From the Progress City Archives comes this collection of tall tales and true from the annals of the Walt Disney Company. From Walt's on-set antics to the creations of modern-day Imagineers, we've put together a sampling of stories from throughout Disney history.SEE how Walt Disney befriended presidents and saved the Winter Olympics!HEAR how Imagineers created the technological wonderland of Epcot Center!READ the true-life tales of never-built Disney theme parks Port Disney and Disney's America!Join us as we explore the obscure and amusing corners of the Disney universe. From Fantasia to Horizons, there's something here for every fan.

From the Progress City Archives comes this collection of tall tales and true from the annals of the Walt Disney Company. From Walt's on-set antics to the creations of modern-day Imagineers, we've put together a sampling of stories from throughout Disney history. SEE how Walt Disney befriended presidents and saved the Winter Olympics! HEAR how Imagineers created the technological wonderland of Epcot Center! READ the true-life tales of never-built Disney theme parks Port Disney and Disney's America! Join us as we explore the obscure and amusing corners of the Disney universe. From Fantasia to Horizons, there's something here for every fan.

In this prequel to Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (1998), his acclaimed book about the post-industrial city as a site of theming, branding and simulated spaces, sociologist John Hannigan travels back in time to the 1950s. Unfairly stereotyped as ‘the tranquillized decade’, America at mid-century hosted an escalating proliferation and conjunction of ‘spectacular’ events, spaces, and technologies. Spectacularization was collectively defined by five features. It reflected and legitimated a dramatic increase in scale from the local/regional to the national. It was mediated by the increasingly popular medium of television. It exploited middle-class tension between comfortable conformity and desire for safe adventure. It celebrated technological progress, boosterism and military power. It was orchestrated and marketed by a constellation, sometimes a coalition, of entrepreneurs and dream merchants, most prominently Walt Disney. In this wide-ranging odyssey across mid-century America, Hannigan visits leisure parks (Cypress Gardens), parades (Tournament of Roses), mega-events (Squaw Valley Olympics, Century 21 Exposition), architectural styles (desert modernism), innovations (underwater photography, circular film projection) and everyday wonders (chemistry sets). Collectively, these fashioned the ‘spectacular gaze’, a prism through which Americans in the 1950s were acculturated to and conscripted into a vision of a progressive, technology-based future. Rise of the Spectacular will appeal to architects, landscape designers, geographers, sociologists, historians, and leisure/tourism researchers, as well as non-academic readers who are by a fascinating era in history.

The Story of Walt's EPCOT. Disney historian and urban planner Sam Gennawey traces the evolution of the EPCOT we didn't get and the Epcot we did, in a tour-de-force analysis of Walt's vision for city-building and how his City of Tomorrow might have turned out had he lived.

"In the early 1990s, a small group of "AIDS denialists," including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment's consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no evidence for Duesberg's beliefs, which turned out to be baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public health officials were able to save countless lives through measures aimed at preventing its transmission"--

"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.