The definitive survey of Alistair Cooke’s brilliant career as a newspaperman Few journalists have covered the American scene as thoroughly as Alistair Cooke did. In addition to presenting the Sunday-night Letter from America broadcasts for the BBC, Cooke was the Guardian’s chief US correspondent for more than a quarter century, filing daily dispatches about the former colonies for his British readers. Selected and introduced by Professor Ronald A. Wells, the pieces in America Observed showcase the full range of Cooke’s omnivorous interests and impressive reportorial skills. From baseball to Billy Graham, Harry S. Truman to Chappaquiddick, he depicts the defining characters and events of the American century with elegance and insight. “The Untravelled Road” is a poignant and perceptive snapshot of the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama. “The Legend of Gary Cooper” eloquently summarizes the unlikely career of America’s leading man, and “A Woman of Integrity” delivers the news of Marilyn Monroe’s death with empathy and honesty. “The Ghastly Sixties” is a concise, candid, and ultimately inspirational chronicle of that turbulent decade. Remarkably prescient and endlessly entertaining, the journalism collected here is some of the twentieth century’s finest.

There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Although television critics have often differed with the public with respect to the artistic and cultural merits of television programming, over the last half-century television has indubitably influenced popular culture and vice versa. No matter what reasons are cited--the characters, the actors, the plots, the music--television shows that were beloved by audiences in their time remain fondly remembered. This study covers the classic period of popular television shows from the 1960s through the 1990s, focusing on how regular viewers interacted with television shows on a personal level. Bridging popular and scholarly approaches, this book discovers what America actually watched and why through documents, footage, visits to filming locations, newspapers, and magazine articles from the shows' eras. The book features extensive notes and bibliography.

Statistical appendix: pp. 203-282.

This study, the first of its kind in English, examines Russian responses to the independence movement in Latin America during the early nineteenth century. From a strictly presentist perspective, the investigation of this subject contributes to the historiography of colonialism and of Latin America's relations with the major world powers. In addition, it rounds out the story of foreign interests in the emancipation of Spanish and Portuguese America, while at the same time shedding new light on the history of Russian overseas expansion. The study probes the major determinants of Russian responses to the struggle for independence of colonial Latin America and evaluates, from a European perspective, the actual impact of tsarist policy on the course of those historic events. Drawing on a wide range of printed materials and on hitherto unused manuscript sources from the archives and libraries of Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the USSR, it isolates Russian New World objectives during the first decades of the nineteenth century and relates those objectives to the formulation of tsarist policy toward the insurgent Iberian colonies.