Cohen argues that silent film allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and develop an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. She connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and 20th century world power.

Silent Film Adaptations of Novels by British and American Women Writers, 1903–1929 focuses on fifty-three silent film adaptations of the novels of acclaimed authors George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. Many of the films are unknown or dismissed, and most of them are degraded, destroyed, or lost—burned in warehouse fires, spontaneously combusted in storage cans, or quietly turned to dust. Their content and production and distribution details are reconstructed through archival resources as individual narratives that, when considered collectively, constitute a broader narrative of lost knowledge—a fragmented and buried early twentieth-century story now reclaimed and retold for the first time to a twenty-first-century audience. This collective narrative also demonstrates the extent to which the adaptations are intertextually and ideologically entangled with concurrently released early “woman’s films” to re-promote and re-instill the norm of idealized white, married, domesticated womanhood during a time of extraordinary cultural change for women. Retelling this lost narrative also allows for a reassessment of the place and function of the adaptations in the development of the silent film industry and as cinematic precedent for the hundreds of sound adaptations of the literary texts of these eight women writers produced from 1931 to the 2020s.

This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture.

During the Silent Era, when most films dealt with dramatic or comedic takes on the "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" theme, other motion pictures dared to tackle such topics as rejuvenation, revivication, mesmerism, the supernatural and the grotesque. A Daughter of the Gods (1916), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Magician (1926) and Seven Footprints to Satan (1929) were among the unusual and startling films containing story elements that went far beyond the realm of "highly unlikely." Using surviving documentation and their combined expertise, the authors catalog and discuss these departures from the norm in this encyclopedic guide to American horror, science fiction and fantasy in the years from 1913 through 1929.

This work identifies 436 American silent films released between 1909 and 1929 that engaged the issues of militant labor and revolutionary radicalism. It begins with an extended introduction and analytical chapters that investigate the ways in which the American motion picture industry portrayed the interrelationships between labor radicals, exploitative capitalists, socialist idealists and Bolsheviks during this critical twenty-year period. Each entry contains a detailed plot synopsis, citations to primary sources, coding indicating the presence or absence of 14 predominant discernible biases (including anti- and pro-capitalism, socialism, revolution and labor), and subject coding keyed to 64 related terms and concepts (including agitators, Bolshevism, bombs, female radicals, militias, mobs, political refugees, and strikes). These statistical data included in the filmography are presented in a series of charts and are fully integrated into the historical-critical text. Total number and percentage statistics for the instances of these coded biases and traits are given per year, per era, and overall.

One of the most powerful forces in world culture, American cinema has a long and complex history that stretches through more than a century. This history not only includes a legacy of hundreds of important films but also the evolution of the film industry itself, which is in many ways a microcosm of the history of American society. Historical Dictionary of American Cinema, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries covering people, films, companies, techniques, themes, and subgenres that have made American cinema such a vital part of world culture.

America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the Movies, 2nd Edition is a lively introduction to issues of diversity as represented within the American cinema. Provides a comprehensive overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality Includes over 100 illustrations, glossary of key terms, questions for discussion, and lists for further reading/viewing Includes new case studies of a number of films, including Crash, Brokeback Mountain, and Quinceañera

The American West is rich in lore, cultural roots, and iconic images. The subject of countless movies, books, and songs, in many ways it embodies the American spirit. This lively two-volume set presents the stories of some of the most influential and representative Western icons—those that have captured the nation's imagination since the early days of westward exploration and that continue to do so within the environmental and technological frontier that is the modern West. This accessible treatment of the untamed enterprise of the 'Old West'—including cowboys, wild west shows, and gun battles—and the continued entrepreneurial imagination of the paradisical 'New West'—including environmentalists and the incorporation of national parks—elevates the reader's understanding of oft-romanticized subjcts and the conflicts and cultural changes that made them icons. Narrative entries include: ; Chief Joseph ; George Armstrong Custer ; Gold Rush ; Winchester Model 1873 ; Frederic Remington ; John Muir ; Las Vegas ; Bill Gates ; Disneyland ; Yellowstone National Park ; Sierra Club With vibrant photos and descriptive sidebars, this comprehensive set is a must-have for students of American history and culture.