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“No Business Like Show Business”: The American Media Exception

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The American Exception, Volume 2

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Abstract

There is no business like American show business. Since the 1800s, operating through a variety of media, Americans have pioneered ways of turning arts and entertainment into commercial mass culture. In magazines and moving pictures, in radio and recorded music, in television and on the Internet, they have crafted new cultural products to amuse audiences. In the late nineteenth century, photography was the hot new medium: the U.S. counted some 6000 publishers of stereographic images (four times as many as in Europe), millions of image-reproducing chromolithographs were sold, and George Eastman captured a mass market with his Kodak camera (Rydell and Kroes 2005: 40–2).

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  1. Department of Sociology, Emory University, Atlanta, USA

    Frank J. Lechner

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Lechner, F.J. (2017). “No Business Like Show Business”: The American Media Exception. In: The American Exception, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58720-6_3

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