This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation’s technological achievements.

This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation’s technological achievements.

Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions. After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

In A Siberian History of Soviet Film, Caroline Damiens explores how the depictions of the indigenous 'Peoples of the North' in Soviet cinema and television evolved between 1920 and 1980. Damiens combines a detailed analysis of key works such as Forest People (1928), Igdenbu (1930), Dersu Uzala (1961 & 1975), Tymancha's Friend (1969) and The Most Beautiful Ships (1972), with primary sources like press articles, archives, and interviews, to reveal how these cinematic portrayals were created and negotiated, providing insight into the concepts of progress and authenticity in the Soviet context. She emphasises the role of indigenous individuals in shaping their cinematic image, both in front of and behind the camera, highlighting the works of lesser-known figures like Suntsai Geonka, Zinaida Pikunova, and Iurii Rytkheu. In doing so, Damiens emphasises the multifaceted nature of film, where interpretations differ based on the perspectives of those involved. Using a decolonial approach and drawing from extensive archival materials, Damiens prompts a re-evaluation of the Soviet cinematic past and present by centring indigenous voices in the narrative. In doing so, she provides a thorough exploration of the intricate relationship between culture, representation, and identity in Soviet cinema.

In this expansive historical synthesis, Richard Butsch integrates social, economic, and political history to offer a comprehensive and cohesive examination of screen media and screen culture globally – from film and television to computers and smart phones – as they have evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on an enormous trove of research on the USA, Britain, France, Egypt, West Africa, India, China, and other nations, Butsch tells the stories of how media have developed in these nations and what global forces linked them. He assesses the global ebb and flow of media hegemony and the cultural differences in audiences' use of media. Comparisons across time and space reveal two linked developments: the rise and fall of American cultural hegemony, and the consistency among audiences from different countries in the way they incorporate screen entertainments into their own cultures. Screen Culture offers a masterful, integrated global history that invites media scholars to see this landscape in a new light. Deeply engaging, the book is also suitable for students and interested general readers.

Featuring scholarly perspectives from around the globe and drawing on a legacy of television studies, but with an eye toward the future, this authoritative collection examines both the thoroughly global nature of television and the multiple and varied experiences that constitute television in the twenty-first century. Companion chapters include original essays by some of the leading scholars of television studies as well as emerging voices engaging television on six continents, offering readers a truly global range of perspectives. The volume features multidisciplinary analyses that offer models and guides for the study of global television, with approaches focused on the theories, audiences, content, culture, and institutions of television. A wide array of examples and case studies engage the transforming practices, technologies, systems, and texts constituing television around the world today, providing readers with a contemporary and multi-faceted perspective. In this volume, editor Shawn Shimpach has brought together an essential guide to understanding television in the world today, how it works and what it means – perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in television, global media studies, and beyond.

Although television has developed into a major agent of the transnational and global flow of information and entertainment, television historiography and scholarship largely remains a national endeavour, partly due to the fact that television has been understood as a tool for the creation of national identity. But the breaking of the quasi-monopoly of public service broadcasters all over Europe in the 1980s has changed the television landscape, and cross-border television channels - with the help of satellite and the Internet - have catapulted the relatively closed television nations into the universe of globalized media channels. At least, this is the picture painted by the popular meta-narratives of European television history. Transnational Television History asks us to re-evaluate the function of television as a medium of nation-building in its formative years and to reassess the historical narrative that insists that European television only became transnational with the emergence of more commercial services and new technologies from the 1980s. It also questions some common assumptions in television historiography by offering some alternative perspectives on the complex processes of transnational circulation of television technology, professionals, programmes and aesthetics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.