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Entertainment in the Progressive Era. Ch 9, Sec 2. As USA became more urbanized, prosperous, people wanted more entertainment, leisure activities. Live performances: Minstrel Shows -white performers in “blackface”. Imitated black music, dance humor. Died out with growth of vaudeville.
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Entertainment in the Progressive Era Ch 9, Sec 2
As USA became more urbanized, prosperous, people wanted more entertainment, leisure activities. • Live performances: • Minstrel Shows-white performers in “blackface”. • Imitated black music, dance humor. • Died out with growth of vaudeville. • Vaudeville-inexpensive variety show. • Song/dance acts, comic sketches, magic acts, ventriloquists, animal acts. • Circuses-very popular. Visited towns every year.
Movies. • 1903-The Great Train Robbery; first movie. • Quickly, nickeloedons set up across USA. • Showed short films at 5 cents/person. • Silent films, with piano or band playing music. • Stars of the day-Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin. • Movies became and remain hugely popular in USA.
Douglas Fairbanks Mary Pickford
Charlie Chaplin Rudolph Valentino
Amusement Parks. • People began to get part of weekend off work. • Wanted to go and do. • Amusement parks began to open on edges of cities at ends of trolley lines. • Featured music, vaudeville shows, carnival games, rides, some had beaches. • Roller coasters, steeplechase, ferris wheels. • Coney Island on edge of New York was considered the biggest and best.
Sports. • Horseracing, boxing, baseball most popular. • Amateur teams, leagues all over USA. • Promoters began charging admission, holding championship games. • 1869, first pro team created-Cincinnati Red Stockings. • Baseball became “America’s Favorite Pasttime”. • Football, basketball developed late 1800s, grew in popularity. • Bicycling became popular late 1800s. • Both sexes played sports. • Women-bicycling, basketball, ice skating, tennis, gymnastics, swimming.
Literature • Newspapers big sellers in USA. • To sell more papers, many publishers used yellow journalism. • Find the dirt on murders, vice, scandal, sex, etc. • Very popular with readers. • Critics felt that yellow journalists “invented facts and sensationalized ordinary events”. • Magazines grew in popularity. • Articles, ads, fiction, rags-to-riches tales.
In literature, “dime novels” became popular. • Cheap paperbacks of adventure stories, rags-to-riches tales. • Others read literature like Henry James and Upton Sinclair. • Mark Twain became very popular. • Humorist and satirist (made fun of society). • The Adventures of Huckleberry Twin, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
Music • Always very popular in USA. • Concerts, operas, music in home. • “Negro Spirituals”, or religious folk songs, became popular with white audiences. • Musical style “Ragtime” became popular. • Jazz first began in New Orleans in late 1800s and slowly gained in popularity. • Invention of the phonograph by Edison in 1877 also brought popular music into homes.