This book introduces anglophone readers to the ballad picture show, a cultural institution which anticipated both the cinema and the tabloid press.

Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales, but are presented as present day events. The difficulty is that it is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy. The legends explored in this book are some of the most bizarre, gruesome, and politically sensitive stories in the contemporary legend canon. At any moment a body may be invaded by noxious creatures, deliberately infected with deadly disease, or raided to provide donor organs for sick foreigners. These are "winter's tales," the stuff of nightmares. In this book Gillian Bennett traces the cultural history of six legends, well-known in Europe and America from medieval times to the present day. Appearing in broadsides, ballads, myths, ancient and modern legends, novels, plays, films, television shows, and stories told in the oral tradition, these legends are not just silly tales which can be dismissed as trivial and untrue. They reveal much about the concerns and fears of everyday life and demonstrate the limits of knowledge and power in the modern world.

A variety of contributors - including journalists, cultural theorists, philosophers, historians and newspaper proprietors - offer insights and perspectives on the history, status and craft of journalism.

This text looks at the star system under the Third Reich. Following the experiments of Weimar, much of cinema after 1933 became part of a wider Nazi backlash against modernism in all its forms. This study contributes to contemporary debates concerning the historical study of film spectatorship.

A powerful account of witches, crones, and the societies that make them From the gruesome ogress in Hansel and Gretel to the hags at the sabbath in Faust, the witch has been a powerful figure of the Western imagination. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of women confessed to being witches--of making pacts with the Devil, causing babies to sicken, and killing animals and crops--and were put to death. This book is a gripping account of the pursuit, interrogation, torture, and burning of witches during this period and beyond. Drawing on hundreds of original trial transcripts and other rare sources in four areas of Southern Germany, where most of the witches were executed, Lyndal Roper paints a vivid picture of their lives, families, and tribulations. She also explores the psychology of witch-hunting, explaining why it was mostly older women that were the victims of witch crazes, why they confessed to crimes, and how the depiction of witches in art and literature has influenced the characterization of elderly women in our own culture.

"In Murder in Parisian Streets Thomas Cragin provides an in-depth study of the production, sale, and content of the canards. He demonstrates their significance to nineteenth-century culture, even their role in determining the emerging tabloid's success. Cragin explores the incremental creation of textual meaning in the canards' authorship, production, distribution, and consumption. He exposes the power of oral traditions as well as modern marketing at work upon this popular news literature. The canards challenge our assumptions about the nineteenth century's revolution in print and reorient our understanding of cultural creation through textual construction."--Jacket.

Revealing the cross utility potential of multiple disciplines to advance knowledge in crime studies, History & Crime showcases new research into crime from across the interdisciplinary perspectives of early modern and modern history, criminology, forensic psychology, and legal studies.