At the height of her celebrity, Madeleine Carroll (1906-1987) was the world's highest-paid actress. She worked alongside such greats as Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton, British directors Victor Saville and Alfred Hitchcock, and Hollywood directors John Ford and Otto Preminger. She also did radio and television shows--all of which she abandoned to become a Red Cross worker. Piecing together long-lost facts, the author describes Carroll's almost indescribable life, narrating her personal highs and lows, as well as her fervent commitment to helping others--particularly child victims of war.

Antipodean soldiers and writers, meat carcasses and moa, British films and Kiwi tourists—throughout the last 150 years, people, objects and ideas have gone back and forth between New Zealand and London, defining and redefining the relationship between this country and the colonial center that many New Zealanders once called home. Exploring the relationship between a colony and its metropolis from Wakefield to the Wombles, it answers questions, including How did New Zealanders define themselves in relation to the center of British culture? and How did New Zealanders view London when they walked through King's Cross or saw the city in movies? By focusing on particular themes—from agricultural marketing to expatriate writers—this discussion develops a larger story about the construction of colonial and national identities.

When Ozzie Nelson died in 1975, he was no longer a household name. For a guy who had created the longest-running TV sitcom in history, invented the rock video, and fronted one of the most successful big bands of the 1930s, it's baffling that Nelson has faded so far from American media memory. Larger than life offscreen--an attorney, college football star, cartoonist, songwriter, major band leader--Ozzie created a smaller-than-life TV persona, the bumbling average Dad who became known to the rock generation (which included his teen idol son Rick Nelson) as the essence of blandness. But America also saw Ozzie as their iconic Dad: not a "father knows best," since his pontifications usually proved flawed by the end of each episode, but the father who tried his best. This book is the only full-length biography of Ozzie Nelson since he published his memoirs in 1973. It treats the big band and early TV icon with affection and hints that American pop culture may owe more to Ozzie than is generally acknowledged.

A pioneering analysis of radio as both a cultural and material production, Communities of the Air explores radio’s powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air—from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices—both technological and social—illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio’s influence on gender (and gender’s influence on radio) through examinations of Queen Elizabeth’s broadcasts, Gracie Allen’s comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the variety of ways radio is used and understood reveals the dynamic emergence and transformation of communities within the larger society. Contributors. Laurence A. Breiner, Bruce B. Campbell, Mary Desjardins, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Nina Hunteman, Leah Lowe, Adrienne Munich, Kathleen Newman, Martin Spinelli, Susan Merrill Squier, Donald Ulin, Mark Williams, Steve Wurzler