American Popular Entertainments and Social History

Catalog description

Popular entertainments have great power. "They tell us what is on the minds of ordinary people at any given moment - their concerns, biases and anxieties - and in turn refine them and restate them in a palatable, easily understood way," wrote Professor Emeritus Brooks McNamara of New York University of this new field of scholarly inquiry that plumbs America's popular entertainments as a means of understanding its social history. This course will examine critical live entertainment forms that flourished in the years between the conclusion of the Civil War and the end of the 1920s largely due to increased leisure time, improved transportation, and rapidly developing cities. Popular entertainment -- amusements aimed at a broad, relatively unsophisticated audience -- were frequently American reinventions of European imports, such as the circus, while others, like the Minstrel Show, were uniquely American creations. We will begin the course with an intensive look at the Minstrel Show as a key to the solidification and perpetuation of American racist stereotypes and then consider Circus, the Wild West Show, Vaudeville, Burlesque, Medicine Show, Chautauqua, and popular dramas such as Toby, Tab, and Tom shows, as manifestations of American society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.