Examines the social, political and popular culture of America in the period between VJ Day and the start of the Korean War, discussing the country's anxieties and insecurities at the onset of the Red Scare and the Cold War. 15,000 first printing.

Using the life and career of her father, writer Margaret Talbot tells the story of the rise of popular culture through a personal lens. The arc of Lyle Talbot's career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician's assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. In her impeccably researched narrative--a combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir--Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of '10s and '20s small-town America, '30s and '40s Hollywood.--From publisher description.

Explores twenty definitive film noir titles from 1941 to 1950 and traces the evolution of popular fashion in the decade of the 1940s, the impact of World War II on home-front fashion, and the influence of the film noir genre on popular fashion.

One hundred six famous actresses and actors are portrayed in full-page pictures by twenty-four leading Hollywood photographers

Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.

A collection of quotables from those gritty movies from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties featuring losers and drifters, dreamers and grifters, immortalized by the TV late show.

The photos in this book include production stills from many noir gems which illustrate the style and capture the impact of this atmospheric cinematic genre. The accompanying text explores the origins of noir and its history from the early 1940s to the present day.