Popular Culture in American History Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards generated from lecture notes detailing the development, concepts, figures, genres, and media in American popular culture history.

Storey's 6 Definitions of Popular Culture

Six frameworks defining popular culture: 1. Widely favored, 2. Residual category (not high culture), 3. Commodified (mass-produced for profit), 4. "From the people" (grassroots culture), 5. Site of hegemonic struggle (reinforcing or challenging power), 6. Postmodern (blending and recycling high and low culture).

Popular Culture

Culture widely consumed by large numbers of people, developed especially alongside modernity, industrialization, and mass media.

Alternative Culture

Culture created by subcultures and countercultural groups that exists outside or in resistance to the mainstream.

High Culture

Art considered refined, prestigious, or sophisticated, historically associated with elites, educated classes, and European traditions.

Cultural Capital

Nonfinancial knowledge, education, speech, manners, and cultural skills that signal status and provide social power, as conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu.

Opera

A theatrical form combining singing, music, acting, and drama that originated in Europe around the late 1500s/early 1600s and became part of American high culture.

Musical

A performance format combining singing, dialogue, acting, and dance that grew into a major form of American commercial entertainment on Broadway and film.

Rock Opera

A narrative storytelling performance told primarily through rock music, combining traditional theatrical forms with rock culture in the 1960s–70s.

Folk Culture

Traditional, handmade, local culture passed down orally between generations within local or rural communities.

Cultural Appropriation

The adoption of another culture's practices, symbols, or styles by a dominant group without appropriate understanding or acknowledgment.

Kitsch

Excessively sentimental, flashy, or tacky art and design mass-produced for commercial consumption.

Ermolao Rubieri

A 19th-century Italian theorist who argued that popular culture should be created "for the people, by the people."

Antonio Gramsci

An Italian Marxist thinker (1891–1937) who developed the concept of cultural hegemony to explain how culture maintains social power.

Cultural Hegemony

A concept formulated by Antonio Gramsci where dominant groups make their worldview seem normal, natural, and universal through media and entertainment.

Sitcoms

"Situation comedies" with recurring characters and settings that became a dominant 20th-century American television genre shaping ideas about social roles.

Heteronormativity

The cultural assumption present across media and social institutions that heterosexuality is the default or normal state.

Premodern

Cultural era associated with rural, traditional, handmade, and local folk culture prior to industrialization.

Modern

Cultural era emerging from the Industrial Revolution characterized by urban, commercialized, and mass-produced culture.

Postmodern

Cultural era characterized by blending high and low culture, sampling, irony, recycling, and hybrid cultural forms.

Almanacs

Cheap pocket reference books in early America containing weather, calendars, sun/moon cycles, and farming information.

Serials

Stories published in episodic installments across multiple issues of newspapers or magazines in the 18th–19th centuries.

Humbug

A harmless hoax, trick, or exaggerated attraction designed by P. T. Barnum to entertain and attract mass audiences.

The Rake

A stock character in 18th–19th century literature and theater representing an immoral man who seduces or ruins innocent women.

Broadsides

Cheap single-sheet prints containing news, announcements, poems, or songs sold on streets and in markets in early America.

Traveling Companies

Itinerant groups of actors and musicians that brought performance entertainment directly to small American towns.

The Beggar's Opera

A 1728 British satire by John Gay that combined street music, comedy, and theater, influencing later musical theater.

Slur Reclamation

The process by which target groups turn a derogatory term into a positive symbol of group identity, such as "Yankee Doodle."

Imagined Community

Benedict Anderson's concept that shared mass media enables citizens to feel connected as one nation despite never meeting most members.

Republicanism

An early American political philosophy rooted in civic virtue, self-government, and opposition to aristocracy.

The Contrast

A 1787 play by Royall Tyler contrasting American and British national characteristics to help construct post-Revolutionary identity.

Jingoism

An extreme, aggressive nationalism marked by a fervent belief in one's country's superiority.

Sensationalism

The journalistic practice of exaggerating crime, sex, violence, or tragedy to attract mass readership and profits.

Blackface

A racist 19th-century theatrical practice using makeup to caricature and mock Black people for mass entertainment.

Charlotte Temple

A 1791 best-selling novel by Susanna Rowson depicting a young woman seduced by an immoral man, highlighting social fears about female virtue.

Essay on the Stage

A 1794 work by Timothy Dwight arguing that theater was morally dangerous and corrupted souls.

African Grove Theatre

The first known Black theater company in the United States, founded in New York City in 1821 by William Alexander Brown.

Melodrama

A 19th-century theatrical genre emphasizing intense emotion, clear villains and heroes, visual spectacle, and dramatic rescues.

Romanticism

A late 18th- and 19th-century movement emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, and individualism over reason.

Archetype

A recurring character type, symbol, or narrative pattern present across historical cultures and modern media.

Monomyth

The universal "Hero's Journey" narrative pattern popularized by Joseph Campbell.

The Anti-Hero

A central story protagonist who lacks traditional moral or heroic traits, reflecting a cultural shift toward flawed characters.

Sam Patch

An 1820s American daredevil who gained early celebrity status through public jump spectacles at waterfalls.

Rotary Press

A printing press using cylinders invented by Richard March Hoe in 1843 that dramatically accelerated newspaper production.

Penny Press

Affordable 1-cent newspapers launched in the 1830s–1840s that democratized news consumption for the urban working class.

The Moon Hoax of 1835

A series of six fake articles published by The Sun claiming life had been discovered on the moon, illustrating the commercial power of sensational stories.

True Womanhood

A 19th-century middle-class ideal prescribing that respectable women should be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic.

The Other

A social concept where non-dominant groups are portrayed as foreign, strange, or inferior to define mainstream identity.

The Jezebel

A racist stereotype created during slavery depicting Black women as inherently promiscuous to justify exploitation.

P. T. Barnum

A 19th-century American impresario and showman who pioneered mass commercial entertainment, publicity hoaxes, and celebrity culture.

Joice Heth

An enslaved Black woman exhibited by P. T. Barnum under the false claim that she was the 160-year-old nurse of George Washington.

Feejee Mermaid

A famous 1840s Barnum humbug consisting of a monkey torso stitched to a fish tail.

Inversion Rituals

Festivals and popular practices that temporarily reverse social roles, enabling lower-status groups to mock elites.

Lindomania

The intense commercial celebrity craze surrounding Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind's 1850 US tour promoted by P. T. Barnum.

Astor Place Riot

A violent 1849 theater riot in NYC between working-class fans of Edwin Forrest and upper-class fans of British actor William Charles Macready.

The Black Crook

An 1866 NYC stage production combining melodrama, dance, and spectacle, widely considered the first modern American musical.

Lithography

A 19th-century printing technique using stone surfaces that enabled cheap, mass-produced visual media and posters.

Currier & Ives

A popular American printmaking firm that mass-produced affordable hand-colored lithographs depicting national life.

Minstrel Shows

A 19th-century theatrical tradition originating in the 1830s where performers used blackface to caricature Black music and culture.

Jim Crow

A racist blackface character created by Thomas Rice in the 1830s whose name was later used for Southern racial segregation laws.

The Mammy

A racist stereotype in popular media depicting enslaved Black women as happy, submissive, and devoted domestic servants.

Cakewalk

A dance developed by enslaved Black people parodying white ballroom dancing, later appropriated by white minstrel shows.

Ten-in-One

A circus format offering ten distinct side attractions under one tent for a single admission price.

Wild West Show

A 19th- and early 20th-century outdoor spectacle created by Buffalo Bill Cody featuring staged frontier battles, sharpshooting, and riding.

Will Rogers

A Cherokee humorist, trick roper, and celebrity who helped establish modern American observational stand-up comedy.

Bulldogging

A rodeo event invented by Black cowboy Bill Pickett involving wrestling a steer to the ground by its horns.

Medicine Show

A traveling 19th-century show that used free entertainment to gather crowds and sell patent medicines.

Columbian Exposition

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair featuring the "White City" architecture, which showcased American technology and modernity.

Ragtime

A syncopated piano music style created by Black musicians in the 1890s–1910s that served as a key bridge to jazz.

Scott Joplin

An African American composer and pianist known as the king of ragtime, famous for works like "Maple Leaf Rag."

Luna Park

An elaborate Coney Island amusement park opened in 1903 by Elmer Dundy and Frederic Thompson, pioneering mass commercial leisure.

The Dandy

A 19th-century fashionable urban gentleman who treated clothing, appearance, and leisure as a personal art form.

Vaudeville

A late 19th- and early 20th-century system of clean, organized variety stage shows tailored to middle-class family audiences.

Benjamin Franklin Keith

A theater entrepreneur who sanitized vaudeville variety acts to build a respectable middle-class entertainment market.

Ziegfeld Follies

A lavish Broadway variety revue created by Florenz Ziegfeld in 1907 known for elaborate sets, music, comedy, and showgirls.

Jazz

An American musical genre developed in New Orleans around 1900 combining African American syncopation, blues, and improvisation.

The Chitlin' Circuit

A safe network of performance venues created for Black entertainers during Jim Crow segregation.

The Green Book

A segregation-era travel guidebook published by Victor Hugo Green to identify businesses welcoming Black travelers.

Race Music

A 1920s–1940s record industry marketing term applied to music performed by African American recording artists.

AABA Form

A standard American popular song structure consisting of three repeating A sections and one contrasting B section (bridge).

Walter Camp

The Yale football figure known as the "Father of American Football" who introduced standardized rules, downs, and the line of scrimmage.

Muscular Christianity

A 19th-century movement asserting that physical fitness, sports discipline, and moral character were interlinked.

Social Gospel

A Progressive-era Protestant movement applying Christian ethics directly to societal problems such as poverty and labor rights.

Progressivism

A widespread political and social reform movement (~1890s–1920s) addressing urban expansion, industrialization, and political corruption.

Comstock Laws

Strict federal legislation passed in 1873 banning the mailing or distribution of "obscene" materials, including contraceptives.

Orientalism

The Western cultural tendency to depict Middle Eastern and Asian societies as exotic, sensual, mysterious, or inferior.

Pulp Fiction

Inexpensive early 20th-century magazines printed on wood-pulp paper featuring adventure, crime, mystery, and horror.

Nickelodeons

The earliest widespread movie theaters, charging 5 cents for entry between 1905 and 1915.

Tin Pan Alley

The New York City music-publishing district that commercialized sheet music and gave rise to the modern popular songwriting industry.

Harlem Renaissance

A major 1920s–1930s cultural movement centered in Harlem celebrating Black literature, music, art, and intellect.

Studio System

The Hollywood business structure where major studios held exclusive long-term contracts over actors, production, and distribution.

Vertical Integration

A studio business model controlling all three phases of film: production, distribution, and movie theater exhibition.

The Hays Office

Hollywood's self-censorship agency established in 1922 (enforcing the Production Code starting in 1934) to avoid government regulation.

Flappers

1920s young women who challenged Victorian gender norms through bobbed hair, short dresses, public smoking, drinking, and independent dating.

The Book Musical

A musical theater genre exemplified by Show Boat (1927) where plot, lyrics, musical score, and characters work as one unified story.