Robert Thompson

Television in the Antenna Age is a brief, accessible, and engaging overview of the medium’s history and development in the US. Integrating three major concerns--television as an industry, a technology, and an art—the book is a basic primer on the complex, fascinating, and often overlooked story of television and its impact on American life. Covers the entire history of American television, from its urban, middle-class beginnings in the late 40s, to the contemporary impact of new technologies and consolidated corporate. Includes interview segments with industry insiders, pictures, and sidebars to illustrate important figures, trends, and events

Television in the Antenna Age is a brief, accessible, and engaging overview of the medium’s history and development in the US. Integrating three major concerns--television as an industry, a technology, and an art—the book is a basic primer on the complex, fascinating, and often overlooked story of television and its impact on American life. Covers the entire history of American television, from its urban, middle-class beginnings in the late 40s, to the contemporary impact of new technologies and consolidated corporate. Includes interview segments with industry insiders, pictures, and sidebars to illustrate important figures, trends, and events

The Broadcast Journalism Handbook has everything you ever wanted to know about working in the television news business but were afraid to ask! College courses teach the theory of how a television newsroom works; here, working journalists show the reality of the business. Learn the ropes—and how to head off amateur errors—from the authors' vast experiences and dozens of interviews with news professionals. The economic recession and new advances in technology are making this exciting career more competitive than ever, and this book will give budding journalists a head start with an insider's view of the job—necessary in today's environment. Complete with a news glossary, job-searching tips, helpful web sites, and real-life scenarios that put the student in the shoes of today's journalists, The Broadcast Journalism Handbook covers many newsroom positions, from assignment editors to producers, reporters, and anchors. It gives you newsroom experience before you get the job.

Empires on the Pacific smashes the standard narrative of World War II in the Pacific theatre, showing America's aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power. Robert Smith Thompson offers a long overdue explanation of what America's war against Japan was really about- in a word: China. The over-reaching British Empire was waning yet unwilling to relinquish its foothold in China, while an increasingly ambitious Japan was determined to dominate the region by conquering China. Enter the young upstart, America. For Franklin Delano Roosevelt and for the United States, the war with Japan had little to do with revenge for Pearl Harbor. Japan would have to be vanquished so that it would never again be an imperial rival.Thompson's recasting of the Asian conflict profoundly alters our understanding of World War II in the Pacific and of what followed in Korea and in Vietnam. Revisionist history at its best, Empires on the Pacific is a far-reaching book that requires us to re-evaluate what we thought we knew about twentieth-century American history and what many still consider our last "good war."

The Viola da Gamba Society Thematic Index of Music for Viols (ed. Gordon Dodd), 1980-92 (and continuing), is composer-based. The present volume initiates a companion project to catalogue manuscripts containing consort music. The editors are all highly experienced in the field and have newly examined all sources. Volume 1 features over 50 MSS whose copyists or owners are known: Bing, Hutton, Jenkins, Le Strange, Lilly, Merro, North. As well as a detailed inventory of every book (with anonymous work identified where possible), the descriptions include information on date, size, binding, paper, rastra, watermarks, collations, scripts, inscriptions and provenance, together with bibliographical references. Brief notes on the owners and copyists are provided. Of particular importance is the inclusion of facsimiles of all hands. Also included is a comprehensive study and illustration of watermarks by Robert Thompson (serving for the whole series). With some printed catalogues such as the British Library and Christ Church, Oxford, now nearly 100 years old, this new and comprehensive study will be an invaluable tool for future research.

Part of Praeger's Media and Society Series, this contributed volume is the only collection of essays on television authorship. It includes work of some of the most prominent scholars in television studies. Rather than assigning one author to individual television texts, the contributors probe the relationship between the various authors at work within the institutional, cultural, and economic settings that characterize the television industry. This book analyzes and defines the unique methods of television authorship and suggests numerous candidates for authorial accountability allowing the medium to enter the realm of contemporary criticism. The first part of the volume provides a case study in four chapters on authorship issues surrounding Frank's Place, the short lived but compelling situation comedy. This is followed by three chapters focusing on issues of authorship in international television. The book then probes the studio's role as author, including essays on Warner Brothers, Desilu, and Screen Gems. Finally the contributors examine individual TV authors and cover such topics as point of view in music video, television production as collective action, and unconventional television.

Part of Praeger's Media and Society Series, this volume breaks new ground in television studies as the first booklength study of an individual television producer. Robert J. Thompson examines the work of Stephen J. Cannell, one of television's most prolific and successful producers. Thompson uses theories of film authorship revised for application to television texts and provides close analysis of Cannell's programs, including individual episodes of The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and The Greatest American Hero.Moving away from the notion that a television series is the creation of an individual author, the book begins with a look at the televisionmaker. Thompson probes the polyauthorial nature of the medium and introduces a new method of studying television authorship. The book then turns to Cannell and a study of his career, focusing on how he developed the formula for his many highly rated television series. Students and teachers of television and television criticism will find Adventures on Prime Time a source of stimulating ideas about the nature of the medium.

This book is the outcome of a decade of research on the neu­ roanatomical mechanisms of learning in the young laboratory rat. It is essentially a discourse on the functional organization of the brain in relation to problem-solving ability and intelli­ gence. During the period between 1980 and 1989, well over 1000 weanling albino rats were subjected to localized brain damage (or sham operations in the case of the controls) under deep anesthesia and aseptic surgical conditions, were allowed tore­ cover, and subsequently were tested on a wide variety of prob­ lems designed to measure general learning ability. Since vir­ tually every part of the brain rostral to the medulla has been explored with lesions, it has become possible not only to map a number of "putative" brain systems underlying the acquisition of distinctive problem-solving tasks, but to isolate several neu­ roanatomical mechanisms that appear to be selectively in­ volved in the acquisition of particular kinds of goal-directed learned activities. Of particular interest was the discovery of a "nonspecific mechanism" (previously referred to in our re­ search reports as the "general learning system") inhabiting the interior parts of the brain. One objective of this volume was to make these maps available in a single source. Another was to provide a descrip­ tion of learning syndromes arising from local lesions to differ­ ent parts of the brain.

Burns and Thompson help to remedy the lack of a forum for current research on television by bringing together, in this volume, some of the best recent research in television studies. This work will begin to fill the gap in literature on television studies as a discipline. In compiling these 13 papers, the editors maintain a balance of timely interest and lasting relevance. The contributors study the texts of current TV dramatic and comic series, such as Dallas and Cheers, as well as current trends in nonfiction TV, such as network and local news coverage. Each analysis of a specific television text is complimented with rigorous theoretical argumentation. Students and scholars of communications and television criticism will find Television Studies valuable reading.The book begins with a two-chapter debate primarily seeking a definition of `television studies.' The debate includes a critical examination of the capitalist institutions that dominate television as an industry. Further chapters discuss dramatic television series; an examination of the development of the lengthy serial text of Dallas, and structural analysis of the pilot episode of Cheers. The book contains five essays on nonfiction television, including an insiders view of the production and promotion of local TV news and an analysis of CBS and ABC's TV news coverage of South Africa over a two week period in 1987. In a final essay, conventional wisdom about `the audience' is refuted.