Download or read book Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements written by Don B. Wilmeth and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1982-06-30 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a useful reference work for popular culture and performing arts collections. Choice
Download or read book Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety written by L. Woods and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows eminent actors performing under stringent conditions in vaudeville. It was a strange notion in 1900 that leading lights of the legitimate stage would ever join a bill of 'turns', with everything from song-and-dance to criminals regaling crowds with their exploits. It chronicles renowned actors showing rough fare in rough times.
Download or read book The Rise of Selfishness in America written by James Lincoln Collier and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A vibrant, sweeping analysis of the roots of American self-indulgence" --Kirkus Reviews "This ringing, provocative jeremiad cuts a path through a haze of self-indulgent thought and action in the "me first" society." --Publisher's Weekly "Wonderful...a delight to read, even exciting...There are few books that inspire real enthusiasm. This is one of them." --The Philadelphia Enquirer
Download or read book The Incredible Scream Machine written by Robert Cartmell and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1984 America celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the first successful roller coaster device: La Marcus A. Thompson’s switchback railway, erected at Coney Island. Robert Cartmell examines every phase of roller coaster history, from the use of the roller coaster by Albert Einstein to demonstrate his theory of physics, to John Allen’s use of psychology in designing one.
Download or read book Playing the Percentages written by Derek Long and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of film distribution in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s, concentrating on booking, circuiting, and packaging marketing practices. Told not as a “golden age” narrative of films, stars, or individual studios but as an economic history of the industry’s film distribution practices, Playing the Percentages is the story of how Hollywood’s vertically integrated studio system came to be. Studying the history of distribution during the growth of Hollywood, Derek Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the result of struggles over distribution practices. Through a combination of archival research, critical surveys of the film industry trade press, and economic analysis, Long uncovers a complex and ever-shifting system of wrangling between distributors and exhibitors. Challenging the overemphasis within scholarship on “block booking” as a monolithic distribution mode, and attending to distribution practices beyond simple circulation, Long highlights the crucial changes in film distribution brought about by live theater, the rise of features, and the transition to sound. Playing the Percentages is a comprehensive history of film distribution in the United States during the silent era that illustrates the importance of power struggles between distributors and exhibitors over booking, pricing, and playing time.
Download or read book Show Town written by Holly George and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century, Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city’s reputation as a “good show town,” the more genteel among them worried about its “Wild West” atmosphere. In Show Town, historian Holly George correlates the clash of tastes and sensibilities among Spokane’s theater patrons with a larger shift in values occurring throughout the Inland West—and the nation—during a period of rapid social change. George begins this multifaceted story in 1890, when two Spokane developers built the lavish Auditorium Theater as a kind of advertisement for the young city. The new venue catered to a class of people made wealthy by speculation, railroads, and mining. Yet the refined entertainment the Auditorium offered conflicted with the rollicking shows that played in the town’s variety theaters, designed to draw in the migratory workers—primarily single men—who provided labor for the same industries that made the fortunes of Spokane’s elite. As well-to-do Spokanites attempted to clamp down on the variety theaters, performances at even the city’s more respectable, “legitimate” playhouses began to reflect a movement away from Victorian sensibilities to a more modern desire for self-fulfillment—particularly among women. Theaters joined the debate over modern femininity by presenting plays on issues ranging from woman’s suffrage to shifting marital expectations. At the same time, national theater monopolies transmitted to the people of Spokane new styles and tastes that mirrored larger cultural trends. Lucidly written and meticulously researched, Show Town is a groundbreaking work of cultural history. By examining one city’s theatrical scene in all its complex dimensions, this book expands our understanding of the forces that shaped the urban American West.
Download or read book Theatre in the United States Volume 1 1750 1915 Theatre in the Colonies and the United States written by Barry Witham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-23 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the growth and development of theatre in the United States. Documents and commentary are arranged into chapters on business practice, acting, theatre buildings, drama, design, and audience behavior.
Download or read book American Studies written by Jack Salzman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-29 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major three-volume bibliography, including an additional supplement, of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1900 and 1988.
Download or read book Striptease written by Rachel Shteir and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first complete history of a century of striptease is filled with rare photographs and period illustrations.
Download or read book The Indian Territory Journals of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge written by Richard Irving Dodge and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These journals also provide insight into Dodge's character, with reports of his official duties as a military man and of several landmark events in his family life. Extensive commentaries and notes by Wayne R. Kime provide further detail, including a history of Cantonment North Fork Canadian River, a six-company post Dodge established and commanded in the region."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Folklore written by Linda Watts and published by Infobase Holdings, Inc. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Folklore has been described as the unwritten literature of a culture: its songs, stories, sayings, games, rituals, beliefs, and ways of life. Encyclopedia of American Folklore helps readers explore topics, terms, themes, figures, and issues related to this popular subject. This comprehensive reference guide addresses the needs of multiple audiences, including high school, college, and public libraries, archive and museum collections, storytellers, and independent researchers. Its content and organization correspond to the ways educators integrate folklore within literacy and wider learning objectives for language arts and cultural studies at the secondary level. This well-rounded resource connects United States folk forms with their cultural origin, historical context, and social function. Appendixes include a bibliography, a category index, and a discussion of starting points for researching American folklore. References and bibliographic material throughout the text highlight recently published and commonly available materials for further study. Coverage includes: Folk heroes and legendary figures, including Paul Bunyan and Yankee Doodle Fables, fairy tales, and myths often featured in American folklore, including "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Princess and the Pea" American authors who have added to or modified folklore traditions, including Washington Irving Historical events that gave rise to folklore, including the civil rights movement and the Revolutionary War Terms in folklore studies, such as fieldwork and the folklife movement Holidays and observances, such as Christmas and Kwanzaa Topics related to folklore in everyday life, such as sports folklore and courtship/dating folklore Folklore related to cultural groups, such as Appalachian folklore and African-American folklore and more.
Download or read book From Traveling Show to Vaudeville written by Robert M. Lewis and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes—all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, Robert M. Lewis has assembled a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century primary sources that document America's age of theatrical spectacle. In eight parts, Lewis explores, in turn, dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque shows, Wild West shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville. Included in this compendium are biographies, programs, ephemera produced by theatrical entrepreneurs to lure audiences to their shows, photographs, scripts, and song lyrics as well as newspaper accounts, reviews, and interviews with such figures as P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Lewis also gives us reminiscences about and reactions to various shows by members of audiences, including such prominent writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, and Maxim Gorky. Each section also includes a concise introduction that places the genre of spectacle into its historical and cultural context and suggests major interpretive themes. The book closes with a bibliographic essay that identifies relevant scholarly works. Many of the pieces collected here have not been published since their first appearance, making From Traveling Show to Vaudeville an indispensable resource for historians of popular culture, theater, and nineteenth-century American society.
Download or read book Coal and Culture written by William Faricy Condee and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical appreciation of the opera house in the coal-mining region of Appalachia from the mid 1860s to the early 1930s, Coal and Culture demonstrates that these were multipurpose facilities that were used for traveling theater, concerts, religious events, lectures, commencements, boxing matches, benefits, union meetings, and - if the auditorium had a flat floor - skating and basketball.
Download or read book Funny Woman written by Barbara W. Grossman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant comic, Fanny Brice had a significant impact on a field that had been predominantly male, proving that the term "funny womanwas not an oxymoron.
Download or read book The Entertainer written by Margaret Talbot and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the life and career of her father, writer Margaret Talbot tells the story of the rise of popular culture through a personal lens. The arc of Lyle Talbot's career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician's assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. In her impeccably researched narrative--a combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir--Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of '10s and '20s small-town America, '30s and '40s Hollywood.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Freak Show written by Robert Bogdan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
Download or read book Musical Style and Social Meaning written by DerekB. Scott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do we feel justified in using adjectives such as romantic, erotic, heroic, melancholic, and a hundred others when speaking about music? How do we locate these meanings within particular musical styles? These are questions that have occupied Derek Scott's thoughts and driven his critical musicological research for many years. In this selection of essays, dating from 1995-2010, he returns time and again to examining how conventions of representation arise and how they become established. Among the themes of the collection are social class, ideology, national identity, imperialism, Orientalism, race, the sacred and profane, modernity and postmodernity, and the vexed relationship of art and entertainment. A wide variety of musical styles is discussed, ranging from jazz and popular song to the symphonic repertoire and opera.
