| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.3

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.3 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century. By Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. x plus 308 pp. $32.50).

Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton have provided historians of modern leisure with an incisive examination of what they call twentieth century "pleasure places": amusement parks, seaside resorts, and tourist destinations. The Playful Crowd highlights four major entertainment venues: Coney Island, Blackpool, Disneyland, and the North of England Open Air Museum at Beamish. Their study is a refreshing addition to scholarship on leisure for at least two reasons. First, it examines the mass consumption of leisure across time, charting developments in specific areas of popular entertainment over the course of a century. Taking this relatively long view allows Cross and Walton to highlight persistent trends in both popular attitudes toward leisure and the historical precursors of contemporary "innovations" in theme parks like Disneyworld. Second, The Playful Crowd investigates the creation of a modern mass audience for amusement parks with a transatlantic perspective, comparing attractions in Britain and the United States. This comparative approach enables Cross and Walton to engage larger developments in class, leisure and culture in two industrialized societies. The Playful Crowd's chronological and geographic sweep frames leisure broadly, but allows for a sufficiently detailed analysis of U.S. and English crowds and attractions to contribute to the cultural history of both nations.

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