Download or read book Snake Oil Hustlers and Hambones written by Ann Anderson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before television and radio commercials beckoned to potential buyers, the medicine show provided free entertainment and promised cures for everything from corns to cancer. Combining elements of the circus, theater, vaudeville, and good old-fashioned entrepreneurship, the showmen of the American medicine show sold tonics, ointments, pills, extracts and a host of other "wonder-cures," guaranteed to "cure what ails you." While the cures were seldom miraculous, the medicine show was an important part of American culture and of performance history. Harry Houdini, Buster Keaton, and P.T. Barnum all took a turn upon the medicine show stage. This study of the medicine show phenomenon surveys nineteenth century popular entertainment and provides insight into the ways in which show business, advertising, and medicine manufacture developed in concert. The colorful world of the medicine show, with its Wild West shows, pie-eating contests, clowns, and menageries, is fully explored. Photographs of performers and of the fascinating handbills and posters used to promote the medicine show are included.

Download or read book Entertainment in the Old West written by Jeremy Agnew and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miners, loggers, railroad men, and others flooded into the American West after the discovery of gold in 1848, and entertainers seeking to fill the demand for distraction from the workers' daily toil soon followed. Actors, actresses and traveling troupes crisscrossed the American frontier, performing in tents, saloons, fancy theaters, and the open air. This exploration of the heyday of popular theater in the Old West chronicles its emergence and growth from 1850 to the early twentieth century. Here is the story of the men and women who provided myriad types of entertainment in the Old West, and brought excitement, laughter and tears to generations of pioneers.

Download or read book The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy written by Rick DesRochers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy examines how contemporary writer/performers are influenced by the comedic vaudevillians of the early 20th century. By tracing the history and legacy of the vaudeville era and performance acts, like the Marx Brothers and The Three Keatons, and moving through the silent and early sound films of the early 1930s, the author looks at how comic writer/performers continue to sell a brand of themselves as a form of social commentary in order to confront and dispel stereotypes of race, class, and gender. The first study to explore contemporary popular comic culture and its influence on American society from this unique perspective, Rick DesRochers analyzes stand-up and improvisational comedy writing/performing in the work of Larry David, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and Dave Chappelle. He grounds these choices by examining their evolution as they developed signature characters and sketches for their respective shows Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, and Chappelle's Show.

Download or read book The Genesis of Mass Culture written by J. Springhall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-04-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thorough survey of the origins and development of the major distinct American commercial entertainments that emerged between over the course of the 19th century and into the 20th, including P.T. Barnum_s American Museum, freak show, and circus, as well as blackface minstrelry, Buffalo Bill_s Wild West Show, and vaudeville.

Download or read book Sex Ed Segregated written by Courtney Q. Shah and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sex Ed, Segregated, Courtney Shah examines the Progressive Era sex education movement, which presented the possibility of helping people understand their own health and sexuality, but which most often divided audiences along rigid lines of race, class, and gender. Reformers' assumptions about their audience's place in the political hierarchy played a crucial role in the development of a mainstream sex education movement by the 1920s. Reformers and instructors taught middle-class youth, African-Americans, and World War I soldiers different stories, for different reasons. Shah's examination of "character-building" organizations like the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) reveals how the white, middle-class ideal reflected cultural assumptions about sexuality and formed an aspirational model for upward mobility to those not in the privileged group, such as immigrant or working class youth. In addition, as Shah argues, the battle over policing young women's sexual behavior during World War I pitted middle-class women against their working-class counterparts. Sex Ed, Segregated demonstrates that the intersection between race, gender, and class formed the backbone of Progressive-Era debates over sex education, the policing of sexuality, and the prevention of venereal disease. Courtney Shah is an instructor at Lower Columbia College, Washington.

Download or read book Emma s Postcard Album written by Faith Mitchell and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-12-21 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BCALA 2023 Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation Award winner The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob attacks, and rampant Jim Crow segregation. During these bleak years, Emma Crawford, a young African American woman living in Pennsylvania, corresponded by postcard with friends and family members and collected the cards she received from all over the country. Her album—spanning from 1906 to 1910 and analyzed in Emma's Postcard Album—becomes an entry point into a deeply textured understanding of the nuances and complexities of African American lives and the survival strategies that enabled people “to make a way from no way.” As snippets of lived experience, eye-catching visual images, and reflections of historical moments, the cards in the collection become sources for understanding not only African American life, but also broader American history and culture. In Emma's Postcard Album, Faith Mitchell innovatively places the contents of this postcard collection into specific historic and biographical contexts and provides a new interpretation of postcards as life writings, a much-neglected aspect of scholarship. Through these techniques, a riveting world that is far too little known is revealed, and new insights are gained into the perspectives and experience of African Americans. Capping off these contributions, the text is a visual feast, illustrated with arresting images from the Golden Age of postcards as well as newspaper clippings and other archival material.

Download or read book A Pentecostal Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles written by William K. Kay and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pastoral Epistles throw light on the early days of the church and the final phase of Paul’s life. This commentary scrutinizes the biblical text while attending to the missional, pastoral, and spiritual challenges facing the worldwide Pentecostal and charismatic (or renewalist) movement. It is written for today’s church without ignoring scholarly literature and cultural perspectives. The ministry of women, the appointment of elders, prophecy, church governance, living as a Christian in the Roman Empire, the end times, charismatic gifts, spiritual warfare, slavery, and ordination all feature.

Download or read book Medical Monopoly written by Joseph M. Gabriel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During most of the nineteenth century, physicians and pharmacists alike considered medical patenting and the use of trademarks by drug manufacturers unethical forms of monopoly; physicians who prescribed patented drugs could be, and were, ostracized from the medical community. In the decades following the Civil War, however, complex changes in patent and trademark law intersected with the changing sensibilities of both physicians and pharmacists to make intellectual property rights in drug manufacturing scientifically and ethically legitimate. By World War I, patented and trademarked drugs had become essential to the practice of good medicine, aiding in the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry and forever altering the course of medicine. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused archival material, Medical Monopoly combines legal, medical, and business history to offer a sweeping new interpretation of the origins of the complex and often troubling relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical practice today. Joseph M. Gabriel provides the first detailed history of patent and trademark law as it relates to the nineteenth-century pharmaceutical industry as well as a unique interpretation of medical ethics, therapeutic reform, and the efforts to regulate the market in pharmaceuticals before World War I. His book will be of interest not only to historians of medicine and science and intellectual property scholars but also to anyone following contemporary debates about the pharmaceutical industry, the patenting of scientific discoveries, and the role of advertising in the marketplace.

Download or read book The Rise of Marketing and Market Research written by H. Berghoff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume serves up a combination of broad questions, theoretical approaches, and manifold case studies to explore how people have sought to understand markets and thereby reduce risk, whether they have approached this challenge with a practical view based on their own business acumen or used the tools of scholarship.

Download or read book Discovering Quacks Utopias and Cemeteries written by Cynthia Williams Resor and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovering Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries: Modern Lessons from Historical Themes​ explores two enduring issues – our age-old pursuit of better lives and how the media impacts our choices. In this unique approach to social history, each chapter opens with essential questions asking the reader to consider these issues in historical and modern life. The histories of fake cures, imaginary and real utopias, cemeteries, tombstones, and scrapbooks are explored from ancient times through the transformations caused by the Industrial Revolution into the twentieth century. Historical images, excerpts from primary source documents, and activities adaptable to learners of all ages are included to illustrate the role of historical media. Quacks, Utopias, and Cemeteries, the third in the daily life series by Cynthia Resor, is an ideal book for history enthusiasts, especially social studies teachers, education or humanities professors, museum educators, and anyone wanting to know about the lives of average people in the past.

Download or read book Advertising and Promotional Culture written by P David Marshall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This key textbook traces the development of advertising from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, providing connections with the past that illuminate present developments and point to future possibilities. Chapters take a variety of theoretical approaches to address four main themes: how advertising imagines the future through the promise of transformation; how tribalism creates a sense of collective identity organised around a product; how advertising builds engagement through participation/presumption; how the blurring of advertising, news, art, education and entertainment characterises the attention economy. P. David Marshall and Joanne Morreale expertly trace these themes back to the origins of consumer culture and demonstrate that, while they have adapted to accord with new technologies, they remain the central foci of advertising today. Ideal for researchers of Media Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies or Advertising at all levels, this is the essential guide to understanding the contemporary milieu and future directions for the advertising industry.

Download or read book Miraculous written by Caroline Starr Rose and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A traveling medicine show promises to cure all, but two kids learn it takes more than faith in the miraculous to fix things that are broken. Thirteen-year-old Jack knows what cured his baby sister when his family thought she might never get well—Dr. Kingsbury’s “Miraculous Tonic.” Guaranteed to relieve maladies known to man or beast, Dr. Kingsbury’s potion can cure everything from pimples to hearing loss to a broken heart, and Jack himself is a witness to the miraculous results and the doctor’s kindness. When he had no money, the doctor didn’t turn him away but gave him the tonic for free along with a job—to travel with him from city to city selling his cure-all elixir. When Dr. Kingsbury and Jack arrive in Oakdale, the town at first feels like any other they’ve been to. But it’s clear Oakdale is a town with secrets, and its citizens are slow to trust strangers. Then Jack meets Cora, and a friendship neither expected starts to bloom. Together they uncover something else they didn’t expect—not only secrets about the town but also Dr. Kingsbury. As they race to discover the truth, they’ll have to decide who and what to believe before it’s too late.

Download or read book On the Waters of the Wissahickon written by Eric Plaag and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 718 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive history of Erdenheim Farm, On the Waters of the Wissahickon separates the facts from the multitude of fictions, revealing the complex and intriguing history behind this important agricultural center along the Wissahickon Creek in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Featuring more than one hundred historical and contemporary illustrations and maps, Eric Plaag's engaging and thorough history of the property chronicles its storied past as well as the inherent value in preserving its future. One of the last intact agricultural parcels in Whitemarsh and Springfield Townships, Erdenheim Farm was at the center of the thoroughbred horseracing world from the 1860s until the late twentieth century. Its illustrious owners have included Aristides Welch, Norman W. Kittson, Robert N. Carson, George D. Widener, Jr., and Fitz Eugene Dixon, Jr., through whom Erdenheim accumulated a rich and fascinating historical pedigree and worldwide attention over the past two centuries. The property is also the subject of extensive lore, including the longstanding rumor that Sirhan Sirhan worked at the farm shortly before his assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, as well as legends that the farm's guests may have included the Marquis de Lafayette and as many as eight U.S. presidents. Once the home of the Lenni Lenape tribe, who in turn sold the property to William Penn during the seventeenth century, the land that would eventually become Erdenheim Farm passed to German immigrant Johann Georg Hocker and several neighboring farmers by 1763. While the farm's name is often attributed to Hocker (Erdenheim loosely translating as "earthly home" in German), and Hocker built the farmhouse most closely associated with this name for much of the nineteenth century, the farm's name probably originates with Dr. James A. McCrea. Under McCrea's ownership during the 1850s, Erdenheim began building a reputation as a highly regarded livestock farm. Its owner from the 1860s until the 1880s, Aristides Welch, brought national attention to Erdenheim through his purchase of major horseracing champions such as Flora Temple and Leamington, transforming the farm into a significant breeding and training operation that produced dozens of national racing champions over the next several decades. Under its next two owners, Norman W. Kittson and Robert N. Carson, Erdenheim's reputation declined even as its boundaries dramatically expanded, but, during the twentieth century, owner George D. Widener, Jr., revived Erdenheim's significance as a world-class thoroughbred operation and livestock showplace. Upon Widener's death, his nephew Fitz Eugene Dixon, Jr., became Erdenheim's primary caretaker and began the painstaking process of preserving Erdenheim even as encroaching suburban sprawl threatened its survival. Through a landmark agreement with the Natural Lands Trust, Dixon permanently protected the oldest parts of Erdenheim. Following Dixon's death in 2006, the Whitemarsh Foundation and nearly a dozen individuals and organizations, including Peter and Bonnie McCausland, worked together to complete a massive land-conservation deal to preserve permanently the majority of Erdenheim's approximately 450 acres as one of the last remaining open spaces in Montgomery County and a unique example of the Philadelphia region's agricultural past.

Download or read book The Genius of the Beast written by Howard Bloom and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential. Author Howard Bloom argues that there’s a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It’s struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race. In more than eighty short, fast chapters, insights appear suddenly, like the quick bursts of flashbulbs, taking the reader on a sweeping tour of human history, from the Stone Age to the present. Every chapter conveys a radically new way to see the astonishing mechanism we call "Western Civilization." Bloom marvels at how humans have turned toxic waste into food and fuel, trash into treasure, and garbage into gold. He shows how we've produced material miracles based on immaterial things—passion, persistence, and fantasy. He shows that what many regard as the end is just the beginning. The beginning of something you've never before imagined. The author explains why the secret to capitalism’s next great leap does not lie in new financial tricks, but in tapping things right under our noses in radically new ways—that is, tapping our imagination, our desire to feel useful, our desire to help others, and our desire to be recognized for contributing to the welfare of humanity. The key to next-generation capitalism lies in a big-picture view that's utterly unlike anything you've previously perceived. A big-picture view that will startle you. A big-picture view with which you can ignite the world, get a new handle on your life, and help transform society. This brilliant, inspirational work of daring ideas and breathtaking research offers more than hope. It offers unseen levels of understanding. Understanding that can literally redefine what it means to be a human being.

Download or read book Here s the Pitch written by Roberta J. Newman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 SABR Baseball Research Award In the mid-nineteenth century, two industries arrived on the American scene. One was strictly a business, yet it helped create, define, and disseminate American culture. The other was ostensibly just a game, yet it soon became emblematic of what it meant to be American, aiding in the creation of a national identity. Today, whenever the AT&T call to the bullpen is heard, fans enter Minute Maid Park, or vote for favorite All-Stars (brought to us by MasterCard), we are reminded that advertising has become inseparable from the MLB experience. Here’s the Pitch examines this connection between baseball and advertising, as both constructors and reflectors of culture. Roberta J. Newman considers the simultaneous development of both industries from the birth of the partnership, paying particular attention to the ways in which advertising spread the gospel of baseball at the same time professional baseball helped develop a body of consumers ready for the messages of advertising. Newman considers the role of product endorsements in the creation of the culture of celebrity, and of celebrity baseball players in particular, as well as the ways in which new technologies have impacted the intersection of the two industries. From Ty Cobb to Babe Ruth in the 1920s and 1930s to Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Willie Mays in the postwar years, to Derek Jeter, Rafael Palmeiro, and David Ortiz in the twenty-first century, Newman looks at many of baseball’s celebrated players and shows what qualities made them the perfect pitchmen for new products at key moments. Here’s the Pitch tells the story of the development of American and an increasingly international culture through the marriage between Mad Men and The Boys of Summer that made for great copy, notable TV advertisements, and lively social media, and shows how baseball’s relationship with advertising is stronger than ever.

Download or read book Pranksters written by Kembrew McLeod and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles the most notorious mischief makers in Western culture from 1600 to the present day and explores how pranks are part of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and social critique.

Download or read book The Food and Drug Administration FDA written by Meredith A. Hickmann and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of foods, drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, and a variety of other products. These products account for 25 cents of every dollar US consumers spend. Under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, FDA is responsible for ensuring that these products are safe, accurately labelled, and in the case of drugs and medical devices, effective. FDA's tasks include: enforcement, pre-market product evaluation and approval, post-market surveillance and investigations, publishing of regulations, conducting and monitoring of research, public education, and regulating products and processes to prevent hazards to human health. Contents: Preface; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding Data; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding and Policy Issues; US European Agricultural Trade: Food and Biotechnology Issues; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding and Policy Issues; Food and Drug Administration Modernisation Act of 1997 -- The Provisions; Index.