Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Making of American Audiences
  • Cited by 130
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2000
Online ISBN:
9780511619717
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619717
Subjects:
History of Ideas, American Theatre, Film, Media, Mass Communication, Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies, Media, Mass Communication
Series:
Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

‘… substantial and absorbing … it appealing style will draw a wide range of readers with an interest in the many facets of entertainment.’

Source: Library Journal

‘A masterly study that should become a standard text.’

Source: Sight and Sound

‘Butsch’s thoroughly researched, critically informed and vividly written accounts of other ‘popular’ media and their audiences’ socio-economic ‘making’ provide extremely useful comparative material for research into cinema audiences’ constructions.’

Source: The English Association

'This fascinating book is also an impressive piece of scholarship.'

Source: Ethics, Place and Environment

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.