Richard Abel - Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916

I am deeply grateful for the sustained encouragement and support received during the long period of this books writing.

Several institutions provided crucial funding for the extensive research required: a 201112 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship as well as the Collegiate Professorship and other funds from the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

The readers of a draft manuscript for the University of California Press offered invaluable assistance. Mark Garrett Cooper was especially generous in his recommendations and suggested several good ideas for reorganizing the prologue and introduction as well as writing concluding paragraphs to several chapters and entractes. Though less generous, the second anonymous reader did prod me to make my objectives and arguments more clear and consistent throughout and clarify critical concepts at certain points, particularly in the context of recent scholarship.

Sincere thanks are due to the staff and facilities of numerous archives and libraries: Barbara Hall, former research archivist at the Margaret Herrick Library; Julia A. Johnas, director of adult services at the Highland Park Public Library; the Periodicals Room of the U.S. Library of Congress; the Research Center of the Chicago History Museum; the Michigan Historical Society Library; the Historical Society of Iowa Library; the Minnesota Historical Society Library; Special Collections at the UCLA Library; the Rubenstein Library and University Archives at Duke University; the University of Pittsburgh Library; the Heinz Research Center, Pittsburgh; the Cleveland Public Library; the Toledo Public Library; the Buffalo Public Library; the New York Public Library; the Baltimore Public Library; the Stark County District Library, Canton, Ohio; and, of course, the Hatcher Graduate Library and Inter-Library Loan Services at the University of Michigan.

The book also could not have been written without the important online sites of the Media History Digital Library, Chronicling America (U.S. Library of Congress), newspaperarchive.com, geneaologybank.com, and Proquest.

So many colleagues and friends shared source material, helped locate new resources, posed crucial questions, raised counterarguments, and pushed me to develop several lines of analysis that I apologize in advance if some are neglected in the following. Paul S. Moore generously shared a great number of materials, sources, and concepts from his own research on early-twentieth-century newspapers, motion picture pages and columns, and local newsreels. Besides his close friendship, Giorgio Bertellini offered crucial ideas for framing the books overall argument. Other support of one kind or another came from Diane Anselmo-Sequeire, Jennifer M. Bean, Stephen Bottomore, Scott Curtis, Monica DallAsta, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Victoria Duckett, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Donan Galili, Hilary Hallett, Charlie Keil, Martin Johnson, Jan Olsson, Shelley Stamp, Gregory Waller, and Jennifer Wild. At the University of Michigan, Screen Arts & Cultures doctoral student Nathan Koob helped greatly by traveling to distant libraries to compile digital newspaper scans and photocopies, as did another Screen Arts & Cultures doctoral student, Ben Strassfeld, at the New York City Public Library, and the Romance Languages & Literatures doctoral student Roberto Vezzani at the Library of Congress.