The Consumer Society: Entertainment in the City The Press and City Life With the first post-war boom in the 1860's, observers began to note that New York society was becoming entirely based upon wealth, social prestige being won by those who had the most splendid carriages, drawing-rooms, and opera boxes. Read More The Origins of the Skycraper America's most advanced ideas in architectural construction have found their widest dissemination through a series of great industrial exhibitions or fairs, beginning with New York's Crystal Palace Fair of 1853 and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. In these early fairs a number of greenhouses constructed of glass and iron introduced Americans to the possibilities of metal construction such as that in Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève... Read More The Rise of Advertising - Mass Circulation We have just seen that choice is determined by the factors creating the utility goods and services are thought to possess. Before attempting an analysis of the precise nature and relative influence of these determinants, it is important that we note a few of the more significant psychological aspects of choice-making. For, in reality, many of the determinants just mentioned affect choice by psychic processes. Read More The Early Film Industry: Foundation of Hollywood With the perfection of a moving picture camera in 1892, and the subsequent invention of the peep hole kinetoscope in 1893, the stage was set for the modern film industry. Previewed at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago during the summer of 1893, the kinetoscope could handle only one customer at a time. For a penny or a nickel in the slot, one could watch brief, unenlarged 35-mm black-and-white motion pictures. The kinetoscope provided a source of inspiration to other inventors; and, more importantly, its successful commercial exploitation convinced investors that motion pictures had a solid financial future. Kinetoscope parlors had opened in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and scores of other cities all over the country by the end of 1894. The kinetoscope spread quickly to Europe as well, where Edison, revealing his minimal commitment to motion pictures, never even bothered to take out patents. Read More First Movie Theaters: Nickelodeons In European countries, notably in France, where pioneer work in moving pictures was even more advanced than it was in the United States, developments followed a quite different course. There was nothing comparable to the nickelodeon madness of this country. Instead of appealing to a mass market, the movies essayed the rôle of sophisticated entertainment. Read More Early European Film: Dominance of Import Films For much of the century's first decade, innovation in film production came more from Europe than the United States, where making movies was still seen as an offshoot of the more profitable business of making equipment. In France Georges Melies exploited the cinema's capacity for illusion in a series of widely-copied science fiction and fantasy films such as Journey to the Moon (1902). Read More The First Hollywood Stars: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford "The movie is the art of the millions of American citizens," an English writer in the Adelphi discovered, "who are picturesquely called Hicks-the mighty stream of standardized humanity that flows through Main Street. The cinema is, through and through, a democratic art; the only one." Nor would this commentator have had it otherwise. The attempt to educate the public to higher standards of taste except through the movies' natural evolution in response to a gradually maturing public sentiment was pious humbug. Read More Ragtime and Dance: Popular New Steps At the opening of the 20th century the decisive influence of the ragtime pianists fell on white audiences tiring of the minstrel show and willing to pay to hear black performers. At the same time the American band was being heard everywhere, promoted by John Philip Sousa, the most successful musician of his time, and testifying among other things to pugnacious nationalism. Both phenomena would modulate into dance bands playing vigorous dance music. Burgeoning displays of sheet music in neighborhood stores, often music calling itself rag, attracted a diverse public, much of which never heard the concerts of the creators of ragtime. Read More