Smoke from cigars, pipes and cigarettes has curled its way through all levels of society in the last two hundred years. Matthew Hilton peels away the multifaceted images evoked by smoking in British literature, advertising and the cinema, as well as by more recent medical and political responses. The virtues attributed to tobacco, pleasure and relaxation, were primarily for the leisured classes...

In this essay, I study MySpace and Facebook pages, as well as interviews with the university students who created them, in order to address how online literacy practices of contemporary convergence culture both use and are filtered through popular culture. Though their answers to questions of intent, audience, and rhetorical choices varied, students shared a common reliance on popular culture c...

Although the question of equal rights for members of the female sex was raised during the founding of the New England colonies (as, for example, when Anne Hutchinson challenged the Puritan theocracy of Boston), such equality has yet to be fully reached in America in fact (or in law) in 1977. The 1970s witnessed a growing agitation for “women’s rights” and, with the enactment of Title IX of the ...