Popular Culture Review: Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2009

Popular culture studies are pertinent to many academic fields, ranging from art, music, communications, marketing, and history to political science and anthropology. The subject has had a tremendous impact on research. For example, as political history became less the study of diplomatic history, and as the relevance of all kinds of evidence from neglected topics such as the stage, cinema, sociology and design, and myriad other areas staked their claims, the subject increased enormously in value. A catalyst for the field was the establishment of the Far West Popular Culture Association in 1988. Popular Culture Review, the Far West Popular Culture Association's biannual journal, is chock full of material that is available nowhere else. Westphalia Press and the Policy Studies Organization are proud to bring the collection back into print. Many of the papers originated in the annual meeting of popular culture researchers in Las Vegas, started in 1968, which happily continues and brings people from all over the world to ponder a wide variety of topics; so much so that is hard to think of a problem or policy that the journal does not have value in illuminating. Its insights have long come of age and become an essential tool in the scholar's repertoire.