Frank Capra's America

Frank Capra's America

PRODUCTION CREDITS AND AUTHORS' PROFILES

Acknowledgments:

On January 9, 1999, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in Washington, D.C., the Popular Culture Association, Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, and the Historians Film Committee sponsored a joint session focusing on Frank Capra's cultural legacy, titled "Frank Capra's Populism: Timebound or Timeless?" This multimedia production is based on that session. The JMMH thanks the speakers at the Capra session—Dan T. Carter, Robert Brent Toplin, and Lawrence Levine—for permission to record and present their remarks; John E. O'Connor, co-founder of the Historians Film Committee, who opened the session; and Peter O. Rollins, current editor of Film & History for facilitating the recording.

Web site design and multimedia production:
Ron Ladouceur and Jane Ladouceur
Audio recording by Gerald Zahavi

About the authors:

Dan T. Carter is the William Rand Denan Professor of History at Emory University. Carter specializes in Southern US history. His books include Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South; When The War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics, and From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Revolution, 1963-1994.

Lawrence Levine is both the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at The University of California Berkeley, and professor of History and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Levine is an internationally renowned interdisciplinary scholar whose work has focused on American culture. In 1983 he was one of the very first historians to be awarded a MacArthur Prize; most recently he served as President of the Organization of American Historians. Levine is the author of numerous books including Black Culture and Black Consciousness: African American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, High Brow, Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History, and Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture and History.

Robert Brent Toplin is professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, film review editor for The Journal of American History, and the author and editor of a number of books, including Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, Hollywood as Mirror, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past, Freedom and Prejudice, and Ken Burns's the Civil War: Historian's Respond. He is also the principal developer of four historical dramas that have appeared nationally on PBS Television.