Electric dreamland : amusement parks, movies, and American modernism /

More than two thousand amusement parks dotted the American landscape in the early twentieth century, thrilling the general public with the latest in entertainment and motion picture technology. Amusement parks were the playgrounds of the working class, combining numerous, mechanically-based spectacl...

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator: Rabinovitz, Lauren, 1950-
Format: Book
Language:English
Imprint: New York : Columbia University Press, 2012.
Series:Film and culture.
Subjects:
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Summary:More than two thousand amusement parks dotted the American landscape in the early twentieth century, thrilling the general public with the latest in entertainment and motion picture technology. Amusement parks were the playgrounds of the working class, combining numerous, mechanically-based spectacles into one unique, modern cultural phenomenon. Lauren Rabinovitz describes the urban modernity engendered by these parks and their media, encouraging ordinary individuals to sense, interpret, and embody a burgeoning national identity. As industrialization, urbanization, and immigration upended society before World War I, amusement parks tempered the shocks of racial, ethnic, and cultural conflict while shrinking the distinctions between gender and class. As she follows the rise of American parks from 1896 to 1918, Rabinovitz seizes on a simultaneous increase in cinema and spectacle audiences and connects both to the success of leisure activities in stabilizing society.
Amusement parks were the playgrounds of the working class in the early twentieth century, combining numerous, mechanically-based spectacles into one unique, modern cultural phenomenon. Lauren Rabinovitz describes the urban modernity engendered by these parks and their media, encouraging ordinary individuals to sense, interpret, and embody a burgeoning national identity. As industrialization, urbanization, and immigration upended society, amusement parks tempered the shocks of racial, ethnic, and cultural conflict while shrinking the distinctions between gender and class. Following the rise of American parks from 1896 to 1918, Rabinovitz seizes on a simultaneous increase in cinema and spectacle audiences and connects both to the success of leisure activities in stabilizing society. Critics of the time often condemned parks and movies for inciting moral decline, yet in fact they fostered women's independence, racial uplift, and assimilation. The rhythmic, mechanical movements of spectacle also conditioned audiences to process multiple stimuli. Featuring illustrations from private collections and accounts from unaccessed archives, Electric Dreamland joins film and historical analyses in a rare portrait of mass entertainment and the modern eye.
Item Description:Includes filmography.
Physical Description:xiii, 237 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-228) and index.
ISBN:9780231156608
023115660X
9780231156615
0231156618
9780231527217
0231527217
Author Notes:Lauren Rabinovitz is professor of American studies and cinema at the University of Iowa. She is the author of For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago and Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-1971 .