Orientation

The years between the conclusion of the Civil War and the end of the twenties represented a golden age of popular entertainment in America. In particular, the increased leisure time, improved transportation, and rapidly developing cities of the period helped spur the growth of a kind of performance that largely faded away later in the twentieth century, for the most part replaced by mass media. Live popular entertainment – amusements aimed at a broad, relatively unsophisticated audience – came to include a dizzying array of types, from the circus to vaudeville, the diorama to the amusement park. Most were European and already centuries old, but they were given a characteristic twist by American showmen.

Popular entertainment is difficult to separate neatly into categories or, in many cases, even into discrete periods or clearly separate types. Part of the reason for confusion is that there were so many relatively anonymous entertainers, who borrowed acts or parts of them without attribution. An example of this – often lateral – movement may be found in the words of a twentieth-century performer, Mae Noell, who came from a popular entertainment family. Her parents, she has written, performed in at least a dozen different kinds of entertainment during their long careers in show business, specializing in towns “too small for real theatre, nickelodeons or Chatauqua.”