BEYOND "DEMOCRATIC CULTURE"

From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910. Edited by Robert M. Lewis. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii + 384pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay and index. $45.00.

Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873–1935. By Derek Vaillant. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiii + 401pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Julia Foulkes
The New School

The history of music, theater, movies, and dance has been a rich way in which to uncover the experiences of ethnic groups in the United States. From Kathy Peiss's exploration of sexual bartering in dance halls among Italian, Irish, and Jewish men and women living on the Lower East Side of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century to Lizabeth Cohen's nuanced reading of immigrants' involvement in movies in Chicago in the 1930s, historians have used cultural activities to assert the power of individual actors in making and understanding their world. This "bottom-up" view has substantiated our understanding of ethnic and racial formation, perhaps most of all in the Progressive Era, and in New York City. The cultural activities of a variety of groups have most often been seen as exemplifying "democratic culture," the allowance of expressive and manipulatable identities. These books follow that rubric, and also point to the limits of this approach in exploring ethnic history.