Transcript Entertainment in the Progressive Era

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-toriches 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.