Going to the movies: early audiences; Heroes and heroines of heir own entertainment: Progressive-era cinema; The rise of Hollywood: Movies, ideology, and audiences in the roaring twenties; Who controls what we see? Censorship and the attack on Hollywood immorality; Confronting the Great Depression: renewing democracy in hard times; Alternative cinemas: Movies on the margins; Seeing red: Cold war Hollywood; Eisenhower´ s America: Prosperity and probles in the 1950s; Black and whiste in colour race and film in the 1960s and 1970s; Vietnam and the crisis of American power: Movies, war, and militarism; Reagan´ s America: The blacklash against women and men; Hollywood goes global: The internationalization of American cinema.