty Draper is seen reading in the bathtub, transformed the way women viewed love, sex, and marriage. In 1947 Christian Dior showcased its revolutionary New Look line. Betty, Peggy, and the rest of the steno pool at Sterling-Cooper can be seen sporting the sloping shoulders, hourglass silhouettes, and billowing skirts of the New Look style.

The History of the French Revolution

The History of the French Revolution
Author: Adolphe Thiers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2011-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108035264

Published in the 1820s, and translated into English in 1838, Thiers' work remains a significant account of the French Revolution.

The Good Girls Revolt

The Good Girls Revolt
Author: Lynn Povich
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610391748

It was the 1960s -- a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the "Help Wanted" ads were segregated by gender and the "Mad Men" office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the "Swinging Sixties." Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job -- for a girl -- at an exciting place. But it was a dead end. Women researchers sometimes became reporters, rarely writers, and never editors. Any aspiring female journalist was told, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else." On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement entitled "Women in Revolt," forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion. It was the first female class action lawsuit--the first by women journalists -- and it inspired other women in the media to quickly follow suit. Lynn Povich was one of the ringleaders. In The Good Girls Revolt, she evocatively tells the story of this dramatic turning point through the lives of several participants. With warmth, humor, and perspective, she shows how personal experiences and cultural shifts led a group of well-mannered, largely apolitical women, raised in the 1940s and 1950s, to challenge their bosses -- and what happened after they did. For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to "find themselves" and fight back. Others lost their way amid opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they weren't prepared to navigate. The Good Girls Revolt also explores why changes in the law didn't solve everything. Through the lives of young female journalists at Newsweek today, Lynn Povich shows what has -- and hasn't -- changed in the workplace.

The Holy Madmen of Tibet

The Holy Madmen of Tibet
Author: David M. DiValerio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199391203

Throughout the past millennium, certain Tibetan Buddhist yogins have taken on profoundly norm-overturning modes of dress and behavior, including draping themselves in human remains, consuming filth, provoking others to violence, and even performing sacrilege. They became known far and wide as "madmen" (smyon pa, pronounced nyönpa), achieving a degree of saintliness in the process. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Tibet's "holy madmen" drawing on their biographies and writings, as well as tantric commentaries, later histories, oral traditions, and more. Much of The Holy Madmen of Tibet is dedicated to examining the lives and legacies of the three most famous "holy madmen" who were all of the Kagyü sect: the Madman of Tsang (author of The Life of Milarepa), the Madman of Ü, and Drukpa Künlé, Madman of the Drukpa Kagyü. Each born in the 1450s, they rose to prominence during a period of civil war and of great shifts in Tibet's religious culture. By focusing on literature written by and about the "holy madmen" and on the yogins' relationships with their public, this book offers in-depth looks at the narrative and social processes out of which sainthood arises, and at the role biographical literature can play in the formation of sectarian identities. By showing how understandings of the "madmen" have changed over time, this study allows for new insights into current notions of "crazy wisdom." In the end, the "holy madmen" are seen as self-aware and purposeful individuals who were anything but insane.

The Whiskey Rebellion

The Whiskey Rebellion
Author: Thomas P. Slaughter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1988-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199923353

When President George Washington ordered an army of 13,000 men to march west in 1794 to crush a tax rebellion among frontier farmers, he established a range of precedents that continues to define federal authority over localities today. The "Whiskey Rebellion" marked the first large-scale resistance to a law of the U.S. government under the Constitution. This classic confrontation between champions of liberty and defenders of order was long considered the most significant event in the first quarter-century of the new nation. Thomas P. Slaughter recaptures the historical drama and significance of this violent episode in which frontier West and cosmopolitan East battled over the meaning of the American Revolution. The book not only offers the broadest and most comprehensive account of the Whiskey Rebellion ever written, taking into account the political, social and intellectual contexts of the time, but also challenges conventional understandings of the Revolutionary era.

Mad Men

Mad Men
Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-06-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1442261463

“A comprehensive examination of the ways in which [the series] uses American cultural memory . . . to shape . . . characters’ developments and the narrative arc.” —Journal of American Culture From the opening credits that feature a silhouette falling among skyscrapers, Mad Men transcended its role as a series about the Madison Avenue advertising industry to become a modern classic. For seven seasons, Mad Men asked viewers to contemplate the 1960s anew, reassessing the era’s stance on women’s rights, race, war, politics, and family relationships that comprise the American Dream. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the show brought to light how deeply we still are connected to that age. The result is a show that continually asks us to rethink our own families, lives, work, and ethical beliefs as we strive for a better world. In Mad Men: A Cultural History, M. Keith Booker and Bob Batchelor offer an engaging analysis of the series, providing in-depth examinations of its many themes and nostalgic portrayals of the years from Camelot to Vietnam and beyond. Highly regarded cultural scholars and critics, Booker and Batchelor examine the show in its entirety, presenting readers with a deep but accessible exploration of the series, as well as look at its larger meanings and implications. This cultural history perspective reveals Mad Men’s critical importance as a TV series, as well as its role as a tool for helping viewers understand how they are shaped by history and culture. “This homage will appeal to fans and academic readers alike. . . . Recommended.” —Choice “Offers a stimulating point of view on the role of mass communication products as keys to understanding our society.” —Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly