This category includes a hemispheric culture industry and audience even while it maintains identification with US identities. Central is Latin music and dance across multiple genres and styles blending African, South American, Mexican, and Caribbean traditions. Midcentury, several performers achieved celebrity with music that sparked mainstream dance crazes like the mambo and cha-cha. Latin music has also influenced American jazz and rock ’n’ roll, exemplified by Latin jazz recordings and Ritchie Valens’s rock stardom. Latin chord progressions and rhythms continued to influence rock and pop, especially in salsa and 1970s boogaloo. Since then, more artists have achieved mainstream musical popularity while Latino and Latina actors and directors have likewise become nationally celebrated. Other forms have flourished, too: activist Chicano theatre, mural culture, lowrider car culture, and fashion expressions of pachucos and pachucas dating back to the 1930s are all counterculture means of signifying ethnic pride and resistance.

Cooking shows historically aired on American radio/TV but transformed in the 1990s into leisure entertainment. In the 1950s, cooking shows were local, cheap, live daytime fare. Aimed at housewives, they advertised new kitchen products and often incorporated ready-made ingredients. In the 1960s, cooking shows became national educational PBS-TV shows, due to Julia Child’s The French Chef, 1963–1973. Child facilitated cooking’s shift from a female domestic duty to a creative leisure outlet. By the 1990s when cable TV targeted niche audiences, the Food Network introduced masculine chefs, travelogues, and sporting competition formulas to attract male viewers and expand its audience beyond the home cook. Food TV entered another new era when social media and streaming services expanded cooking TV subgenres as well as their cultural diversity. Social media also created opportunities for amateur producers, although demands for high production values privilege some producers, even on popular apps Instagram and TikTok.

Popular culture has been instrumental for defining Asian American identities, featuring long-standing tensions between self-representation and those by a White majority. The digital media revolution has both multiplied self-representation and overturned notions of the category’s inherent national exclusivity as international imagery flows freely across borders. Early imagery portrayed immigrant Asians as a “yellow peril” that threatened White society, while human villages at world’s fairs and even urban ethnic enclaves delimited Asian American representation. In theatre and movies, White actors usually played the Asian characters using makeup and enacting “yellowface.” But, beginning in the late 1960s, Asian Americans began fighting back in independent films that resisted the racist stereotypes, depicted the damage of Orientalist representation, and created new imagery. Across types of popular culture – from foodways to social media – and through media stars like Bruce Lee, Margaret Cho, or Mindy Kaling, Asian Americans have demonstrated creative independence.

Minstrel shows and their practice of White actors blackening their faces and hands to portray African American caricatures was the first uniquely American form of theatrical expression. Beginning in the 1830s, professional troupes combined comedy, dance, and music to depict those of African descent as dim-witted, lazy, cartoonish figures. Minstrelsy conjoins complicated racial and class politics, appropriating antebellum slave dialect, music, and dance while simultaneously celebrating it, lampooning it, and denigrating it. Initially directed to Northern working-class audiences, minstrel shows contributed significantly to racial ideologies as they provided a contradictory vehicle for both identification with and revulsion of non-Whites. Minstrelsy dramatically exemplifies how popular culture propagated proslavery ideology in the North. Understanding the cultural dynamics of minstrelsy and blackface is also important as the form has left a complex legacy for modern depiction of African Americans in mass entertainment.

American intellectuals traditionally criticized “lowbrow” popular culture as a societal detriment when immigration and rising working-class culture concerned the elite. In the 1940s, the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers perpetuated such disdain for popular culture as the ruling class’s weapon for keeping the workers distracted from political realities. After World War II, many scholars reversed course and celebrated popular culture as democratic American consensus. But the social upheavals of the 1960s influenced the next generation of intellectuals, drawn to popular culture for how it might express social resistance. A new international model supporting this approach was Marxist-influenced British Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall, that embraced popular culture as capable of either social domination or resistance. Since then, feminist, ethnic, and queer studies critiques as well as acknowledgment of popular culture’s global reach and transnational flow have influenced pop culture theories and methods.

In the 1820s, newspapers, religious tracts, pamphlets, magazines, and books became available in vast, affordable quantities to Americans across all classes. This print revolution occurred because of expanding literacy rates, new industrial technologies for mass production, population growth, new transportation modes for wider distribution, and the new Jacksonian ideology of populist democracy. Fiction became especially popular in book form and serialized in magazines and newspapers. After the Civil War, the publishing industry consolidated, and an efficient, interlocked network of syndicates, subscription sales, and door-to-door salesmen popularized the leading authors of the day. Perhaps more germane to the “democratizing” role of nineteenth-century publishing were the penny press and the dime novel. Each offered newspapers or books for cheap prices, making their literature available to urban working classes. This rich, diverse volume of nineteenth-century print culture established the dynamics of American popular culture.

In the 1930s, American comic books switched from reprinting newspaper cartoons to original content. They imitated pulp fiction and introduced superhuman crime fighters. In World War II, these patriot heroes boosted sales. By 1950, comic books featured sensationalistic content and tamer adventures but became the target of concerns that they were unhealthy for children. A 1954 Senate subcommittee even took testimony about comic books’ impact on teenagers. Fearing censorship, the comic book industry created an internal regulatory system. But by the late 1960s, they again struggled, and so they fashioned more relevant stories, more superheroes, new distribution networks, and specialty retail outlets that spawned a fan culture of adult readers. By the early 2000s, comic books regularly provided material for movies and TV. They introduced gender and racial diversity. Today, comic book culture thrives as a fan-driven industry, and annual conventions or “Comic-Con’s” attract hundreds of thousands.

Hollywood’s overseas expansion during the 1920s–1930s resulted from interwoven economic, political, and industrial changes. Although European agents rented Hollywood movies prior to 1914, World War I destroyed European film industry infrastructures, thus allowing American companies to flood markets with their products. Simultaneously, US domestic growth resulted in vertically integrated companies whose international revenues facilitated greater quality and quantity of production. This achievement fostered by Jewish immigrant studio moguls repackaged the very utopian promise that had brought them to the United States. They accomplished what the US government could not – global advertisement for an American way of life and consumerism. Even though some nations attempted building robust film industries, boycotting American theatres and products, or legislating restrictions, the rise of Nazism and World War II prevented effective national cinemas. Hollywood’s global ascendancy is not simply about American domination but about how a national cinema became a global one.

This volume focuses on American popular culture’s historical and cultural power as a transformative agent shaping national and world histories, values, and societies. Popular culture is broadly construed herein as “commercialized leisure,” a definition derived from social theories about work/leisure and the nature of industrialized societies. Not to be confused with folklore, it makes several supportive assumptions: popular culture is driven by mechanization, it defines audiences as consumers, it is a conduit for group identities, it is transnational, and it is always actively interpreted by its varied audiences. American popular culture is dependent on technological developments, from the 1820s print revolution to the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad to the domination of mass-media technologies ending with the rise of the Internet. The book is organized into three sections: nineteenth century, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and case studies where popular culture has been weaponized for sociopolitical domination or resistance.

As popular culture prospered in the mid nineteenth century, it targeted middle-class women as an emerging audience of consumers. It encouraged women to take pleasure in domesticity and nurturing families as women’s appropriate role in society. Modern scholars either castigated or ignored these works until feminism’s rise in the 1970s–1980s, when scholars reevaluated bestseller domestic or sentimental novels for their rightful place in popular culture. They also reclaimed other popular forms of sentimental culture, including Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine (1830–1898) as well as household manuals like Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) that offered a middle-class “cult of domesticity.” Sentimental culture also extended to piano sheet music and other parlor entertainments like daguerreotypes, photograph albums, and stereographs that were supposed to be the means for women creating strong family bonding in affectionate leisure time together.

Key to popular theatre were animal performances that provided amusement when mechanical power was eclipsing animal power and that illustrated science’s new hierarchies of human and animal bodies. Hybrid theatre-circus presentations regularly included horseback riding and display as well as dangerous animal stunts. For example, Mazeppa (1831) highlighted the lead character tied bareback to a horse that stampeded across the stage. The best-known Mazeppa (1861–1868) starred Adah Isaacs Menken who sensationalized the role by cross-dressing and carrying out the dangerous bareback ride. Menken became a star – a striking counterexample to Victorian femininity. After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad expanded touring possibilities for these large-scale shows while Manhattan theatres built larger venues and more elaborate productions. The 1905 opening of Times Square’s Hippodrome was unparalleled for audience capacity (5,200), underground facilities for housing animals, and stage apparatus for supporting an entire circus and special effects.

From 1840–1920, waves of European and Asian immigrants engaged popular culture as a means for preserving ethnic identities as well as acculturating to a new society. This duality was at the core of ethnic commercial leisure, exemplified here by German beer gardens and Yiddish theatre. Vaudeville, movies, and Tin Pan Alley music especially catered to immigrant audiences, incorporating efforts at assimilation and ethnic distinctiveness into entertainment more broadly. The representation of immigrant groups and African Americans, however, in these entertainments was generally comic racist caricatures. Negative depictions of Irish, German, Jewish, African Americans, and Chinese persisted even while African American and immigrant groups fought racial ridicule in protests, boycotts, and censorship campaigns. While the stakes and efforts varied across different groups’ responses to racial and ethnic denigration, these struggles reveal much about racial identity and “Americanness” when mass immigration and increasingly restrictive immigration laws were redefining American society.

Television’s historical arc begins with its early years or “network era” when a handful of broadcasting channels and key companies dominated. American TV quickly adapted radio and movie strategies, saturating American homes by the 1960s. It created a shared national culture both through its storytelling and its function as a source of news information. But things in the 1980s shifted during the cable/satellite era when programming or “niche marketing” targeted narrower groups shaped by their interests, language, or social factors across dozens of channels. Television transformed again during the era of the Internet and subscription streaming. Its evolution from mass to micro audiences, from scheduled to on-demand experiences, and from domestic to international viewers has changed what was commercially viable, allowing for greater diversity across sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class lines. Throughout its production and reception changes, though, American TV has been a key cultural storyteller.

American vaudeville and burlesque, two farcical forms of variety theatre, peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Burlesque became popular when British star Lydia Thompson and her “British Blondes” came to the United States in 1868 and performed topical parodies that also defied gender expectations and restrictions. Vaudeville was initially a cheap saloon entertainment. But both became a big commercial enterprise of national traveling circuits and theatre chains. Both achieved success by serving as entertaining style guides to modern, vernacular culture. Vaudeville was only rendered passé when movies superseded its purpose. Simultaneously, burlesque circuits narrowed to bawdy comedy and female striptease acts. These entertainments are important not only for understanding how popular culture helped to loosen gender restrictions and social conflicts about class but also for what they reveal about group values during a time of intense change.

Although Hollywood and the US Department of Defense had previously collaborated in wartime, a post-Vietnam War alliance produced a new type of censorship and propaganda. In both blockbuster films and TV, Hollywood allowed the Pentagon to remove unwanted themes and to affix propagandistic storylines in exchange for borrowing hardware and personnel. Entertainment liaison offices for US armed services regularly meet producers’ requests for expensive military “props” in exchange for script control, a practice quietly carried out on hundreds of Hollywood productions. Only recently through Freedom of Information Act requests has it been revealed how films like The Transformers and Top Gun series feature authentic military aircraft and weapons because the government excised script traces of military war crimes, sexual misconduct, and incompetence. While not formally acts of censorship or propaganda, exacting script approval that sneaks in military public relations has yet to undergo public or Congressional scrutiny.

Popular dance encompasses movement practices across street, stage, and screen. Street dance began in the African American ring shout and cakewalk as mimicries of slave owners but evolved into minstrel show parody and ragtime. Similar appropriation continued from the lindy hop to rock ’n’ roll to disco. In the 1970s, however, breaking and hip-hop sparked a Black street dance revival employing intricate footwork and acrobatics. Stage dance developed from minstrelsy and burlesque to musical theatre where choreography became an integral element. Classic Hollywood musicals disseminated popular dance as did New Hollywood movies that made dance central to exploring social disparities. Network television initially featured teenagers bopping on American Bandstand and Soul Train. Cable network MTV made 1980s music videos and stars’ dance performances standard for popularizing pop songs. Since then, television has reinvented dance competition shows while Internet platforms circulate new popular dance stylings.