The Making of American Audiences
From Stage to Television, 1750–1990

This is a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the colonial period to the modern day.

Richard Butsch (Author)

9780521664837, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 April 2000

468 pages, 18 b/w illus. 8 tables
22.9 x 15.3 x 3 cm, 0.688 kg

'This fascinating book is also an impressive piece of scholarship.' Ethics, Place and Environment

In The Making of American Audiences, Richard Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the colonial period to the modern day. Providing coverage of theatre, opera, vaudeville, minstrelsy, movies, radio and television, he examines the evolution of audience practices as each genre supplanted another as the primary popular entertainment. Based on original historical research, this volume exposes how audiences made themselves through their practices - how they asserted control over their own entertainments and their own behaviour. Importantly, Butsch articulates two long-term processes: pacification and privatization. Whereas during the nineteenth century, overactive audiences represented a threat to civic order through their unruly behaviour, in the twentieth century, audiences have become more passive, dependent upon and controlled by media messages. This timely study serves as an important contribution to communication research, as well as American cultural history and cultural studies.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: participative public, passive private?
1. Colonial theater, privileged audiences
2. Drama in early Republican audiences
3. The B'hoys in Jacksonian theaters
4. Knowledge and the decline of audience sovereignty
5. Matinee ladies: re-gendering theater audiences
6. Blackface, whiteface
7. Variety, liquor and lust
8. Vaudeville, incorporated
9. 'Legitimate' and 'illegitimate' theater around the turn of the century
10. The celluloid stage: Nickelodeon audiences
11. Storefronts to theaters: seeking the middle class
12. Voices from the ether: early radio listening
13. Radio cabinets and network chains
14. Rural radio: 'we are seldom lonely anymore'
15. Fears and dreams: public discourses about radio
16. The electronic cyclops: fifties television
17. A TV in every home: television 'effects'
18. Home video: viewer autonomy?
19. Conclusion: from effects to resistance and beyond
Appendix: availability, affordability, admission price
Notes
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Film theory & criticism [APFA]