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PROLOGU~ POPULAR CULTUR~ on T~~ ORin~ IN NovEMBER I 829, soME TWELVE THousand people, many of whom had paid for a good view, watched the famous falls jumper Sam Patch leap off a scaffolding and plunge 125 feet into the roiling waters at the foot of Genesee Falls in upstate New York. It was his last jump. Drunk before he leaped, he did not survive. He could hardly have guessed that his jump from that platform marked a symbolic moment in the history of American popular culture. When Patch bounded into the void, American entertainment was in the process of stepping into a turbulent new era.1 That new era was the product of several developments that owed much to the American Revolution. Initially a colonial war for independence, the Revolution hastened many changes. "A fundamental mistake of the Americans has been that they considered the revolution as completed when it was just begun," observed Noah Webster, a young member of the revolutionary generation, in 1787. One of the rebellion's ongoing consequences was a spreading political environment that celebrated personal autonomy, social mobility, and popular sovereignty. Another was an emerging market economy that prized the individual's freedom to profit from producing and selling goods. Much irony existed in the fact that such changes came at the considerable expense of the republican ideals that shaped much of the Revolution's ideology. But the paradoxes and unintended consequences so central to that story also helped give rise to the kinds of entertainment that leading revolutionaries feared. It would have been of little comfort to those revolutionaries to realize that such entertainment derived in significant ways from their own ambivalence about accommodating the expectations and tastes of society's increasingly assertive lower ranks.2 Although the developing commercial amusements differed substantially from the folk games, festivals, and celebrations that had marked 2 WITH AMUSEMENT FOR ALL societies around the globe for centuries, they nevertheless tapped similar desires for fun and pleasure just as they stirred familiar apprehensions about those desires. The England from which most of the colonists had come to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included many traditions of play and entertainment that were woven into timehonored religious commemorations of saints and martyrs, seasonal holidays, and county fairs. There were sporting events that foreshadowed modern baseball and football. There were horse races and a variety of blood sports such as cockfighting and animal baiting. Fairs included puppet shows and displays of human "freaks." But such amusements also provoked concern and opposition. Sometimes authorities banned events that had become too violent. In 1762, for example, England's Southwark fair was so disruptive that officials abolished it. Among the critics of such popular diversions was the poet William Wordsworth, who cringed at a fair: "What a shock I For eyes and ears! What anarchy and din, I . .. Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs, I The Horse of knowledge, the learned Pig, I ... the man that swallows fire, I ... All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things, I . .. A Parliament of Monsters...."3 When individuals such as Wordsworth lamented this "vast mill vomiting ," they expressed elite worries about upheavals from society's lower classes , but another significant source of tension flowed from religious concerns. A dilemma in this regard was that the line between sacred and secular often blurred. It was to aid the Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church, for example, that England's King James I in 1618 issued his Book of Sports: "Our good people," he proclaimed, should not be "discouraged from any lawful recreation, Such as dancing ... Recreation ... and the setting up of Maypoles and other sports." The king reasoned that banning such activities would only make Catholicism more appealing. In that regard, the sacred and the secular were entwined in an uneasy relation that resembled "a dance," as one historian has written, "sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward."4 Even the fiercely devout Puritans in New England's Massachusetts Bay colony recognized the importance of having fun. They accepted "worldly delights" as long as such pleasures did not interfere with godly pursuits, occur on the Sabbath, smack of Catholicism, or otherwise threaten the colony's religious mission. "It spoils the bow to keep it always straight," asserted the minister Benjamin Colman. "I am far from inveighing against sober mirth," he wrote in 1707; "on the contrary, I justify, applaud, and recommend it. Let it be pure and grave ... yet free and cheerful." In sum, there was nothing...

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