Scarecrow Press imprint: 1180 books

In 1898, documentary footage of a yacht race was shot by Robert A. Mitchell, making him the first Irishman to shoot a film within Ireland. Despite early exposure to the filmmaking process, Ireland did not develop a regular film industry until the late 1910s when James Mark Sullivan established the...

Iran is a country with a deep and complex history. Over several thousand years, Iran has been the source of numerous creative contributions to the spiritual and literary world, and the site of many remarkable manifestations of material culture. The special place that Iran has come to hold in contemporary...

While there are costume and fashion dictionaries tied to specific countries or periods, none have been comprehensive. In The Complete Costume Dictionary, Elizabeth Lewandowski has collected from a variety of sources—including costume history texts, journal articles, historical publications, autobiographies,...

David A. Ellis has interviewed some of the most influential and highly regarded cameramen of the last half century and more, and he has assembled these exchanges in Conversations with Cinematographers. While their names may not be known by the general public, these men and their work have left indelible...

The Gilded Age was an important three-decade period in American history. It was a time of transition, when the United States began to recover from its Civil War and post-war rebuilding phase. It was as a time of progress in technology and industry, of regression in race relations, and of stagnation...

People who are considered “famous” can be found in many different fields. This book describes 472 museums, historic sites, and memorials about 409 people in 26 categories: Actors Explorers Playwrights Architects First Ladies Poets Artists/Sculptors Frontiersmen Presidents Athletes Journalists/Publishers...

Richard Egües and José Fajardo are universally regarded as the leading exponents of charanga flute playing, an improvisatory style that crystallized in 1950s Cuba with the rise of the mambo and the chachachá. Despite the commercial success of their recordings with Orquesta Aragón and Fajardo y...

When the earliest filmgoers watched The Great Train Robbery in 1903, many of them shrieked in terror at the very last clip when one of the outlaws turns directly toward the camera and fires a gun, seemingly, directly at the audience. The puff of smoke was sudden and it was hand colored so that it...

Social networking is now an entrenched activity for nearly every teen in the country. A recent study showed that nearly 75% of American teens use an online social network, a percentage that continues to rise. Librarians, such as the author herself, are often asked by young adults for help and advice...

In the 1960s, The Beatles would address like no other musical act a radical shift in the cultural mindset of the late twentieth century. Through tools of “electric technology,” this shift encompassed the decline of visual modes of perception and the emergence of a “way-of-knowing” based increasingly...

Martin provides a new overall assessment of the importance of Charlie Parker through an analysis of his improvisations in a variety of genres. Earlier studies of Parker argue that his style is based on an extensive network of melodic formulas that are combined to create solos. Because the same formulas...

In Recording History, Peter Martlanduses a range of archival sources to trace the genesis and early development of the British record industry from1888 to 1931. A work of economic and cultural history that draws on a vast range of quantitative data, itsurveys the commercial and business activities...

Once dubbed espionage, the practice of intelligence has never been more important nor more sophisticated than it is today. Its coming-of-age began during World War II, which saw the birth of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the United States and the XX Committee to supervise the activities...

For over a century, the conflict between the Arabs and Jews has remained the most intractable problem confronting the world. Hardly a day passes that the Arab-Israeli Conflict is not headlined in the media. It has turned the Arabs and Israelis against one another and embittered relations within the...