The Difficulty of using popular culture as a way of understanding historical periods is no secret. Historians themselves have long been reluctant to study the impact of the mass media because it does not seem to yield the sorts of “hard” evidence presumably found in political debates, social legislation, state department memoranda, statistics on production and trade, tax records, or movements of population. All of these source materials persuade the historian that he can discover what people actually thought and did, whereas it seems almost impossible to detect what effects, if any, popular culture has had on the attitudes and behavior of its audience.