"This is an extremely important book, a major, highly readable, well-researched contribution to the scholarship on the history of movie censorship and regulation in the Progressive era. Fronc provides a rich and diverse portrait of the social matrix that informed the shape, success, and limits of the National Board of Review’s efforts to encourage better films and defeat censorship laws."
~Matthew H. Bernstein, Emory University, author of Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television
"A terrific, well-argued, and engaging book that will appeal to readers in American history and film history. By mining primary sources from institutional records, Jennifer Fronc is able to provide the first account that really gets inside the workings of the National Board of Review."
~Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, University of Texas at Austin, author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture
"Not unlike Facebook, the nascent movie industry resisted regulation; it fought back with self-imposed guidelines aided by the rhetoric of civil libertarians. Ranged against the studios were Puritans and Progressives, a coalition of moralizers, women’s groups concerned with the effect of movies on children and culture warriors who linked movies with the medium’s lowlife origins as burlesque sideshow attractions. . . Fronc has written an engaging and balanced account of questions whose debating points remain relevant today."
~Shepherd Express
"Jennifer Fronc provides a needed history of the most far-reaching, and successful, organization to regulate motion pictures in the early 20th century: The National Board of Review...Fronc’s careful historical work reminds us that even among people who shared political sentiments—Progressive reformers, labor organizers, animal rights activists, and clubwomen—there was considerable disagreement about whether and how society should regulate motion pictures."
~Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"A comprehensive and meticulously researched study...Fronc's book brings considerable scholarship and insight into the politics of efforts to regulate early American cinema and to their lingering effects on efforts to circumscribe the effects of film on what those prone to regulate viewed as vulnerable audiences."
~Journal of American History
"Fronc has made a well-researched contribution on a fascinating period of tug-of-war over early films. Film and free-speech historians will find Monitoring the Movies a comprehensive analysis of the censorship debate during the Progressive era and would welcome this impressively detailed book on the shelf."
~Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy
