Download or read book The Making of American Audiences written by Richard Butsch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-28 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Making of American Audiences, Richard Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the Colonial period to the present. Providing coverage of theater, opera, vaudeville, minstrelsy, movies, radio and television, he examines the evolution of audience practices as each genre supplanted another as the primary popular entertainment. Based on original historical research, this volume exposes how audiences made themselves through their practices--how they asserted control over their own entertainments and their own behavior.