Deep background

The origins of American popular culture can be traced back to a centuries' old hybridization with deeply racist overtones made clearest in the minstrel show, and a socially constructed “frontier” consisting of pioneers, wild Indians, bad men, and two-fisted (or two-gun) heroes. The innovative center of modern American popular culture emerged, most significantly, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Extensive immigration and urbanization, along with technological and market breakthroughs, suddenly prompted a multifaceted mass culture where tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands and more could simultaneously enjoy the same newly minted music (definitely including dance), literature, vaudeville, and then film; likewise assorted items packaged for the emerging consumer, from California fruit to bicycles and even “vacations.”

Key newer sources of popular culture were rooted in the cultures of those who used English as a second language, and for good reasons. Among Jews especially, but also other groups, the most secular and socialistic-minded segment of the respective populations abjured the raw prejudices of older white America, on race issues in particular. Locked out of most existing business opportunities, newer immigrants by the thousands also rushed to embrace the burgeoning culture industry. There, within the evolving tastes and markets that the outsiders studied and learned how to shape, lay both the entepreneurial genius and the performative talent of impresarios, musicians, actors, athletes, and so on.