Television in Black-and-white America

Book excerpt: La couverture indique : "Alan Nadel's new book reminds us that most of the images on early TV were decidedly Caucasian and directed at predominantly white audiences. Television did not invent whiteness for America, but it did reinforce it as the norm - particularly during the Cold War years. Nadel now shows just how instrumental it was in constructing a narrow, conservative, and very white vision of America." "During this era, prime-time TV was dominated by "adult Westerns," with heroes like The Rebel's Johnny Yuma reincarnating Southern values and Bonanza's Cartwright family reinforcing the notion of white patriarchy - programs that, Nadel shows, bristled with Cold War messages even as they spoke to the nation's mythology. America had become visually reconfigured as a vast Ponderosa, crisscrossed by concrete highways designed to carry suburban white drivers beyond the moral challenge of racism, racial poverty, and increasingly vocal civil rights demands."