United States Popular Culture

From P.T Barnum’s display of Joice Heth to the film The Birth of a Nation, United States popular culture has always been a vehicle for both shaping and reflecting American national identity. The emergence of a national popular culture allowed the United States to create a national identity which served as a unifying device during periods of immense tension and division. Furthermore, popular culture dictated popular ideas and encouraged people how they should spend their leisure time. The United States sought to create its own national identity, and this included its own unique culture that reflected the ever-expanding country and its values. American popular culture helped unite a country which was vital given that people were divided on major

The success of the Midway at the Chicago World Fair proved how popular amusement parks were, “the Chicago Fair showed that there was a huge waiting urban market for more Midways, a clientele both available and mobile via railway, streetcar and automobile. There were literally millions of Americans eager to pay for this kind of recreation (Nye, 65). People found amusement parks appealing and wanted additional facilities, the demand was high enough for new parks to be create all over the country. Amusement parks represented an important part of American popular culture, it was important to have a designated fun environment where people could remember the joys of life. Since the parks were not restricted to just the upper class, more Americans were able to partake in what was advertised as an important part of American identity. Coney Island helped inspire “the creation of similar amusement parks around the country-about 1,500 of them by 1919-among them Olympic Park in Irvington, New Jersey; Riverview Park in Chicago; Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio; Kennywood, near Pittsburgh; and Columbia Gardens in Butte, Montana” (Rydell and Kroes, 77). The rapidly increasing number of parks demonstrated that they appealed to a large portion of the American public and the regional expansion helped promote a national unity rather than limiting the parks to a

“Coney Island.” The Independent, New York, August 8, 1907. http://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/2267.html.

Levine, Lawrence W. “William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation.” The American Historical Review, vol. 89, no. 1, 1984, pp. 34-66. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/stable/pdf/1855917.pdf?refreqid=e xcelsior:c93217d734cbad9d4d5437cf98876c08.

Nye, Russel B. “Eight Ways of Looking at an Amusement Park.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 1981, pp. 63-75. https://onlinelibrary-wiley- com.proxy.library.carleton.ca/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.64102003.x.

Ranney, H. M. Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (1849). http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/astor/Account.xhtml.

Robert W Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna; The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

“The Columbia Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly, #1917 (September 16, 1893), pp. 877-878.