| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. By Richard Butsch. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x, 438 pp. Cloth, $69.95, ISBN 0-521-66253-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-521-66483-7.)

Historians studying the changing importance of leisure confront a dizzying array of literature emanating from scholars working across a wide range of disciplines. Richard Butsch, a sociologist known to many cultural historians for his For Fun and Profit (1990), has assembled this disparate scholarship into a multilayered narrative of the history of amusement audiences. One of the book's strengths is its breadth; Butsch discusses the evolution of audiences from the colonial period to the present and, because of their popularity and common exploitation of drama and variety styles, includes stage, minstrelsy, vaudeville, movies, radio, and television in his analysis. 1

One major theme concerns the changing relationship between audiences and performers. Colonial elites exercised control over performers by interrupting and ignoring the actors. As theater space opened to members of the working classes, elites and working classes developed separate taste cultures in which knowledge of and reverence for actors and performances was an important marker of inclusion in their respective social groups. This privileging of the performer over the audience was an important step in the pacification of audiences, as rowdiness and disruption became widespread signs of bad manners. . . .

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