First airing in 1966, with a promise to "boldly go where no man has gone before," Star Trek would eventually become a bona fide phenomenon. Week after week, viewers of the series tuned in to watch Captain Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the crew of the USS Enterprise as they conducted their five-year mission in space. Their mission was cut short by a corporate monolith that demanded higher ratings, but Star Trek lived on in syndication, ultimately becoming...

America's preeminent columnist presents his penetrating and surprising reflections on everything from embryo research to entitlement reform, from Halley's Comet to border collies, from Christopher Columbus to Martin Luther King, from drone warfare to American decline. Features a special, highly autobiographical introduction.

"Essays about 1990s popular culture, politics, sports, literature, music"--

From executive producers T Bone Burnett, Robert Redford and Jack White, this is the story of early American recorded music when the musical strands of a nation first combined to spark a cultural renaissance that forever transformed the future of music and the world. Also includes a feature-length film of in-studio sessions, with leading contemporary artists recording early American music on a restored 1920s recording machine.

"U.S. history gets the star treatment with this essential guide to the Smithsonian's first permanent exhibition on pop culture"--

Chronicles America's post-Civil War struggle for racial equality and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated black Americans throughout the twentieth century, as seen through the visual culture of the era.

In 1971, the anonymously published Go Ask Alice -- the supposed diary of a middle-class addict-- reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portray of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. In 1979 Jay's Journal -- the posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist -- poisoned whole communities. In reality the two books were written by Beatrice Sparks, a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family, stole a dead boy's memory,...

Documents the kaleidoscopic year during which transformative talents from Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills heavily influenced pop culture, politics, and social movements.

Her image appeared in periodicals and advertisements roughly twenty times daily; she rivaled FDR and Edward VIII as the most photographed person in the world. Her portrait brightened the homes of countless admirers: from a black laborer's cabin in South Carolina to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's recreation room in Washington, DC. A few years later her smile cheered the secret bedchamber of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. For four consecutive years Shirley...