The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century
About this ebook
Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an "industrial saturnalia."Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these "Sodoms by the sea" flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts' very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions.
The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britain's industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.
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About the author
Gary S. Cross is professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several titles, including An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (Columbia, 2000).John K. Walton is professor of social history at the University of Central Lancashire. His most recent book is The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century.
Gary Cross is professor of history at Penn State and the author of An All-Consuming Century (CUP, 2000); Time and Money: The Making of Consumerist Modernity (Routledge, 1993; A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (University of California Press, 1989) and A Social History of Leisure since 1600 (Venture, 1990)
Gary Cross is professor of history at Penn State and the author of An All-Consuming Century (CUP, 2000); Time and Money: The Making of Consumerist Modernity (Routledge, 1993; A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (University of California Press, 1989) and A Social History of Leisure since 1600 (Venture, 1990)
