| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. By LeRoy Ashby. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. xii, 648 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8131-2397-6.)
LeRoy Ashby draws on the substantial volume of historical scholarship on American popular culture produced since the 1970s to present a survey of impressive breadth on two centuries of American amusements in a lengthy book of over 600 pages. The book concentrates on commercial amusements, perhaps since these are better documented and researched than noncommercial pastimes.	1
Numerous topics are introduced. Chapters move along at a rapid clip from topic to topic, with a general description of a given period introducing or connecting one-to-three page narratives on particular subjects or personalities such as P. T. Barnum, Lydia Thompson, B. F. Keith, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth. Readers learn about the sacralization of high culture and the commercialization of popular culture, and about movies, radio, and television, their industries, programs, and personalities. The book is, in a sense, an encyclopedia of leisure written as a continuous narrative. Yet, the book is well indexed to locate a particular topic amidst its mountain of subjects.	. . .

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