Dana Steven's book, Camera Man, is a great place to start. It's about Buster Keaton so you get the transition from Vaudeville to film. She's a writer for Slate and does their podcast and b/c of that she was able to get on a crapton of podcasts, everyone from Marc Maron to the New Books Network. I like this interview with her: https://newbooksnetwork.com/dana-stevens-keaton-on-buster-keaton-jp-ef

The New Books Network has a good podcast on film from various academic viewpoints as well. https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/arts-letters/film

Also, I'm going to post more about this in my reading for the week, but Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher is about Edward Curtis and it discusses his important film, Land of the Head Hunters.

Back in the hey day of "scientific" racism there were a lot of claims that were made about Anglo-Saxon people vis a vis other groups. Most of it is pretty easily rejected, even by the 30. Just better tools of linguistic analysis, genetics, and basic standards in stuff like anatomy got people to reject stuff like phrenology, which had served as the basis for a lot it.

But, the racism associated with the term got worked into a lot of stuff, like immigration law and the medical profession. It mostly now is associated with stuff like keeping Jewish people from receiving refuge from the Nazis or slavery or sterilizing people of color or lower classes or colonialism.

Even in Iberia you still have the Basques, and there's Galicia Belgica with Flemish and German. The claim your disputing seems like one of those claims that only really works at a very general level and as you point out, the non elites kind of could do their own thing and are often over looked at that level.

Your point about the eastern side of the empire is another good one. The Greek situation is complicated b/c of it's role as a language of high culture and the Semitic languages were in a state of flux anyway and going through all sorts of changes.

You might dig The 12 Who Ruled by Palmer. It's about the Committee for Public Safety. It's an older book, but very readable.

Mike Duncan's got a bibliography for his sources on the French Revolution section of his Revolutions podcast that's worth checking out as well.

https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/bibliography.html

Wawro's book, A Mad Catastrophe was really fascinating.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/geoffrey-wawro-a-mad-catastrophe-the-outbreak-of-world-war-i-and-the-collapse-of-the-habsburg-empire-basic-books-2014-3

I agree. I think they're probably better off searching JSTOR for some papers. It looks like this author is Russian, but maybe you can out more from this conference.

https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/detp-20/125940123

For anyone interested, Charles Mann was just on the Lunar Society Podcast. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/charles-mann#details

I'm not a subscriber b/c it leans a little too tech bro for my interests but it looks like he has some good guests. Mann's interview was interesting and others might like it. The interviewer is very thoughtful.

Things like that are to multicausal to lay at the feet of any one thing. The cassettes were important in giving people a figure to focus on, but there wouldn't have needed to be a figure if there wasn't so much dissatisfaction. If the Shah wasn't so flagrant in his profligacy, if he wasn't in power due to the US assistance, if the SAVAK weren't so brutal, etc, would people have looked for an alternative to the Shah? I would say the cassettes were more important to establishing the Ayatollah as an alternative to the Shah than being responsible for the revolution itself. I think the Shah's mismanagement was the driving reason for that. How it played out is a different story.

(For people who haven't heard about this aspect of the Revolution there were cassettes of the Ayatollah's sermons that were widely distributed throughout Iran before the revolution. One of the ironies was that the US's support of the Shah had allowed the Shah to put in a modern telephone system which allowed Khomeini to call in and deliver these sermons with enough clarity that they could be recorded, duped and distributed.)