Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, many forms of theatre have been called 'popular', but in the twentieth-century the term 'popular drama' has taken on definite political overtones, often indicating a repudiation of 'commercial theatre'. Does this mean that political theatre is or tries to be more attractive to more people than commercial theatre? Does it conversely mean that commercial theatre has no political effects? The articles in this book were submitted as papers for a conference on the theme of 'popular' theatre, film and television. Contributions came from people with very different types of experience: from an ex-animal trainer to a lecturer in film studies; from playwrights, directors and actors to professional critics and academics. Each author focused on a particular problem of defining drama in performance, drawing together the conditions of performance, the types of audience and the political effects of the plays or films in question. The result was a series of fruitful connections and juxtapositions that shows the remarkable continuity of the problems raised in attempts to create a popular political drama.

Wherever the Marxist agenda is found, it has always followed the same simple formula: Destroy and Rebuild. Agitprop, the technique invented by Lenin to rouse his fellow Russians to overthrow the government of czarist Russia, has been used in the United States since the 1960s and is still being used to destroy America's culture and rebuild it as Cultural Marxism. Agitprop in America identifies this attempted "transformation" of the United States as an anti-American movement, which has been variously called "the culture war," "the counter culture," and "political correctness." By analyzing the movement's dogmas and methods, including the manipulation of American speech, and by trenchant comments on cultural history, this book provides the understanding needed to thwart the imposition of an alien, atheistic culture on the United States. European readers may find Agitprop in America of some use in the cultural crisis which they face.

Alewitz brings to this tradition his own rich sense of irony, humor, and fantasy to illuminate the hidden spaces where connections between the workforce of the U.S. and its extended relatives across the planet are to be found."--BOOK JACKET.

In Information War, former United States Information Agency employee Nancy Snow describes how U.S. propaganda efforts and covert operations are expanding more rapidly today than at any other time in U.S. history, as the Bush administration attempts to increase U.S. dominance by curbing dissent and controlling opinion. Snow lays out the propaganda techniques that the government uses to control dissent in the twenty-first century, spotlights the key players and their spinmeistering abilities in the information war, and describes memorable "leaks" in the Administration’s efforts to conduct stealth propaganda programs and control information at home. Ultimately she shows that dissent and true democracy are the early casualties of these policies.

From Stalin's anti-American campaign to Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence policy, this book addresses the Soviet propaganda and ideology directed towards the United States during the early Cold War.

Fiction. A portable collection of polemical bedtime stories for adults, addressing such timely topics as: erectile dysfunction during the national anthem, what happens when Nancy Pelosi comes calling, and what Model A Fords say under certain conditions.

During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, amateur theater groups sprang up in cities across the country. Workers, peasants, students, soldiers, and sailors provided entertainment ranging from improvisations to gymnastics and from propaganda sketches to the plays of Chekhov. In Revolutionary Acts, Lynn Mally reconstructs the history of the amateur stage in Soviet Russia from 1917 to the height of the Stalinist purges. Her book illustrates in fascinating detail how Soviet culture was transformed during the new regime's first two decades in power. Of all the arts, theater had a special appeal for mass audiences in Russia, and with the coming of the revolution it took on an important role in the dissemination of the new socialist culture. Mally's analysis of amateur theater as a space where performers, their audiences, and the political authorities came into contact enables her to explore whether this culture emerged spontaneously "from below" or was imposed by the revolutionary elite. She shows that by the late 1920s, Soviet leaders had come to distrust the initiatives of the lower classes, and the amateur theaters fell increasingly under the guidance of artistic professionals. Within a few years, state agencies intervened to homogenize repertoire and performance style, and with the institutionalization of Socialist Realist principles, only those works in a unified Soviet canon were presented.