With Amusement for All

A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

By: LeRoy Ashby

Narrated by: Kevin Pierce

Length: 33 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience.

Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in American society. For example, in the late 19th century, Americans embraced "self-made men" such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie; the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star "Buffalo Bill" Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance.

Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the 19th-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes - crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody's shows. By the early 20th century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor's profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor's short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiences - from family life to college life - with black casts.

Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock 'n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean's 1971 anthem "American Pie" served as an epitaph for rock's political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock 'n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge.

With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America.

The book is published by University Press of Kentucky.

©2012 The University Press of Kentucky (P)2013 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A masterpiece. The book is a tour de force in its field and has made popular culture, once thought to be a frivolous area for academic study, a serious field of inquiry." ( USA Today)

"No single author has tackled popular culture with so much breadth and depth and managed to strike a balance between the popular and scholarly approaches. Ashby's absorbing and hugely informative study will appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended." ( Library Journal)

"A survey of impressive breadth on two centuries of American amusements." ( Journal of American History)

Excellent

Would you consider the audio edition of With Amusement for All to be better than the print version?

Best to have both

What did you like best about this story?

Transportive strangeness of "old weird America"

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

His voice and performance are just fine

If you could give With Amusement for All a new subtitle, what would it be?

....

Any additional comments?

....

Masterpiece

I return to this book every few years. Its exhaustive survey of popular culture is a perfect window into US history. A great read/listen for everyone from students to writers.

Extremely narrow

doesn't cover many topics and goes on for 9 hours on the horror of anything from the last 40 years. everything is "corporate america" and how it ruined the world. nothing is called positive or favorable to the masses.

The file is too large

Any additional comments?

The book is fine, the file is too large to deal with on my mp3. Have not tried to listen on my computer or other device, but I listen to audio books in the car not at home.
Please break this book up into 4-5 sections.

Well researched, full of information

If you have ever wondered what people did for entertainment in the past, this is the book for you. LeRoy Ashby demonstrates how social, political, and cultural shifts impacted the way we viewed entertainment. Billy Joel's song "We didn't start the fire" is a brief time capsule through history and pop culture, but "With Amusement for All" is the definitive history on almost two centuries on the topic.

As noted, audiences once clamored to black face performances and heavily relied on newspapers for news and to be entertained. The marketing genius PT Barnum utilized a variety of acts and sideshows to fascinate the masses. Barnum's star attractions including a woman he claimed was 160 years old, and nursed George Washington, bearded women, midgets, and other human oddities.

Topic included, but certainly not limited to:

- Composer Stephen Foster
- Wild west shows
- Dime novels
- Bare knuckle boxing headlined by John L. Sullivan, and later prize fighting
- Baseball, with fans interested in statistics, later infatuated by the long ball and Babe Ruth
- The invention of basketball, football
- Burlesque, Vaudeville
- Recorded music, motion pictures
- The Tramp and Harry Houdini
- The birth of Jazz
- The emergence of radio, and radio shows such as Amos 'n' Andy and Burns and Allen
- Amusement parks, fairgrounds, and the circus
- The explosion of comic books, and later comic bookstores
- Pop culture boasting morale of the nation during the second World War
- Walt Disney, John Wayne
- The TV boom of the 1950's, and cable TV in the 80's
- Playboy, Marilyn Monroe
- Elvis Presley, and rock 'n' roll music featuring the Beatles and The Rolling Stones
- 007, Saturday Night Live, MTV, HBO, ESPN, VCRs
- All in the family, sitcom mania
- Disco, punk rock, hip hop, rap
- Star Wars, ET
- Reality shows, talk shows on radio, Fox News

Ashby has all the bases covered, and Kevin Pierce provides captivating narration.

So Much Fun!

An amazing overview! Well put together with great narration that kept me listening even after I was done driving. I love books like this that give you history in a context that you may not consider.

..Lacks Character.

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The book is read like an infomercial. That could be changed, but I am not offering to do that.

Would you ever listen to anything by LeRoy Ashby again?

?

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Shallow salesmen ship tonalities.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Maybe, depends on the director. I had hoped for decent content, but it was unreadable/'unlistenable'.

Any additional comments?

...as a disclaimer I did not listen to the entire book.

It's a thourough and well-reswarched history

Ultimately, however, it can be quite dry. I would recommend it for people interested in a dense and comprehensive history chiefly of media forms. It covers the larger popular culture from circuses and tin pan alley to MTV and Hollywood. It weaves in social and political themes effortlessly, as well. though I enjoyed the listen, it would've taken me much more effort and time to have read the print copy on my shelf.

Lots of country music, news and comic book info.

It's not a bad book. I'll admit that I skipped a lot of the 1800's. But the early 1900's were interesting. However it really got botched around the 80's and 90's. First of all, they seemed really wedged in at the end. The author didn't seem to really get those eras. MTV was barely mentioned, nor was the influx of teen movies, music or TV shows. Most of the things talked about for the 80's were for the older generations. He spends a great deal of time talking about talk shows, and radio. And a ton on country music. And comics. Lots of talk about comics.

Oddly enough, he mentions horror in the 90's but not the 80's where they had a huge resurgence. He calls Silence of the Lambs a "slasher" movie. Shows like Seinfeld, 90210 and Friends were not even mentioned. Instead, he talked about who owned with news station. Which, IMO, isn't really pop culture.

The narration wasn't bad. There were a few times sentences were repeated, and a few mispronounced words.


Probably better suited for listeners at least in their 50's.

Interesting Info, Poor Narration

There was a lot of interesting info about the history of amusement in America and the related sociological implications. Sports, theater, film, Television, and video games, etc. were covered. Unfortunately, the narrator was unsatisfactory. Aside from the annoying mispronunciations and outright errors, he was stiff and unconvincing, not seeming to get the material he was reading. The overall quality of the narration was so disappointing that it basically ruined the book for me.