Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, hoped that ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists came upon the four sixty-foot presidential heads carved in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they would have a clear and graphic understanding of American civilization. Borglum, the child of Mormon polygamists, had an almost Ahab-like obsession with Colossalism--a scale that matched his ego and the era. He learned how to be a celebrity from Auguste Rodin; how to be a political bully from Teddy Roosevelt. He ran with the Ku Klux Klan and mingled with the rich and famous from Wall Street to Washington. Mount Rushmore was to be his crowning achievement, the newest wonder of the world, the greatest piece of public art since Phidias carved the Parthenon. But like so many episodes in the saga of the American West, what began as a personal dream had to be bailed out by the federal government, a compromise that nearly drove Borglum mad. Nor in the end could he control how his masterpiece would be received. Nor its devastating impact on the Lakota Sioux and the remote Black Hills of South Dakota. Great White Fathers is at once the biography of a man and the biography of a place, told through travelogue, interviews, and investigation of the unusual records that one odd American visionary left behind. It proves that the best American stories are not simple; they are complex and contradictory, at times humorous, at other times tragic.

Ten-year-old Four Winds is a young Lakota girl caught up in the changes brought about by her people's forced move to the reservation. Set in the Dakota Territory, it is the year 1880. Four Winds has been taken away from her family and brought to a boarding school run by whites. It is here she is taught English and learns how to assimilate into white culture. But soon she discovers that the teachers at this school are not interested in assimilation but rather in erasing her culture. On the reservation, Four Winds had to fight against starvation. Now she must fight to hold on to who she is.

Amid modern-day racial unrest, a national pandemic, and a political divisiveness that seems to have become a dominant feature of American discourse, Harriet F. Senie offers a thoughtful reflection on the complex legacies of the four presidents memorialized on Mount Rushmore.

In The Agony of Shopping and Other Plays, Vince takes us on a roller coaster ride of the soul where flashes of light, nobility, and hope are intermingled with shadows of decadence, greed, and despair.

The American family has long been at the centre of the typical Hollywood narrative. But the depiction of the nuclear family within contemporary mainstream US cinema has not yet been closely studied. Home Movies addresses this oversight by assessing recent cinematic representations of the family in terms of cultural politics and representations of gender, sexuality, race and class. Focusing on a diverse range of popular films - from Meet the Parents to The Incredibles - Claire Jenkins analyses the father-daughter relationship within sequels and series; Meryl Streep's embodiment of the mother; the superhero family and extraordinary manifestations of the ordinary family; disaster films which depict the president as father; 'mom-coms' and Hollywood's representations of the non-traditional family. She combines film studies, gender studies and family history to demonstrate the complexities of Hollywood's family values.

In a land of legends and mighty warriors, one fatal gunshot changes the course of a nation. Torn between two races, a white man raised by Blackfeet Indians is propelled across the vast, unexplored Northwest wilderness of the early 1800s in this historically accurate adventure of a desperate mission to defend his adopted people from invasion by ruthless white fur traders.