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When United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the gash it left in the ground became a national site of mourning. The flight's forty passengers became a media obsession, and countless books, movies, and articles told the tale of their heroic fight to band together and sacrifice their lives to stop Flight 93 from becoming a weapon of terror. This book argues that by memorializing these individuals as patriots, we have woven them into the much larger story of our nation—about what it means to be truly American. The book examines the symbolic impact and role of the Flight 93 disaster in the nation's collective consciousness, delving into the spontaneous memorialization efforts that blossomed in Shanksville immediately after news of the crash spread; the ad-hoc sites honoring the victims that in time emerged; and the creation of an official, permanent crash monument in Shanksville like those built for past American wars. The book also analyzes the cultural narratives that evolved in films and in books around the events on the day of the crash and the lives and deaths of its “angel patriot” passengers, uncovering how these representations of the event reflect the myth of the authentic American nation—one that Americans believed was gravely threatened in the 9/11 attacks. The book unveils how, in the wake of 9/11, America mourned much more than the loss of life.

The typical story about creationist social movements centers on battles in the classroom or in the courtroom—like the Scopes Trial in 1925. But there is a new setting: a museum. “Prepare to Believe” is the slogan that greets visitors throughout the Creation Museum located in Petersburg, Kentucky. It carries the message that the organization Answers in Genesis (AiG) uses to welcome fellow believers as well as skeptics since opening in 2007. The Creation Museum seeks to persuade visitors that if one views both the Bible (a close, literal reading) and nature (observational, real world data) as sources of authority, then the earth appears to be much younger than conventionally understood in mainstream society. This book argues that the impact of the Creation Museum does not depend on the accuracy or credibility of its scientific claims, as many scholars, media critics, and political pundits would suggest. Instead, what AiG goes after by creating a physical site like the Creation Museum is the ability to foster plausibility politics—broadening what the audience perceives as possible and amplifying the stakes as the ideas reach more people. Destabilizing the belief that only one type of secular institution may make claims about the age of the earth and human origins, the Creation Museum is a threat to this singular positioning. In doing so, AiG repositions itself to produce longstanding effects on the public’s perception of who may make scientific claims. Creating the Creation Museum is a story about how a group endures.

In recent years, questions such as “What are kids eating?” and “Who's feeding our kids?” have sparked a torrent of public and policy debates as we increasingly focus our attention on the issue of childhood obesity. It is estimated that one in three American children are either overweight or obese. Enduring inequalities in communities, schools, and homes affect young people's access to different types of food, with real consequences in life choices and health outcomes. This book sheds light on the social contexts in which children eat, and the broader backdrop of social change in American life, demonstrating why attention to food's social meaning is important to effective public health policy, particularly actions that focus on behavioral change and school food reforms. The book provides narratives of the everyday life of youth, highlighting young people's voices and perspectives and the places where they eat. It provides an account of the role that food plays in the lives of today's youth, teasing out the many contradictions of food as a cultural object. The book examines the complex relationship between youth identity and food consumption, offering answers to those straightforward questions that require crucial and comprehensive solutions.

The Jim Crow era of outright racism seemingly ended decades ago, yet the major American film industry—Hollywood—is waist deep in racial politics. Jim Crow Hollywood shows how Hollywood insiders consider race when making decisions about moviemaking. Movies by and about white Americans are said to be worthy investments, while movies by and about Black Americans are said to be risky investments. This way of thinking has profound effects on the way movies and people move through the Hollywood system—shaping their production budgets, determining who directs lucrative tent pole blockbuster franchise movies, and creating stigma around race and moviemaking. Quotes from film directors, statistics on over a thousand movies, and emails between Hollywood insiders reveal that race is back in the forefront regarding how decision-makers in American culture institutions rationalize inequality. Except now understandings about race are mixed with talk about economic investments and cultural preferences, making racial inequality more palatable to the everyday observer and further entrenching racial divisions that counteract post-Civil rights narratives of racial progress.

Immigration is dramatically changing major cities throughout the world. Nowhere is this more so than in New York City and Amsterdam, which, after decades of large-scale immigration, now have populations that are more than a third foreign-born. These cities have had to deal with the challenge of incorporating hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose cultures, languages, religions, and racial backgrounds differ dramatically from those of many long-established residents. This book examines and compares the impact of immigration on two of the world's largest urban centers. The book discusses how immigration has affected social, political, and economic structures, cultural patterns, and intergroup relations in the two cities, investigating how the particular, and changing, urban contexts of New York City and Amsterdam have shaped immigrant and second-generation experiences. Despite many parallels between New York and Amsterdam, the differences stand out, juxtaposing chapters on immigration in the two cities helps to illuminate the essential issues that today's immigrants and their children confront. Organized around five main themes, the book offers an in-depth view of the impact of immigration as it affects particular places, with specific histories, institutions, and immigrant populations. It contributes to our broader understanding of the transformations wrought by immigration and the dynamics of urban change, providing new insights into how—and why— immigration's effects differ on the two sides of the Atlantic.

This book examines the design (imagining and producing), delivery (distribution, gatekeeping, and cultural mediation), and decoding (reception, consumption, and debate) of varied genres and styles of contemporary racialized media. In line with what the late great media sociologist Stuart Hall called the “circuit of culture,” the authors herein collectively analyze, first, the production side of imagining and encoding ideological meanings and narratives, the material structures, the people involved, and global political economy of media; second, the arena of distribution in which marketing strategies, gatekeeping traditions, laws and policies, and professional customs structure where and how media is framed; and third, the practices of consumption whereby audience receive, interpret, and debate racialized media. Despite pronouncements that we have reached a “postracial” or “colorblind” society or that racial—and racist—meanings are only the domains of extremist activism and political rhetoric, we demonstrate how dominant racial meanings are deployed, negotiated, and contested in the behind-the-scenes productive activity with, distributive processes regarding, and consumer reactions to racialized media. The chapters highlight the multidirectional influences between media, the racialized climate of politics and culture, reverberations of media meanings in society, and experiences of media consumption along the lines of race, class, and gender positionalities. To analyze these complex relationships, contributing authors utilize various forms of media, including film, television, books, newspapers, social media, video games, and comics, among others.