Product Description

Iconic Events explores the social forces that have shaped the meanings around and enduring significance of events that have captured the public's imagination, including: Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Columbine, and September 11th. The book focuses on three interpretive phases including journalistic representations, political appropriations, and popular adaptations and pays particular attention to the development of dominant and resistive event narratives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1056362 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 pages

Customer Reviews

Why some events "just catch our eye"
Titanic? 9/11? Pearl Harbor? Columbine? Why do we "know" what these simple titles mean? How did it happen that these words evoke a complex, nuanced yet emotional set of images? And why do other, often quite similar events (the sinking of the Andrea Doria, the Red Lake school shootings) ring no bells?

Patricia Leavy's excellent book, Iconic Events, explores this queston. Her analysis shows how much construction - by media, political forces, and consumer capitalism - goes into producing the instantly recognized iconic event. For instance, the cultural phenomenon "Titanic" began life as a partially misundersood national news item. Missing from the coverage was the context and history of the great liner - White Star's "triumph of the Aryan race." Missing, too, was any mention of the fact that the "law of the sea," which allowed women and children to enter the life boats first, was highly classed and raced: it applied only to first class passengers and not at all to the third class passengers who were locked into their watery graves. But, if news coverage was incomplete, it was nevertheless handy, and was quickly appropriated by the anti-Suffrage movement. "See," they said, "chivalry, not the vote, is what women need." And, in the end, Titanic's selective, romanticized narrative became the source for commerical memorabilia, reproductions, and trinkets.

Nor is the Titanic story unique. Even the more recent and arguably more important "9/11" goes through a similar metamorphosis, from saturation news coverage, to being used as an image inappropriately apporiated by the war on drugs (the drugs, allegedly, being supplied by the terrorists), to commodity form - the dazzling pink glitter "I love NYFD" t-shirt.

What Leavy offers in Iconic Events is a thoughtful analysis of how the media covers news (often, in the words of Todd Gitlin, reducing it to the "olds" - new instances of previously established phenomena); how contemporaneous political forces appropriate initial media images, and how, evetually, every popular image becomes grist for commercial kitsch. When all these processes converge, the iconic event is born.

Why is this analysis important? Because, through Leavy's insights, we come to understand how our sense of reality is constructed by those who have little care for our real well-being. We get some insight into the organizational, political, and commercial forces that, for many of us, define what is real, what is important, what is not worthy of notice. No small feat for a slender, elegantly written volume - a major contribution to the study of political and popular culture.

A Superb Book!
Patricia Leavy's book Iconic Events: Media,Politics and Power in Retelling History is a fascinating account of several historical events that have shaped our nation's history since its inception. The Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Columbine, September 11, 2001 are just some of the pivotal events that are covered in this riveting book.

Leavy does a splendid job in defining how each specific event is iconic in its own way. Moreover,she investigates the market and social forces that have molded the collective memory of the nation.

The book is first-rate in all respects - research, analyisis, narrative etc... It is essential reading for anyone interested in mass media and the influence it has over our lives.