Stabile, Carol

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"We can remember it for you wholesale": Lessons of the broadcast blacklist
(Marquette University Press, 2011) Stabile, Carol A.
The following essay considers the ways in which the broadcast blacklist affected how media studies scholars think about and study the 1950s, as well how we understand the role of gender and family in 1950s popular culture. At the start of the 1950s--at the very moment in which television was emerging, in the words of blacklisted writer Shirley Graham DuBois, as "the newest, the most powerful, the most direct means of communication devised by Man ... .[whose] potentialities for Good or for Evil are boundless"--a massive ideological crackdown occurred in broadcasting (Graham 1964. By focusing on how the blacklist made struggles over gender, race, and class unspeakable in the new medium, this essays seeks to restore the memory of these struggles and their participants to accounts of the 1950s, to underscore the strategic manipulation of culture and memory by conservative forces, and to remind us just how crucial historical research is for media studies.