University Press of Mississippi: Books

Written over a span of a quarter of a century, they present a remarkably rich and complex look at Washington, the educator and leading precursor of the Civil Rights Movement who rose from slavery to be the dominant force in black America at the opening of the twentieth century.

Readers will know Bob Ross (1942-1995) as the gentle, afro'd painter of happy trees on PBS. And while the Florida-born artist is reviled or ignored by the elite art world and scholarly art educators, he continues to be embraced around the globe as a healer and painter, even decades after his death. In Happy Clouds, Happy Trees, the authors thoughtfully explore how the Bob Ross phenomenon grew into a juggernaut.

Contributions by Lanette Cadle, Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem, Renata Lucena Dalmaso, Andrew Eichel, Kyle Eveleth, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Darren Harris-Fain, Krystal Howard, Christopher D. Kilgore, Kristine Larsen, Thayse Madella, Erica McCrystal, Tara Prescott, Danielle Russell, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Joseph Michael Sommers, and Justin Wigard

From the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, five big movie studios-Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and RKO-dominated Hollywood's film industry. This "big studio system" operated primarily as a series of assembly-line production factories. Ideally, each churned out fifty-two movies a year, enough to supply showcase theaters across the country with a new lineup each week-with profit being the overriding goal.