UNT Dallas Library News

Winter Reading Ebooks

12/17/2025

Zachary Brown

Communication Studies, History, Media Arts

Winter Reading Ebooks

Happy Holidays - Animated: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year's Cartoons on Television and Film (2019) - synopsis: From devotional portrayals of the Nativity to Santa battling villains and monsters, this encyclopedia catalogs more than 1,800 international Christmas-themed cartoons and others with year-end themes of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the New Year. Explore beloved television specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas, theatrical shorts such as Santa’s Workshop, holiday episodes from animated television series like American Dad! and The Simpsons, feature films like The Nutcracker Prince and obscure productions such as The Insects’ Christmas, along with numerous adaptations and parodies of such classics as A Christmas Carol and “Twas the Night before Christmas.”

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West (2008) - synopsis: In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year’s westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal.

America: Government, History, & Culture - eBooks

07/10/2025

Zachary Brown

History, Media Arts

E-book titled When They Hid the Fire: A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America (2017) - synopsis: When They Hid the Fire examines the American social perceptions of electricity as an energy technology that were adopted between the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries. Arguing that both technical and cultural factors played a role, Daniel French shows how electricity became an invisible and abstract form of energy in American society. As technological advancements allowed for an increasing physical distance between power generation and power consumption, the commodity of electricity became consciously detached from the environmentally destructive fire and coal that produced it. This development, along with cultural forces, led the public to define electricity as mysterious, utopian, and an alternative to nearby fire-based energy sources.

E-book titled Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror (2023) - synopsis: Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film, one that is not merely used for extraneous “comic relief” moments but often serves to underscore major themes, intensify suspense, and disorient viewers. Each chapter focuses on a different comic style or device, from the use of funny monsters and scary clowns in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street to the physical humor and slapstick in movies ranging from The Evil Dead to Final Destination. Along the way, humor scholar David Gillota explores how horror films employ parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics.

America: Government, History, & Culture - eBooks

07/08/2025

Zachary Brown

History, Media Arts, Music, Women and Gender Studies

E-book titled Atomic Tunes: The Cold War in American and British Popular Music (2021) - synopsis: What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions.

E-book titled Sentiments of a British-American Woman: Esther Deberdt Reed and the American Revolution (2017) - synopsis: At the time of her death in 1780, British-born Esther DeBerdt Reed was one of the most politically important women in Revolutionary America. Her treatise “The Sentiments of an American Woman” articulated the aspirations of female patriots, and the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, which she founded, taught generations of women how to translate their political responsibilities into action. DeBerdt Reed’s life yields remarkable insight into the scope of women’s political influence in an age ruled by the strict social norms structured by religion and motherhood. The story of her courtship, marriage, and political career sheds light both on the private and political lives of women during the Revolution and on how society, religion, and gender interacted as a new nation struggled to build its own identity.

Art and Poetry Month - eBooks

04/11/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, Communication Studies, History, Media Arts, World Languages, Literatures and Cultures

E-book titled Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement (2021) - synopsis: Dada magazines made the Dada art movement what it was: diverse, non-hierarchical, transnational, and defiant of the most fundamental artistic conventions. This first volume entirely devoted to Dada periodicals retells the story of Dada by demonstrating the centrality of these graphically inventive, provocative periodicals. The book includes magazines from well-known Dada cities like New York and Paris as well as Zagreb and Bucharest, and reveals that Dada continued to inspire art journals into the 1920s.

E-book titled Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media (2024) - synopsis: Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan’s media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem.

Art and Poetry Month - eBooks

04/09/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, English, History, Media Arts

E-book titled The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets: Poetic Responses to English Poetry from Chaucer to Yeats (1994) - synopsis: The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets collects together writings by all the major poetic figures from Chaucer to Yeats demonstrating their vivid responses to each other, ranging from elegiac eulogy to burlesque and satire. The anthology is arranged in two sections. Part One contains poets’ writings on the nature, qualities and purpose of poetry, and Part Two is a chronological collection of poets’ writings on their peers, with an individual entry for each poet.

Art and Poetry Month - eBooks

04/07/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, Communication Studies, Counseling, English, Media Arts

E-book titled The Arts Therapies: A Revolution in Healthcare (2020) - synopsis: The separate arts therapies - drama, art, music and dance - are becoming available to increasing numbers of clients as mental health professionals discover their potential to reach and help people. This fully updated new edition of The Arts Therapies provides, in one volume, a guide to the different disciplines and their current practice and thinking in different parts of the world. Each chapter draws on a variety of perspectives and accounts to develop understandings of the relations between theory, research, and practice, offering perspectives on areas such as the client-therapist-art form relationship or on outcomes and efficacy to help articulate and understand what the arts therapies can offer specific client groups.

E-book titled Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation (2016) - synopsis: There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the “thing itself” beyond representation. Words Fail pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers—Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben—as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey the ongoing struggle of living in a highly fragmented world.

Art and Poetry Month - eBooks

04/03/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, Communication Studies, English, History, Media Arts

E-Book titled Design by IKEA: A Cultural History (2014) - synopsis: Sara Kristoffersson’s compelling study provides the first sustained critical history of IKEA. Drawing on original research in the IKEA company archive and interviews with IKEA personnel, Design by IKEA traces IKEA’s symbolic connection to Sweden, through its design output and its promotional materials, to examine how the company both promoted and profited from the concept of Scandinavian Design.

E-Book titled Doom Scroll: Poems (2023) - synopsis: Doom Scroll explores an anxious domesticity. These prose poems hedge toward moments of levity—a Joy Division song, a meal at Denny’s—as a pandemic lockdown, busted politics, and other existential dreads loom in the margins.

Art and Poetry Month - eBooks

04/01/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, Communication Studies, English, Media Arts

E-book titled Slam Your Poetry: Write a Revolution (2020) - synopsis: Miles Merrill, spoken word artist and founder of Australian Poetry Slam, and award-winning teacher Narcisa Nozica will take you from novice to spoken word superstar in no time. Slam Your Poetry provides step-by-step instructions and exercises that will inspire you to: 1. Write a poem that pops 2. Rehearse like a winner 3. Wow your audience 4. Beat stage fright 5. Run a winning competition for your school or community group. Part how-to guide, part masterclass, part manifesto, this book will help teachers, students, and wannabe spoken word artists of all ages slam like a pro.

E-book titled Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World inside Your Head (2023) - synopsis: Marvel Comics in the 1970s explores a forgotten chapter in the story of the rise of comics as an art form. Bridging Marvel’s dizzying innovations and the birth of the underground comics scene in the 1960s and the rise of the prestige graphic novel and postmodern superheroics in the 1980s, Eliot Borenstein reveals a generation of comic book writers whose work at Marvel in the 1970s established their own authorial voice within the strictures of corporate comics.

Black History Month - eBooks

02/09/2025

Zachary Brown

Art, Ethnic Studies, History, Media Arts

E-book titled Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement (2015) - synopsis: As Emilie Raymond shows, during the civil rights movement the Stars for Freedom - a handful of celebrities both black and white - risked their careers by crusading for racial equality and forged the role of celebrity in American political culture. Focusing on the “Leading Six” trailblazers - Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dick Gregory, and Sidney Poitier - Raymond reveals how they not only advanced the civil rights movement in front of the cameras, but also worked tirelessly behind the scenes, raising money for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legal defense, leading membership drives for the NAACP, and personally engaging with workaday activists to boost morale.

E-book titled Pioneering Cartoonists of Color (2017) - synopsis: Syndicated cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson offers an unprecedented look at the rich yet largely untold story of African American cartoon artists. This book provides a historical record of the men and women who created seventy-plus comic strips, many editorial cartoons, and illustrations for articles. The volume covers the mid-1880s, the early years of the self-proclaimed black press, to 1968, when African American cartoon artists were accepted in the so-called mainstream.

Black History Month - eBooks

02/07/2025

Zachary Brown

Business, Ethnic Studies, History, Journalism, Media Arts

E-book titled Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (2015) - synopsis: Posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007, Richard Durham creatively chronicled and brought to life the significant events of his times. Durham’s trademark narrative style engaged listeners with fascinating characters, compelling details, and sharp images of pivotal moments in American and African American history and culture. In Word Warrior, award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham’s astounding career.

E-book titled Building the Black Metropolis: African American Entrepreneurship in Chicago (2017) - synopsis: Robert E. Weems Jr. and Joseph P. Chambers curate a collection of essays that place the city as the center of the black business world in the United States. Ranging from titans like Anthony Overton and Jesse Binga to McDonald’s operators to black organized crime, the scholars shed light on the long-overlooked history of African American work and entrepreneurship since the Great Migration. Together they examine how factors like the influx of southern migrants and the city’s unique segregation patterns made Chicago a prolific incubator of productive business development “and made building a black metropolis as much a necessity as an opportunity.”

Subjects

Accounting

1

Advertising

2

Agriculture and Veterinary Science

8

Anthropology

78

Art

120

Biochemistry

3

Biography

66

Biology

10

Business

9

Career/Employment

44

See more...

Recent Posts

Winter Reading Ebooks

...

Winter Reading Ebooks

...

Hispanic Heritage Month - eBooks

...

Hispanic Heritage Month - eBooks

...

Contact Us:

7350 University Hills Blvd, 3rd Floor, Dallas, Texas 75241
Ph: 972-338-1616 | E-mail: Library@untdallas.edu
© Copyright 2024, UNT Dallas. All rights reserved.

Social Media:

Visit Us:

Hours: Mon.-Thur.: 8:00-8:00 | Fri -Sat: 8:00-5:00 |
Sun: 12:00-5:00
Directions & Maps to the Library | Privacy Statement