{"product_id":"with-amusement-for-all-a-history-of-american-popular-culture-since-1830","title":"With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830","description":"\u003cp\u003ePopular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley  Oprah Winfrey  and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States  covering everything from the penny press to Playboy  the NBA to NASCAR  big band to hip hop  and other topics including film  comics  television  sports  dance  and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race  gender  class  technology  economics  and politics  LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture  revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies  appetites  and values in American society. For example  in the late nineteenth century  Americans embraced \"self-made men\" such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey  Wild West star \"Buffalo Bill\" Cody  professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding  and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time  however  several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak  frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback  and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans  blacks  and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows  it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypescrowds jeered Sitting Bull at Codys shows. By the early twentieth century  however  black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions  reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later  Red Foxx and Richard Pryors profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryors short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiencesfrom family life to college lifewith black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold  erotic  sensational  and surprising  as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market  control shifting public appetites  and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s  Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s  Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene  and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLeans 1971 anthem \"American Pie\" served as an epitaph for rocks political core  which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock n Roll did not lose its ability to shock  in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830  showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social  political  economic  and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected  refracted  or reinforced the values those forces represent in America.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44958135386165,"sku":"ByrdShop_0813141079","price":35.65,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780813141077.jpg?v=1770840977","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/with-amusement-for-all-a-history-of-american-popular-culture-since-1830","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}