It began with a burglary, the objectives of which are to this day unclear, and it led to the unprecedented resignation of a president in disgrace. For years the story dominated the airwaves and the headlines. Yet today a third of all high school students do not know that Watergate occurred after 1950, and many cannot name the president who resigned. How do Americans remember Watergate? Should we remember it? To what extent does our current "memory" of Watergate jibe with the historical record? Most important, who--the media? political elites? the courts?--are responsible for the particular version of those tumultous?sic? events we remember today? What Americans remember (and what they have forgotten) about the most traumatic domestic event in our recent history offers startling insights into the nature of collective memory. Michael Schudson, one of this country's most perceptive observers of the media, uses interviews, press accounts of recent political controversies, and poll data to explore how America's collective memory of Watergate has changed over the years, and what this reveals about how we can learn from the past. Schudson argues that Watergate was both a Constitutional crisis triggered by presidential wrongdoing and a scandal in which investigators pursued multiple, and sometimes veiled, objectives. He explores the continuing unsettled relationship between these two faces of Watergate. Liberals who deny that scandals are socially constructed miss part of the story, as do conservatives who deny or minimize the Constitutional crisis. The book gives special attention to several key domains where the memory of Watergate has been contested and transmitted: as a myth inside journalism, as a debate over reform legislation in Congress, as a set of lessons in school textbooks, as a new language for the public at large. Schudson's findings are often surprising. He argues that Richard Nixon has not been rehabilitated in the public mind and that there is good reason to think he never will be. And he shows that the myth spawned by Watergate of an all-powerful press has proved a mixed blessing. Above all, by examining more recent events like the Iran-contra Affair, this important and insightful book documents how the metaphor of Watergate continues to influence the White House, the Congress, and the nation's political life in general. The book thus offers an original argument about how the past survives and is transmitted across generations, even in the face of conscious efforts to rewrite history

This book, first published in 2007, is an international overview of the state of our knowledge in sociocultural psychology - as a discipline located at the crossroads between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Since the 1980s, the field of psychology has encountered the growth of a new discipline - cultural psychology - that has built new connections between psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and semiotics. The handbook integrates contributions of sociocultural specialists from fifteen countries, all tied together by the unifying focus on the role of sign systems in human relations with the environment. It emphasizes theoretical and methodological discussions on the cultural nature of human psychological phenomena, moving on to show how meaning is a natural feature of action and how it eventually produces conventional symbols for communication. Such symbols shape individual experiences and create the conditions for consciousness and the self to emerge; turn social norms into ethics; and set history into motion.

As the fortieth anniversary of the Nixon resignation approaches, it is time to take a fresh look at Watergate's impact on the American political system and to consider its significance for the historical reputation of the president indelibly associated with it.

From cynical portrayals like The Front Page to the nuanced complexity of All the President’s Men, and The Insider, movies about journalists and journalism have been a go-to film genre since the medium's early days. Often depicted as disrespectful, hard-drinking, scandal-mongering misfits, journalists also receive Hollywood's frequent respect as an essential part of American life. Matthew C. Ehrlich tells the story of how Hollywood has treated American journalism. Ehrlich argues that films have relentlessly played off the image of the journalist as someone who sees through lies and hypocrisy, sticks up for the little guy, and serves democracy. He also delves into the genre's always-evolving myths and dualisms to analyze the tensions—hero and oppressor, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and falsehood—that allow journalism films to examine conflicts in society at large.

By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture. But beginning in the mid-eighties it reemerged with a vengeance, and for nearly fifteen years World War II was ubiquitous across US popular and political culture. In this book, Barbara A. Biesecker explores the prestige and rhetorical power of the “Good War,” revealing how it was retooled to restore a new kind of social equilibrium to the United States Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995 and its replacement, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Situating these popular memory texts within the culture and history wars of the day and the broader framework of US political and economic life, Biesecker argues that, with the notable exception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, these reinventions of the Good War worked rhetorically to restore a strong sense of national identity and belonging fitted to the neoliberal nationalist agenda. By tracing the links between the popular retooling of World War II and the national state fantasy, and by putting the lessons of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their successors to work for a rhetorical-political analysis of the present, Biesecker not only explains the emergence and strength of the MAGA movement but also calls attention to the power of public memory to shape and contest ethnonational identity today. This book will interest rhetoricians and historians as well as students and scholars in the fields of US politics and communication studies.

How an image-obsessed president transformed the way we think about politics and politicians. To his conservative supporters in 1940s southern California, Richard Nixon was a populist everyman; to liberal intellectuals of the 1950s, he was "Tricky Dick," a devious manipulator; to 1960s radicals, a shadowy conspirator; to the Washington press corps, a pioneering spin doctor; to his loyal Middle Americans, a victim of liberal hatred; to recent historians, an unlikely liberal. Nixon's Shadow rediscovers these competing images of the protean Nixon, showing how each was created and disseminated in American culture and how Nixon's tinkering with his own image often backfired. During Nixon's long tenure on the national stage—and through the succession of "new Nixons" so brilliantly described here—Americans came to realize how thoroughly politics relies on manipulation. Since Nixon, it has become impossible to discuss politics without asking: What is the politician's "real" character? How authentic or inauthentic is he? What image is he trying to project? More than what Nixon did, this fascinating book reveals what Nixon meant.

A six-month New York Times bestseller: “Not only the best Watergate book, but a very good book indeed” (The Sunday Times). As White House counsel to Richard Nixon, a young John W. Dean was one of the primary players in the Watergate scandal—and ultimately became the government’s key witness in the investigations that ended the Nixon presidency. After the scandal subsided, Dean rebuilt his career, first in business and then as a bestselling author and lecturer. But while the events were still fresh in his mind, he wrote this remarkable memoir about the operations of the Nixon White House and the crisis that led to the president’s resignation. Called “fascinating” by Commentary, which noted that “there can be little doubt of [Dean's] memory or his candor,” Blind Ambition offers an insider’s view of the deceptions and machinations that brought down an administration and changed the American people’s view of politics and power. It also contains Dean’s own unsparing reflections on the personal demons that drove him to participate in the sordid affair. Upon its original publication, Kirkus Reviews hailed it “the flip side of All the President’s Men—a document, a minefield, and prime entertainment.” Today, Dean is a respected and outspoken advocate for transparency and ethics in government, and the bestselling author of such books as The Nixon Defense, Worse Than Watergate, and Conservatives Without Conscience. Here, in Blind Ambition, he “paints a candid picture of the sickening moral bankruptcy which permeated the White House and to which he contributed. His memory of who said what and to whom is astounding” (Foreign Affairs).

Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First Amendment protections that shield the press from government censorship. But in this comprehensive history of American press freedom as it has existed in theory, law, and practice, Sam Lebovic shows that, on its own, the right of free speech has been insufficient to guarantee a free press. Lebovic recovers a vision of press freedom, prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, based on the idea of unfettered public access to accurate information. This “right to the news” responded to persistent worries about the quality and diversity of the information circulating in the nation’s news. Yet as the meaning of press freedom was contested in various arenas—Supreme Court cases on government censorship, efforts to regulate the corporate newspaper industry, the drafting of state secrecy and freedom of information laws, the unionization of journalists, and the rise of the New Journalism—Americans chose to define freedom of the press as nothing more than the right to publish without government censorship. The idea of a public right to all the news and information was abandoned, and is today largely forgotten. Free Speech and Unfree News compels us to reexamine assumptions about what freedom of the press means in a democratic society—and helps us make better sense of the crises that beset the press in an age of aggressive corporate consolidation in media industries, an increasingly secretive national security state, and the daily newspaper’s continued decline.

"If daily journalism constitutes history's first rough draft, then "Getting it Wrong" certainly reveals how rough that draft can be. Joseph Campbell is a dogged and first-rate scholar."--Neil Henry, Dean, University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism "Dr. Campbell has done meticulous research that examines ten media myths in context. This book rightfully calls us to rethink some significant errors that have become a part of our history and our collective memories. It is just downright interesting reading."--Wallace B. Eberhard, recipient of the American Journalism Historians Association Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement

The first comprehensive history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the United States. Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia is the first comprehensive, research-based, scholarly study of the pervasiveness of our deeply ingrained culture of conspiracy. From the Puritan witch trials to the Masons, from the Red Scare to Watergate, Whitewater, and the War on Terror, this encyclopedia covers conspiracy theories across the breadth of U.S. history, examining the individuals, organizations, and ideas behind them. Its over 300 alphabetical entries cover both the documented records of actual conspiracies and the cultural and political significance of specific conspiracy speculations. Neither promoting nor dismissing any theory, the entries move beyond the usual biased rhetoric to provide a clear-sighted, dispassionate look at each conspiracy (real or imagined). Readers will come to understand the political and social contexts in which these theories arose, the mindsets and motivations of the people promoting them, the real impact of society's reactions to conspiracy fears, warranted or not, and the verdict (when verifiable) that history has passed on each case.