{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02418745275888133, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005291005291005291, 'mean_word_length': 4.884444444444444, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A People’s History of Poverty in America (review)

censorship boards, courts, and streets to protest it. The filmic text itself is little analyzed by Stokes; the author instead provides an extensive review of the large and varied literature on the subject. His focus is on how the film was marketed, how audiences experienced it—from their theater surroundings and the cost of tickets to being shown to their seats by ushers in period costumes and hearing the film’s score—and how they were transformed, thrilled, moved, or enraged by it. The depth and reach of Stokes’s research reveals some true historical gems, disturbing and clear windows onto the history of racism, representation, popular culture, and social change in the twentieth-century United States. In the midst of the violence in Little Rock, Arkansas that exploded with the desegregation of Central High School in 1957, he tells us, city residents could visit a downtown movie theater to see The Birth of a Nation (249). Stokes highlights the social and political consequences and the persistent reactionary quality of Griffith’s toxic imagery and warped historical narrative. This book is an invaluable resource both for those new to the study of The Birth of a Nation as well as those of us who thought we already understood well the history of this film.