The Making of American Audiences

From Stage to Television, 1750-1990

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by Richard Butsch

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published June 2000, 448 pages, paper

ISBN 0521664837

Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the Colonial period to the present. Providing coverage of theater, 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 behavior.

Contents

Introduction: Participative Public, Passive Private?
1. Colonial Theater, Privileged Audiences
 2. Drama in Early Republican Audiences
3. The B'Hoys in Jacksonian Theaters
4. Knowledge and the Demise of Audience Sovereignty
5. Matinee Ladies: Re-Gendering Theater Audiences
6. Blackface, Whiteface: "Gentlemen, Be Seated"
7. Variety, Liquor and Lust
8. Vaudeville, Incorporated
9. "Legitimate" and "Illegitimate: Theater Around the Turn of the Century
10. Pictorial Essay
11. The Celluloid Stage: Nickelodeon Audiences
12. Storefronts to Theaters: Seeking the Middle Class
13. Voices from the Ether: Early Radio Broadcasting
14. Radio Cabinets and Network Chains
15. Rural Radio: "We Are Seldom Lonely Anymore"
16. Fear and Dreams: Public Discourses About Radio
17. The Electronic Cyclops: Fifties Television
18. A TV in Every Home: Television "Effects"
19. Homevideo: Viewer Autonomy?
Conclusion: From Effects to Resistance and Beyond