Entertainment in the Progressive Era

Ch 9, Sec 2

• As USA became more urbanized, prosperous, people wanted more entertainment, leisure activities.

• Live performances:– Minstrel Shows-white performers in “blackface”.• Imitated black music, dance humor.• Died out with growth of vaudeville.

– Vaudeville-inexpensive variety show.• Song/dance acts, comic sketches, magic acts,

ventriloquists, animal acts.– Circuses-very popular. Visited towns every year.

• Movies.– 1903-The Great Train Robbery; first movie.– Quickly, nickeloedons set up across USA.• Showed short films at 5 cents/person.

– Silent films, with piano or band playing music.• Stars of the day-Mary Pickford, Douglas

Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin.• Movies became and remain hugely popular in

USA.

Mary Pickford

Douglas Fairbanks

Rudolph Valentino

Charlie Chaplin

• Amusement Parks.– People began to get part of weekend off work.• Wanted to go and do.

• Amusement parks began to open on edges of cities at ends of trolley lines.– Featured music, vaudeville shows, carnival games,

rides, some had beaches.• Roller coasters, steeplechase, ferris wheels.

• Coney Island on edge of New York was considered the biggest and best.

• Sports.– Horseracing, boxing, baseball most popular.– Amateur teams, leagues all over USA.– Promoters began charging admission, holding

championship games.• 1869, first pro team created-Cincinnati Red Stockings.

– Baseball became “America’s Favorite Pasttime”.• Football, basketball developed late 1800s, grew

in popularity.• Bicycling became popular late 1800s.• Both sexes played sports.– Women-bicycling, basketball, ice skating, tennis,

gymnastics, swimming.

Literature• Newspapers big sellers in USA.• To sell more papers, many publishers used

yellow journalism.– Find the dirt on murders, vice, scandal, sex, etc.

• Very popular with readers.– Critics felt that yellow journalists “invented facts

and sensationalized ordinary events”.• Magazines grew in popularity.– Articles, ads, fiction, rags-to-riches tales.

• In literature, “dime novels” became popular.– Cheap paperbacks of adventure stories, rags-to-

riches tales.• Others read literature like Henry James and

Upton Sinclair.• Mark Twain became very popular.– Humorist and satirist (made fun of society).– The Adventures of Huckleberry Twin, A

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

Music• Always very popular in USA.– Concerts, operas, music in home.

• “Negro Spirituals”, or religious folk songs, became popular with white audiences.

• Musical style “Ragtime” became popular.• Jazz first began in New Orleans in late 1800s

and slowly gained in popularity.• Invention of the phonograph by Edison in

1877 also brought popular music into homes.