John F. Kennedy remains central to both the American and the global imagination. Featuring essays by leading literary critics, historians, and film scholars, The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy addresses such topics as Kennedy's youth in Boston and his time at Harvard, his foreign policy and his role in reshaping the US welfare state, his relationship to the civil rights and conservative movements, and the ongoing reverberations of his life and death in literature and film. Going beyond historical or biographical studies, these chapters explore the creation and afterlife of an icon, a figure who still embodies - and sparks debate about - what it means to be American.

With the publication of his seminal novel White Noise, Don DeLillo was elevated into the pantheon of great American writers. His novels are admired and studied for their narrative technique, political themes, and their prophetic commentary on the cultural crises affecting contemporary America. In an age dominated by the image, DeLillo's fiction encourages the reader to think historically about such matters as the Cold War, the assassination of President Kennedy, threats to the environment, and terrorism. This Companion charts the shape of DeLillo's career, his relation to twentieth-century aesthetics, and his major themes. It also provides in-depth assessments of his best-known novels, White Noise, Libra, and Underworld, which have become required reading not only for students of American literature, but for all interested in the history and the future of American culture.

From Please Please Me to Abbey Road, this collection of essays tells the fascinating story of the Beatles – the creation of the band, their musical influences, and their cultural significance, with emphasis on their genesis and practices as musicians, songwriters, and recording artists. Through detailed biographical and album analyses, the book uncovers the background of each band member and provides expansive readings of the band's music. • Traces the group's creative output from their earliest recordings through their career • Pays particular attention to the social and historical factors which contributed to the creation of the band • Investigates the Beatles' unique enduring musical legacy and cultural power • Clearly organized into three sections, covering Background, Works, and History and Influence, the Companion is ideal for course usage, and is also a must-read for all Beatles fans

THE ACCLAIMED BOOK, NOW IN PAPERBACK, with a reading group guide and a new afterword by the author. At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy’s change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence. Once these dark "Unspeakable" forces recognized that Kennedy’s interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up. Douglass takes readers into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the President’s motorcade. As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda.

The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. The essays also guide the reader to an understanding of Velázquez's work--his training in his native Seville, reflections in his oeuvre of artistic currents from outside Spain, and how Velázquez's religious paintings may be understood within the religious context of Counter-Reformation Spain.

In his new book, Michael J. Hogan, a leading historian of the American presidency, offers a new perspective on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as seen not from his life and times but from his afterlife in American memory. The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considers how Kennedy constructed a popular image of himself, in effect, a brand, as he played the part of president on the White House stage. The cultural trauma brought on by his assassination further burnished that image and began the process of transporting Kennedy from history to memory. Hogan shows how Jacqueline Kennedy, as the chief guardian of her husband's memory, devoted herself to embedding the image of the slain president in the collective memory of the nation, evident in the many physical and literary monuments dedicated to his memory. Regardless of critics, most Americans continue to see Kennedy as his wife wanted him remembered: the charming war hero, the loving husband and father, and the peacemaker and progressive leader who inspired confidence and hope in the American people.

Using John F. Kennedy as a central figure and reference point, this volume explores how postcolonial citizens viewed the US president when peak decolonization met the Cold War. Exploring how their appropriations blended with their own domestic and regional realities, the chapters span sources, cases and languages from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe to explore the history of US and third world relations in a way that pushes beyond US-centric themes. Examining a range of actors, Globalizing the U.S. Presidency studies various political, sociocultural and economic domestic and regional contexts during the Cold War era, and explores themes such as appropriation, antagonism and contestation within decolonisation. Attempting to both de-americanize and globalize John F. Kennedy and the US Presidency, the chapters examine how the perceptions of the president were fed by everyday experiences of national and international postcolonial lives. The many examples of worldwide interest in the US president at this time illustrate that this time was a historical turning point for the role of the US on the global stage. The hopes and fears of peaking decolonization, the resulting pressure on Washington, Moscow and other powers, and a new mediascape together ushered in a more comprehensive globalization of international politics, and a new meaning to 'the United States in the world'.