Although the ukulele has always been popular - even when cast to the grass-skirt ghetto of luaus and limbo contests - the current craze for this instrument has put the four-string cousin of the guitar into the hands of veteran musicians and young hipsters alike.
The Courage To Love: From Abuse to Happiness, a Healing Memoir From a childhood marked by abuse and silence, Guy Giard's extraordinary journey spans four continents in search of healing, joy, and true purpose.
"e;The Artificial Paradise shows how science fiction is a powerful purveyor of cultural myths rooted in the history of the West, myths that shape American attitudes toward nature, technology, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre asserts the centrality of theater to the ongoing negotiations of the Australian context.
Whether found in country barn dances, the plaintive twang of Hank Williams, the glitzy glamour of Dolly Parton, or the country-pop sound of Faith Hill, country music has always maintained an allegiance to its own authenticity.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues.
Reiland Rabaka provides an alternative history of funk since the mid-1960s, which uncovers the epoch that funk women influenced and were influenced by while wrestling with issues revolving around race, gender, sexuality, and class simultaneously in the American music industry and in American society.
Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Joshua Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible.
Directing in Musical Theatre offers a comprehensive guide which will equip aspiring directors with all of the skills that they will need in order to guide a production from beginning to end.
Directing in Musical Theatre offers a comprehensive guide which will equip aspiring directors with all of the skills that they will need in order to guide a production from beginning to end.
Hungarian composer Bela Bartok declared his Cantata profana, composed in 1930 and premiered in London in 1934, his "e;credo,"e; the composition of which was inseparable from the history of his involvement with folklore.
Practicing Feminisms, Reconstructing Psychology is a valuable survey of developments to date in feminist psychology and a provocative assessment of its future possibilities.
The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three original American racesred, black, and whitefor Mormons and others in the early American Republic.
The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina are the heart of a region where traditional music and dance are performed and celebrated as nowhere else in America.
A collection of autobiographical, fantastical and odd essays, short stories and columns, it's rites of passage narrative is unsettling, upsetting, darkly humorous and oddly uplifting, and charts a deeply personal course that, at times, it's audience will be intimately familiar with and instantly able to relate to.
In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years.
"e;Libretto-bashing has a distinguished tradition in the blood sport of opera,"e; writes Arthur Groos in the introduction to this broad survey of critical approaches to that much-maligned genre.
Among the nearly 90,000 Cubans who settled in New York City and Miami in the 1940s and 1950s were numerous musicians and entertainers, black and white, who did more than fill dance halls with the rhythms of the rumba, mambo, and cha cha ch.
This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a postcivil rights generation.
As Deirdre Clemente shows in this lively history of fashion on American college campuses, whether its jeans and sneakers or khakis with a polo shirt, chances are college kids made it cool.
When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring a race of singers who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy.
Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention.
Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900 focuses on women writers and their struggle to protect animals from abuse in the transition from preindustrial to Victorian society.
