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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from American culture)
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This article is about the high culture and popular culture of the United
States. For customs and way of life, see Society of the United States.
Culture of the
United States
Architecture
Cinema
Comic books
Cuisine
Dance
Literature
Music
Poetry
Radio
Sculpture
Television
Theater
Visual arts
The development of the culture of the United States of America-music,
cinema, dance, architecture, literature, poetry, cuisine and the visual
arts-has been marked by a tension between two strong sources of inspiration:
European sophistication and domestic originality.
American music is heard all over the world, such as through MTV, Channel V,
VH1 and by singers such as Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Madonna, Whitney
Houston, Cyndi Lauper, Mariah Carey, Backstreet Boys and American movies and
television shows can be seen almost anywhere[citation needed] such as icons
like Star Wars, Titanic, The Matrix etc. and American sports figures are
widely known such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Venus Williams, Mike
Tyson, Michael Johnson and American movie actors and actresses are widely
known such as Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe, Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tom Cruise etc. This is in very stark contrast to the early days
of the American republic, when the country was generally seen as an
agricultural backwater with little to offer the culturally advanced world
centers of Europe and Asia. At the beginning of her fifth century, nearly
every major American city offers classical and popular music; historical,
scientific and art research centers and museums; dance performances,
musicals and plays; outdoor art projects and internationally significant
architecture. This development is a result of both contributions by private
philanthropists and government funding.
One way that American culture differs from that of similar countries (e.g.
Canada and the United Kingdom) is that American culture exhibits a tendency
to hybridize pop culture and so-called high culture, and generally questions
normative standards for artistic output.[citation needed] This is likely an
effect of the country's egalitarian tradition, and the nation's history of
constitutionally protected freedom of speech and expression, as enshrined in
the First Amendment.
Contents
[hide]
a.. 1 Literature
a.. 1.1 Poetry
b.. 2 Comic books
c.. 3 Music
d.. 4 Film
e.. 5 Television
f.. 6 Dance
g.. 7 Visual arts
a.. 7.1 Architecture
b.. 7.2 Sculpture
h.. 8 Theater
i.. 9 Cuisine
j.. 10 Fashion
k.. 11 Popular culture
a.. 11.1 Exportation of popular culture
l.. 12 References
m.. 13 See also
[edit] Literature
Main article: Literature of the United States
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American art and
literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a
distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second
half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, would be
recognized as America's other essential poet. Eleven U.S. citizens have won
the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. Ernest
Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most
influential writers of the twentieth century.[1] A work seen as capturing
fundamental aspects of the national experience and character-such as Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)-may be dubbed the
"Great American Novel." Popular literary genres such as the Western and
hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States.
[edit] Poetry
Main article: Poetry of the United States
The poetry of the United States naturally arose first during its beginnings
as the Constitutionally-unified thirteen colonies (although prior to this, a
strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American
societies[2]). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on
contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in
the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later
part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience
abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the
forefront of the English-language avant-garde.
This position was sustained into the 20th century to the extent that Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential English-language
poets in the period during World War I.[3] By the 1960s, the young poets of
the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and
predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward
the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified,
as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African
Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other subcultural groupings. Poetry, and
creative writing in general, also tended to become more professionalized
with the growth of creative writing programs in the English studies
departments of campuses across the country.
[edit] Comic books
Main article: American comic book
Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States
has been the leading producer with only the British comic books (during the
inter-war period and up until the 1970s) and the Japanese manga as close
competitors in terms of quantity.
Comic book sales began to decline after World War II, when the medium was
competing with the spread of television and mass market paperback books. In
the 1960s, comic books' audience expanded to include college students who
favored the naturalistic, "superheroes in the real world" trend initiated by
Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. The 1960s also saw the advent of the underground
comics. Later, the recognition of the comic medium among academics, literary
critics and art museums helped solidify comics as a serious artform with
established traditions, stylistic conventions, and artistic evolution.
[edit] Music
Main article: Music of the United States
The music of the United States reflects the country's multi-ethnic
population through a diverse array of styles. Rock and roll, country, rhythm
and blues, jazz, and hip hop are among the country's most
internationally-renowned genres. Since the beginning of the 20th century,
some forms of American popular music have gained a near global audience.[4]
The earliest inhabitants of the United States were Native Americans who
played the first music in the area. Beginning in the 17th century,
immigrants from the British Isles, Spain, and France began arriving in large
numbers, bringing with them new styles and instruments. African slaves
brought musical traditions, and each subsequent wave of immigrants
contributed to a melting pot.
Much of modern popular music can trace its roots to the emergence in the
late 19th century of African American blues and the growth of gospel music
in the 1920s. The African American basis for popular music used elements
derived from European and indigenous musics. The United States has also seen
documented folk music and recorded popular music produced in the ethnic
styles of the Ukrainian, Irish, Scottish, Polish, Hispanic and Jewish
communities, among others.
Many American cities and towns have vibrant music scenes which, in turn,
support a number of regional musical styles. Aside from cities such as
Detroit, New York, Chicago, Nashville and Los Angeles, many smaller cities
have produced distinctive styles of music. The Cajun and Creole traditions
in Louisiana music, the folk and popular styles of Hawaiian music, and the
bluegrass and old time music of the Southeastern states are a few examples
of diversity in American music.
[edit] Film
Main article: Cinema of the United States
American cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since
the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main
periods: the silent film era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and
the contemporary period (after 1980).
[edit] Television
Main article: Television in the United States
Television is one of the major mass media of the United States. In an
expansive country of more than 300 million people, television programs are
some of the few things that nearly all Americans can share. Ninety-nine
percent of American households have at least one television and the majority
of households have more than one.
[edit] Dance
Main article: Dance in the United States
There is great variety in dance in the United States, it is the home of the
Lindy Hop and its derivative Rock and Roll, and modern square dance
(associated with the United States of America due to its historic
development in that country--nineteen U.S. states have designated it as
their official state dance) and one of the major centers for modern dance.
There is a variety of social dance and concert or performance dance forms
with also a range of traditions of Native American dances.
[edit] Visual arts
Main article: Visual arts of the United States
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American artists
primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel
development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement,
which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Developments in
modern art in Europe came to America from exhibitions in New York City such
as the Armory Show in 1913. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as
the center of the art world. Painting in the United States today covers a
vast range of styles.
[edit] Architecture
Main article: Architecture of the United States
The United States has a history of architecture that includes a wide variety
of styles.
The United States of America is a relatively young country, and the Native
Americans did not leave any buildings comparable to the grandeur of those in
Mexico or Peru. For this reason, the overriding theme of American
Architecture is modernity: the skyscrapers of the 20th century are the
ultimate symbol of this modernity.
Architecture in the US is regionally diverse and has been shaped by many
external forces, not only English. US Architecture can therefore be said to
be eclectic, something unsurprising in such a multicultural society.
[edit] Sculpture
Main article: Sculpture of the United States
The history of sculpture in the United States reflects the country's 18th
century foundation in Roman republican civic values as well as Protestant
Christianity, both of which sought truth in the spoken word of orator or
minister and neither of which required the visualizaton of magnificence,
power, solemnity, or profundity that characterized the sculptural traditions
of European (as well as Asian) civilizations.
[edit] Theater
Main article: Theater in the United States
Theater of the United States is based in the Western tradition, mostly
borrowed from the performance styles prevalent in Europe, especially
England. Today, it is heavily interlaced with American literature, film,
television, and music, and it is not uncommon for a single story to appear
in all forms. Regions with significant music scenes often have strong
theater and comedy traditions as well. Musical theater may be the most
popular form: it is certainly the most colorful, and choreographed motions
pioneered on stage have found their way onto movie and television screens.
Broadway in New York City is generally considered the pinnacle of commercial
U.S. theater, though this art form appears all across the country.
Off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway diversify the theatre experience in New
York. Another city of particular note is Chicago, which boasts the most
diverse and dynamic theater scene in the country. Regional or resident
theatres in the United States are professional theatre companies outside of
New York City that produce their own seasons. There is also community
theatre and showcase theatre (performing arts group). Even tiny rural
communities sometimes awe audiences with extravagant productions.
[edit] Cuisine
Main article: Cuisine of the United States
Mainstream American culinary arts are similar to those in other Western
countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine
uses ingredients such as turkey, white-tailed deer venison, potatoes, sweet
potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, indigenous foods employed by Native
Americans and early European settlers. Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue,
crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively
American styles. Soul food, developed by African slaves, is popular around
the South and among many African Americans elsewhere. Syncretic cuisines
such as Louisiana creole, Cajun, and Tex-Mex are regionally important.
Iconic American dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers,
and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. So-called French
fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely
adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[5] Americans generally
prefer coffee to tea, with more than half the adult population drinking at
least one cup a day.[6] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible
for making orange juice and milk (now often fat-reduced) ubiquitous
breakfast beverages.[7] During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric
intake rose 24%;[5] frequent dining at fast food outlets is associated with
what health officials call the American "obesity epidemic." Highly sweetened
soft drinks are widely popular; sugared beverages account for 9% of the
average American's daily caloric intake.[8]
[edit] Fashion
Main article: Fashion in the United States
Apart from professional business attire, fashion in the United States is
eclectic and predominantly informal. While Americans' diverse cultural roots
are reflected in their clothing, particularly those of recent immigrants,
cowboy hats and boots and leather motorcycle jackets are emblematic of
specifically American styles. Blue jeans were popularized as work clothes in
the 1850s by merchant Levi Strauss, a German immigrant in San Francisco, and
adopted by many American teenagers a century later. They are now widely worn
on every continent by people of all ages and social classes. Along with
mass-marketed informal wear in general, blue jeans are arguably U.S.
culture's primary contribution to global fashion.[9] The country is also
home to the headquarters of many leading designer labels such as Ralph
Lauren and Calvin Klein. Labels such as Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle,
Hollister and Ecko cater to various niche markets.
[edit] Popular culture
American popular culture has expressed itself through nearly every medium,
including movies, music and sports. Christina Aguilera, Mickey Mouse,Britney
Spears, Barbie, Elvis Presley, Madonna, Aerosmith, Babe Ruth, Baseball,
American football, Basketball, screwball comedy, G.I. Joe, jazz, the blues,
Rap & Hip Hop, The Simpsons, Michael Jackson, Superman, Gone with the Wind,
Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jordan, Indiana Jones, Sesame Street, Catch-22-these
names, genres, and phrases have joined more tangible American products in
spreading across the globe.
It is worth noting that while America tends to be a net exporter of culture,
it absorbs many other cultural traditions with relative ease, for example:
origami, soccer, anime, and yoga.
It can be argued that this ability to easily absorb parts of other cultures
and other languages is its greatest strength and helps American culture and
language spread. Americans in general do not worry about protecting their
"indigenous culture" (see below) but instead eagerly create and adopt new
things and then change or modify to make them their own.
[edit] Exportation of popular culture
The United States is an enormous exporter of entertainment, especially
television, movies and music. This readily consumable form of culture is
widely and cheaply dispersed for entertainment consumers worldwide. It's
even considered to be an "entertainment superpower" along with Europe,
India, and Japan.
Many nations now have two cultures: an indigenous one and
globalized/American popular culture. That said, what one society considers
entertainment is not necessarily reflective of the "true culture" of its
people. More popular syndicated programs cost more, so overseas
entertainment purchasers often choose older programs that reflect various,
and dated, stages of United States cultural development. Pop culture also
tends to neglect the more mundane and/or complex elements of human life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_culture |
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| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:34 pm |
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On May 7, 9:34 pm, "turtoni" <turt... at (no spam) fastmail.net> wrote:
the number of traveling shows available to the farm and village
families who constituted the bulk of the American population was small
until, really, the 1880s, if not later. It is difficult to put figures
to anything like this, for there must have been hundreds, if not
thousands, of traveling performers moving around the United States in
the middle decades of the 19th century who went unrecorded. But in
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's portrait of small-town America in the
ante-bellum period, it is clear from the famous "Duke and the Dauphin"
episodes that Huck, then about twelve years old, had had little
experience with circuses or shows in general. Few farm families had
either the time or the money to take in a traveling show very often;
and during a hard northern winter, not many would have been much
inclined to hike three or four miles through the snow to enjoy one.
For most Americans during the colonial period and for decades after,
professional entertainment was a relatively rare treat. Like butter
and candles, American entertainment was usually home-made-a dance, a
footrace, a family sing around the square piano or cottage organ in
the homes of the better off.
Among the few traveling shows which did meander around the United
States were some entertainers, working by themselves or with small
troupes, who did blackface acts to give what purported to be
imitations of Negro song and dance. The most famous of these
entertainers was Thomas D. Rice, who copied a dance he saw done by a
black man stiff with age and crippled with rheumatism. "Weel about and
turn about and do jus so; ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow,"
the old man sang, and Rice's version of the dance became widely
popular in the 1830s.
In time these blackface acts were expanded, with larger troupes
playing more elaborate shows. This form of entertainment came to be
called the minstrel show. It was made up of set routines combining
songs, dances, jokes, and even fairly lengthy skits, all supposed to
represent the jolly life of blacks on the old plantation. Minstrelsy
"swept the nation" in the 1840s, and remained popular for decades
thereafter. In the post-Civil War period, some blacks, now able to
travel and to organize their own businesses, put together minstrel
shows of their own, ironically blacking up to maintain the character
of minstrelsy. These black minstrels began the tradition of the black
entertainer in the United States, which has played so profound a role
in American entertainment. Nonetheless, whites continued to dominate
minstrelsy.
By the 1860s and 1870s a new, although parallel, form of entertainment
was emerging which would eventually kill the minstrel show and go on
to become the basis for the modern entertainment industry. This was
[variety]. Like minstrelsy, variety consisted of a loose collection of
songs, dances, comedy, skits, and other hard to categorize acts; but
it was not tied together by a common theme, as minstrelsy had been.
Variety owed something to minstrelsy, in part because the minstrel
shows had worked out the system of moving a large troupe from town to
town, and in part because variety shows frequently included black acts
which had been developed by the minstrels.
But the true roots of vaudeville lay in Europe. Beginning in about the
1840s there had developed in European cities the institution of what
was called in France the cafe-concert. Often set in the open air,
these cafes-concerts consisted of tables grouped around a stage where
fairly rough entertainment was put on. Waiters went through the
audience serving liquor, mainly beer. One important feature of the
cafes-concerts was the mingling of social classes, as we can see in
Edouard Manet's "The Waitress," which shows a top-hatted gentleman
seated close to a blue-smocked working man in a cafe-concert.
The immigrants pouring into the United States from the late 1840s on
brought the idea to America. Kathy Peiss, in her study of working
women's amusements at the turn of the century, says, "In the 1850s
some saloon owners converted their back rooms and cellars into small
concert halls and hired speciality acts to amuse their patrons and
encourage drinking. By the 1860s over two hundred concert-saloons had
spread along Broadway, the Bowery, and the waterfronts, catering to a
heterogeneous male clientele of laborers, soldiers, sailors, and
'slumming' society gentlemen. The conventions of polite society were
put aside in these male sanctuaries, where crude jokes, bawdy comedy
sketches, and scantily clad singers entertained the drinkers."
The idea of providing entertainment to attract and hold drinkers is an
obvious one; but the timing of the rise of the concert saloon, the
mingling of social classes, and the name itself strongly suggest the
European origin.
The shows might open with a chorus line of women in revealing
costumes, after which would come comics and song and dance acts.
Performances were often closed by an "afterpiece," usually an erotic
and partly improvised skit; among the most famous of these were "The
Book Agent" and "The Bathing Girl," both short on plot but long on
innuendo. In most of these places "waiter girls," in short uniforms,
served drinks and sometimes themselves. By the latter decades of the
19th century there were saloons of this type in all big cities and in
many small towns, like Sherwoods Mascot in Galveston, Texas, and
Chicago Joe's Coliseum in Helena, Montana. The most famous of these
places were the big city saloons, like Harry Hill's on Houston Street,
in New York City, which offered boxing matches, walking contests, song
and dance, and the usual blue skits.
Variety was created by moving this saloon entertainmemt into theaters.
"At first the changes were superficial and, although more elegant than
the saloon, the fare was still quite low and vulgar," employing the
usual sexual jokes and dancing girls showing a good deal of flesh.
Ethnic humor, built on stereotypes of the German and Irish immigrants
coming into the country, was a staple of the new variety show.
These early popular theaters, it should be noted, had a strong_sexual
component, off-stage as well as on. Many of them had third tiers above
the dress and family circles reserved for prostitutes. "By the 1830s
and 1840s, the relinquishing of the third tier to prostitutes had
become an established national tradition," says one writer. There was
often a bar on the third tier, and a separate set of stairs leading up
to it from a side alley. One authority has estimated that as late as
1875, 70 percent of Americans associated the theater with sin; but up
until the 1880s theaters could not have survived without the patronage
of the prostitutes, not for their admission fees, for they were
generally admitted free, but for the men they drew.
The theater, then, was not a place where women and children of the new
middle class the industrial society was spawning, with their Victorian
ethic, could possibly go; and this in turn meant that middle-class
males could not visit them either, at least on those occasions when
they wanted to take their families or sweethearts out for an evening
of fun. The theaters, thus, were off-limits to the most affluent 25
percent of the American population; and it occurred to one showman,
Tony Pastor, that if he could produce clean variety, he could attract
a whole segment of the population to his shows which had hitherto not
come. In 1881 Pastor opened his Fourteenth Street Theater, offering "a
straight, clean, variety show-the first-as such-ever given in this
country. It was a daring venture. Only gals on the trampish side
attended variety in the eighties. Pastor's move was mainly (and
frankly) for profit, a definite and canny bid to double the audience
by attracting respectable women-wives, sisters, sweethearts-" says
Douglas Gilbert in his history of the institution.
Pastor's innovation was successful, and very quickly other
entrepreneurs leapt in to imitate him. Through the 1880s and 1890s
variety grew at an astonishing pace. Across the nation, barns,
warehouses, abandoned churches were converted to variety theaters.
Very quickly, in order to shed the old unseemly image, the name was
changed to vaudeville, a word of French extraction whose origins are
in dispute.
The heyday of vaudeville ran from about the mid-1890s to approximately
1920, although it had begun earlier, and was still staggering along
into the 1930s. Through its golden age the houses grew more elaborate,
the acts more polished and professional, the audiences ever larger,
the salaries higher, and the renown greater. Douglas Gilbert says,
"The essence of American vaudeville was comedy despite [Edward]
Albee's contention that it was women's backsides." The comedy,
especially in the early days, was often very heavy-handed, depending
on fright wigs, slapshoes, and the punching about of one comic by the
other. But the routines were fast-paced, played with energy and zest,
and followed each other in rapid fire, so that audiences hardly
finished applauding one act when the next was pouncing at them.
It began to be recognized that certain acts extracted more applause
than others, and promoters and theater owners started advertising, or
"billing," such acts more prominently. Very soon a hierarchy of
vaudevillians was created, with the stars at the top barely deigning
to speak to the humble unknowns at the bottom. The top acts began
demanding special treatment in the form of large dressing rooms and
other amenities, and of course salaries ranging upwards of $5000 a
week. Even fairly low level performers could make good incomes in the
vaudeville heyday.
With so much money rolling in, the acts were dressed up with stylish
backdrops and used elaborate props. In order to keep the Victorian
middle class coming, a certain refinement was allowed to creep in. In
the late 1890s violinist Edouard Remenyi, "the Heifetz of his day,"
performed in vaudeville playing "Hearts and Flowers," Mendelssohn's
"Spring Song," and similar works. B. F. Keith, co-owner of the Keith-
Albee chain, the largest vaudeville group in the country, began
posting signs in his dressing rooms warning performers against the
slightest impropriety. But not all performances were elegant. The cat
piano routine involved a man who miaowed the "Miserere" while pulling
the tails of cats imprisoned in wire cages. One dancer came on stage
naked to the waist, with eyes painted on his nipples, a nose below,
and mouth around his navel; by working the muscles of his torso he
made faces on his stomach as he danced. Another actor did soliloquies
from Shakespeare, playing Hamlet with a beard and tights, while a
comic played Yorick with a German accent, and dug beer bottles from a
grave.
Through the 1900s and 1910s vaudeville continued to expand. "By the
teens there were more than one thousand theaters playing standard
vaudeville acts and in excess of 4,000 small-time theaters." One
authority says that there were between ten and twenty thousand acts
competing for the work, but, in fact, it could not have been less than
twenty thousand, and may well have been double or triple that number.
The money roared in. In 1893 Keith and his partner, Edward Albee,
opened the first real vaudeville "palace," the Colonial in Boston. It
cost some $670,000 for the decor alone. In 1922 the chain added the
Cleveland Palace at a cost of five million dollars. There were
paintings by Corot and Bougeureau in the marble lobby, and the lobby
carpet was the largest single piece of weaving in the world; or so the
publicity went.
But by this time B. F. Keith was dead, and so was vaudeville, although
nobody quite realized it yet. The peak had come in the years just
before World War I; the downhill slide went faster and faster through
the 1920s, and when the famous Palace in New York, the nation's
premiere vaudeville showcase, was converted to a movie house in 1932,
the dying business stopped breathing.
Vaudeville constituted the first organized system of mass
entertainment in the United States-or indeed the world. Before it,
entertainers had been individual entrepreneurs who worked as singles,
or as small opera or minstrel troupes, playing riverboats, small
theaters, and the free-and-easy saloons. But vaudeville came to be
dominated by a handful of showmen who owned huge chains of theaters,
and ran them with the attention to detail characteristic of big
business. By the 1920s Keith-Albee had four hundred houses, and the
great chains of Marcus Loew, F. F. Proctor, and two or three others
had hundreds more. The chains operated like network television,
"broadcasting" the same acts, even entire bills through the system,
the only difference being that network television is instantaneous,
while it might take an act months to work its way around a major
circuit. Bills were not thrown together haphazardly, but were
carefully worked out to provide pace, rhythm, and variety. Acts were
expected to be thoroughly rehearsed and carefully polished. There was
nothing slapdash or improvised about vaudeville in its mature stages.
The theater owners were by-and-large canny and usually fairly cold-
blooded showmen, who were, like other businessmen, mainly interested
in money. The system was operated by bureaucracies of experts in one
phase or another of the business. It ran with machine-like smoothness,
oiled by large sums of money, and was capable of crushing people who
stood in its way.
Vaudeville was the foundation on which the 20th-century entertainment
business was built. It provided a model for a national system. It
turned over to later forms, like the movies, an infrastructure of
theaters into which they could easily slide. It left a legacy of acts
which would be used by newer forms, perhaps modified, but still
essentially employing the old routines: Eddie Cantor, the Marx
Brothers, George Jessel, Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, Abbott and
Costello, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, W. C. Fields, and many others
trained in vaudeville went on to become headliners in movies, radio,
and television. The Marx brothers, Abbott and Costello, and W. C.
Fields movies were built around the characters and routines they had
developed in vaudeville; the Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and similar radio
programs were basically vaudeville bills, consisting of comic patter,
songs and skits, and in acknowledgment of their roots were called
variety programs; even as late as the 1960s one of the most popular
television programs ever was an out-and-out vaudeville show led by a
former Broadway newspaper columnist named Ed Sullivan.
The modern entertainment industry came out of vaudeville, and
vaudeville could not have grown to the giant it became outside of the
industrial city. In its maturity it was a very expensive operation and
for its audience needed a large population within easy distance of its
theaters. It needed crowds of people, it needed rapid transit systems,
it needed people with a little money in their pockets and leisure time
to spend the money on. A national vaudeville system could not have
been built on small communities with the populations of farm families.
It needed cities.
Among other things, the fact that the new industrial society was
actually tied together physically by a vast metal web of railroad
tracks and telegraph and eventually telephone wires allowed vaudeville
to develop into a national system to a degree that would not have been
possible had it had to depend upon canal barges and stage coaches for
transportation and the mails for communication. It was this network
that allowed industry in general to become national, and in that sense
vaudeville was "industrial" entertainment-a product of the same system
that created U.S. Steel and Standard Oil.
Furthermore, the huge success of vaudeville, which built enormous
fortunes for a lot of people, was predicated on the expanded middle
class of industrial society. "For the first time in America, a form of
entertainment was developed that offended virtually no one and
appealed to all classes," says Wilmeth.
Although working people did constitute a substantial proportion of the
audience for vaudeville, the poorest among them could not afford to go
often. There was, moreover, the language barrier for many. The middle
class, which was still living in cities and towns, not in the suburbs,
had certain attributes which made it important to show business. For
one thing, middle-class people had greater leisure than laborers in
the mills and mines. Clerks and accountants did not routinely work the
sixty-hour week that was typical of the mills and mines, and
furthermore, they were not so exhausted at the end of the day. For
another thing, they had considerably more money to spend on
entertainment than laboring people did, and were far better able to
afford to go to the more expensive palaces where the top acts worked.
For yet a third-and this is important-the members of the middle class-
could not generally avail themselves of some types of entertainment
that were open to working people. A young male accountant might be
permitted an occasional visit to a bar, and would probably also have a
periodic fling in a vice district; but he could hardly habituate such
places without risking his middle-class status; and he certainly could
not bring his wife or his fiancee to such places. As for middle-class
women, far from being able to go to taverns and the like, for the most
part they could not go out at night unless escorted by a male who
stood in some clear relationship to them as husband, fiance, brother,
or other relative. Through the years of the vaudeville boom there were
arriving other entertainment centers, particularly the new institution
of the cabaret, and the big, gaudy restaurant which offered
entertainment and, after 1910, dancing. But these places were
expensive, and they still appeared slightly tainted to many people of
the middle class. Vaudeville was acceptable to all but the very
religious; it was relatively inexpensive; and there were vaudeville
theaters everywhere. Vaudeville thus gave show business a
respectability that it had not always had; it brought it into the
American mainstream; it made it seem legitimate in a way that much of
the rough entertainment of the early day was not.
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The Rise of Selfisness in America
James L. Collier
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195052773/
Copyright © 1991 by James Lincoln Collier
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1. Self-interest - History-2Oth century.
2. United States-Moral conditions - History-20th century. |
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| Immortalist... |
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:34 pm |
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On May 7, 9:42 pm, Immortalist <reanimater_2... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
SPORTS
Running closely parallel to the rise of vaudeville out of saloon
entertainment was another branch of the entertainment industry which
has proven to have greater staying power: what we have come to call
sports. Modern games were not invented by Americans: most of the games
we spend so much time watching and much less time playing were
invented by the English in the late 18th and early 19th century. Other
contributions were made by the Germans in the early 19th century,
especially in the area of gymnastics and field sports, with some
contribution from the Swedes. The Canadians developed ice hockey;
lacrosse was an American Indian game; and basketball was invented in
Springfield, Massachusetts. But it was the English who developed, if
they did not invent, the ball games which have figured so largely in
the lives of people in the 20th century-tennis, golf, the bat games,
the kicking games.
It is significant that one of the most important figures in the
development of modern sports was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby,
who was attempting early in the 19th century to reform the English
public schools, which had become to an extent debauched in the 18th
century. Modern sports, then, were initially a product of the
Victorian mentality. For these Victorians, just as the main function
of art was not to provide pleasure but to uplift, so the function of
sport would not be to amuse but to improve. As people must cultivate
their minds and elevate their souls, so they must improve their
bodies. People, so the Victorians came to believe, had a duty to keep
fit. One ought to play at sports: going out for the team or taking an
arduous daily swim came to be seen as a virtue.
This was equally true of the Germans, who were developing the idea of
physical training: they saw in gymnastics a spiritual element. From
the Victorian point of view it really did not matter who won or lost
for the point of the contest was to improve the players both
physically and morally; what counted therefore was fair play, honor,
and a good physical challenge. Even after sports began to be
professionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
English insisted on maintaining the distinction between the gentleman
amateur, who played for the values in the game itself, and the
professional, who was in part an entertainer and whose rewards
depended upon winning. A residue of this Victorian attitude continues
today in the idea that sports are meant to "build character," which is
still given lip service in at least some American colleges and
universities. For the Victorians it was a real ideal: sports taught
fortitude, loyalty, team spirit, a willingness to endure the hard
moments uncomplainingly. It was a time when tennis players would
applaud each other's fine shots, and would no more think of throwing a
racquet or cursing an umpire than they would of belching at the tea
table.
The United States was somewhat behind in adopting the new Victorian
sports culture. Americans had, of course, followed the lead of the
Europeans, especially the English, in taking up horse racing and the
blood sports: not only the gentry, but ordinary farmers liked to bet
on horses at backwoods tracks attended by rough country crowds.
But the United States, especially New England, carried into the 19th
century a residue of Calvinism that told them that idleness was sin,
and play the devil's work. Equally sinful was wagering; and the
drunken blood-thirst of the spectators around the cockpit could hardly
have been attractive to the religious temper.
Gradually, however, the new Victorian view of sport as having moral
and character-building qualities drifted across the Atlantic, and the
old objections began to dissipate. The 19th century, says one writer,
"was a period of beginnings characterized by the gradual breakdown of
traditional prejudices against play and amusements."
The first game to benefit from the new acceptance of sport was what
came to be called baseball. It began to develop out of its English
predecessors in the 1830s. By 1845 there were written rules, and at
the same moment Americans did what they would characteristically do-
they professionalized the game. By the time of the Civil War there had
come into existence leagues, player organizations, newsletters,
committees to coordinate rule changes, and the like. The Civil War
itself gave the sport further impetus, as bored soldiers in army
encampments got up games to while away empty time, in the process
teaching the game to others who did not know it. The baseball game at
a Civil War army camp was a common sight. And very quickly after the
close of the war baseball became a modern spectator sport with a
nationwide following.
Richard D. Mandell, a sports historian, says, "The establishment of
'leagues' under profit-oriented managerial control in the 1870s
provided the models for other American sports that later
professionalized."
Thereafter it all came in a rush. In the 1870s American colleges began
holding track and field events in imitation of the English university
competitions. Parimutuel betting was developed in the 1860s and 1870s.
The National League in baseball was formed in 1876. Boat racing became
popular in the 1870s and 1880s. The first meeting of the League of
American Wheelmen came in 1880, the first national tournament of the
United States Lawn Tennis Association was held in 1881. Boxing,
especially after the arrival of John L. Sullivan as the sport's first
great champion, began to draw large audiences. "Western Union paid 50
operators to send out 208,000 words of description following John L.'s
fight with Jack Kilrain in New Orleans in 1889. When Jim Corbett beat
Sullivan in 1892, 300 saloons and billiard halls in New York alone
were supposed to have received the news." College football-developed
out of the rugby game invented at Thomas Arnold's school a half-
century earlier-began to attract a large following in the 1880s, and
by the 1890s people were referring to a sports craze on American
college campuses, with football the dominant game. Symptomatic of the
enormous interest in the game was the fact that in 1903 Harvard, with
a student body of some 5000, saw fit to provide a concrete stadium
which could hold 57,000 people.
And so it went. The United States Golf Association was formed in 1894.
The first international track meet was held at Manhattan Field in New
York in 1895. The contestants were the New York Athletic Club and the
London Athletic Club, and the Americans won all eleven events.
Basketball was invented by James A. Naismith in 1891; and by the turn
of the century the sport had become a major element in the American
culture.
This exploding interest in sports could hardly be ignored by the
media. According to the pioneering sports historian John R. Betts,
"Sports had merged into such a popular topic of conversation that
newspapers rapidly expanded their coverage in the 1880s and 1890s,
reiving in great part on messages sent over the [telegraph] lines from
distant points." Sporting papers proliferated, and William Randolph
Hearst developed for his papers the sports section in the last years
of the century. By 1900 baseball players could earn $2,000 annually,
as compared with a working man's salary of $700; and by 1910 top
players could make $10,000 a year, a very large sum for the time. Says
Mandell:
"By the turn of the century American sport had evolved into a pattern
or system that was unique. Sports spectatorship and (far less) sports
participation, sports business, and sports myth were smoothly
integrated into American life. The process had been swift, but it had
been natural and had gone much farther than the evolution of sport
anywhere else in the world."
Sport inevitably cut across all classes; but there was some tendency,
through the 19th century in any case, for it to be a gentleman's
activity, at least in certain areas. For one thing, developing a skill
at throwing a ball or hitting one with something took practice, and
practice required leisure time, which neither the farmers of the
earlier part of the century nor the immigrants of the latter part had
in much abundance. Certain sports, like sculling, sailboat racing,
even bicycling, cost money; others, like tennis and golf, required
grounds which needed a lot of upkeep. And only the rich could pursue
sports like yachting, automobile racing, and equestrianism. The
colleges provided the elite who attended them with leisure time for
practice, incentive in the form of status which accrued to successful
athletes, and the necessary playing grounds and equipment. Football
was, basically, college football; and in the first years of this
century fully a quarter of major league baseball players were college
graduates, at a time when less than 5 percent of the population had
college degrees. Other events, like sculling, swimming, and the track
and field sports, were also developed at colleges and are even today
dominated by college athletes.
But sport was too attractive to be ignored by the majority of the
population, and as it was increasingly professionalized it became a
route along which working people could escape from the slums. Most
games did not require the participants to speak English very well, or
the grasp of American customs and traditions. All you had to know was
how the game was played; and if you were good at playing it you could
be rewarded. (Blacks, of course, were generally disbarred from joining
white leagues and teams, although there were some exceptions, most
notably in boxing.) Whatever feeling gentlemen from the colleges felt
about allowing the lower orders in, the lower orders came anyway. By
1910 or so over half of the baseball players were of Irish or German
extraction, an over-representation. Boxing, whose first famous hero
was the Irishman John D. Sullivan, drew the attention of immigrants,
and when the black Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship, he
drew his ethnic fellows to the sport. During World War I the services
often used boxing as a training device; through their wartime service
men of all classes became familiar with the sport, which helped to
give it more general acceptance; now the middle class could enjoy it.
Class lines were being crossed in both directions; it is probably safe
to say that in this respect sport has become, especially since the
admission of blacks to the main leagues, one of the most democratic
aspects of American culture.
It hardly needs to be said that modern sports, like vaudeville, were a
product of the industrial city. Like "vaudeville, sports needed a mass
audience within easy traveling distance of the playing fields. It
needed mass transit systems, and a lot of sports grounds were
established at the ends of the trolley lines which were then reaching
out to city limits. Financiers backing the electrical streetcars at
times actually invested in the building of baseball parks at the end
of the streetcar lines during the 1880s and 1890s. John R. Betts says,
"At the turn of the century the popular interest in athletic games in
thousands of towns and cities was stimulated to a high degree by the
extension of rapid transit systems."
Sports also needed railroad lines to carry teams from city to city:
most leagues were built around intercity, not intracity, rivalries: it
was New York against Boston or Chicago, not the East Side against the
West Side. When two teams existed in one city, as they often did in
the biggest cities, they were usually distributed into different
leagues, and did not compete directly. In addition, railways were
needed to bring spectators, often in the tens of thousands, to
isolated events, like championship fights, boat races, national track
meets. The telegraph, and later the telephone, helped to popularize
sports by providing results instantly: in small towns around the
country newspaper offices often posted inning by inning scores of
important baseball games in their windows. Says Betts, "By 1900 sport
had attained an unprecedented prominence in the daily life of millions
of Americans and this remarkable development had been achieved in part
through the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, the penny press,
the electric light, the streetcar, the camera, the bicycle, the
automobile, and the mass production of sporting goods." Modern sport
was tight in the embrace of modern technology.
Abetting the rise of sports was the belief, widely held by reformers
in the Progressive period, that a good deal of the disorder in the
slums was the direct result of a lack of recreation for young people.
One of the great functions of the settlement houses was to provide
decent occupations for the young, and to this end they formed bands
and orchestras, drama groups, clubs and classes of all kinds. Sports
were seen as ideal in this respect, for not only did it occupy spare
time that might otherwise have been given over to shoplifting or
sexual experimentation, but it expended a lot of the restless energy
which, so it was believed, often drove the young into unsavory
activities for lack of anything else to do with it. Basketball was
invented in 1891 precisely to provide a physically active indoor game
which could be played in bad weather, especially in the northern
cities with their hard winters. All through the period playgrounds,
softball fields, running tracks, were built with public funds.
"Indeed, among the masses of Americans," Mandell says, "sports came to
be considered a civic obligation . . . The Young Men's Christian
Association (YMCA) led the way in proposing organized training and
team games as methods for absorbing the idle time of poor city boys
and instilling in them habits of good hygiene, self-discipline and
respect for officials . . . Urban settlement houses and eventually
churches also promoted the standard American sports because they
presumably developed leadership and built character." It was not just
boys, however; girls' basketball, track, and other teams became common
even in small towns. The vast system of school sports which we now
take for granted was a product of this attitude.
The Rise of Selfisness in America
James L. Collier
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195052773/
Copyright © 1991 by James Lincoln Collier
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
1. Self-interest - History-2Oth century.
2. United States-Moral conditions - History-20th century. |
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| turtoni... |
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:46 pm |
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| turtoni... |
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:51 pm |
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Guest
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"Association football, commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport
played between two teams of eleven players, and is widely considered to be
the most popular sport in the world."
HTH... |
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