Nightclub City

Nightclub City
Author: Burton W. Peretti
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812203364

In the Roaring Twenties, New York City nightclubs and speakeasies became hot spots where traditions were flouted and modernity was forged. With powerful patrons in Tammany Hall and a growing customer base, nightclubs flourished in spite of the efforts of civic-minded reformers and federal Prohibition enforcement. This encounter between clubs and government-generated scandals, reform crusades, and regulations helped to redefine the image and reality of urban life in the United States. Ultimately, it took the Great Depression to cool Manhattan's Jazz Age nightclubs, forcing them to adapt and relocate, but not before they left their mark on the future of American leisure. Nightclub City explores the cultural significance of New York City's nightlife between the wars, from Texas Guinan's notorious 300 Club to Billy Rose's nostalgic Diamond Horseshoe. Whether in Harlem, Midtown, or Greenwich Village, raucous nightclub activity tested early twentieth-century social boundaries. Anglo-Saxon novelty seekers, Eastern European impresarios, and African American performers crossed ethnic lines while provocative comediennes and scantily clad chorus dancers challenged and reshaped notions of femininity. These havens of liberated sexuality, as well as prostitution and illicit liquor consumption, allowed their denizens to explore their fantasies and fears of change. The reactions of cultural critics, federal investigators, and reformers such as Fiorello La Guardia exemplify the tension between leisure and order. Peretti's research delves into the symbiotic relationships among urban politicians, social reformers, and the business of vice. Illustrated with archival photographs of the clubs and the characters who frequented them, Nightclub City is a dark and dazzling study of New York's bygone nightlife.

The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound

The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound
Author: William Gibbons
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 977
Release: 2024
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0197556167

Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.

Surveillance Capitalism in America

Surveillance Capitalism in America
Author: Josh Lauer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0812253353

Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that a ubiquitous but often unseen surveillance infrastructure created by business and the state has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding.

Prohibition New York City

Prohibition New York City
Author: David Rosen
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439671745

“The drunken ’20s started roaring almost immediately, but they were loudest in Manhattan. David Rosen’s [book] has all the snazzy, jazzy details.” —NY Daily News Texas Guinan was the queen of New York’s speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city’s biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown’s “Wet Zone,” Greenwich Village and Harlem for inebriated entertainment. Patrons threw cultural norms aside as free-flowing hooch lubricated the jazz joints, sex circuses and drag balls that fueled the era’s insurgent spirit. At the center of the party was Texas with her trademark catchphrases and guarantee to have a good time. Author David Rosen recounts Texas’s adventurous life alongside tales of Gotham’s nightlife when abstinence was the law of the land and breaking the law an all-American indulgence.

City Songs and American Life, 1900-1950

City Songs and American Life, 1900-1950
Author: Michael L. Lasser
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580469523

"Nothing defines the songs of the great American songbook more richly and persuasively than their urban sensibility. During the first half of the twentieth century, songwriter such as Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, and Thomas 'Fats' Waller flourished in New York City, the home of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem. Many of these remarkably deft and forceful creators were native New Yorkers. Others got to Gotham as fast as they could. Either way, it was as if, from their vantage point on the West Side of Manhattan, these artists were describing America--not its geography of politics, but its heart--to Americans and to the world at large. In City songs and American life, 1900-1950, renowned author and broadcaster Michael Lasser offers an evocative and probing account of the popular songs--including some written originally for the stage or screen--that America heard, and sang, and danced to during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. Lasser demonstrates how the spirit of the teeming city pervaded these wildly diverse songs. Often that spirit took form overtly in songs that portrayed the glamor of Broadway of the energy and jazz age culture of Harlem. But a city-bred spirit--or even a specifically New York City way of feeling and talking--also infused many other widely known and loved songs, stretching from the early decades of the century to the twenties (the age of the flapper, bathtub gin, and women's right to vote), the Great Depression, and, finally, World War II. Throughout this remarkable book, Lasser emphasizes how the soul of city life, as echoes in the nation's songs, developed and changed in tandem with economic, social, and political currents in America as a whole"--Dust jacket flap.

Bright Light City

Bright Light City
Author: Larry Gragg
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700619038

When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.

Supreme City

Supreme City
Author: Donald L. Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 784
Release: 2015-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1416550208

An award-winning historian surveys the astonishing cast of characters who helped turn Manhattan into the world capital of commerce, communication and entertainment --

Not Bad for Delancey Street

Not Bad for Delancey Street
Author: Mark Cohen
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1512603139

He was amazing. "A little man with a Napoleonic penchant for the colossal and magnificent, Billy Rose is the country's No. 1 purveyor of mass entertainment," Life magazine announced in 1936. The Times reported that with 1,400 people on his payroll, Rose ran a larger organization than any other producer in America. "He's clever, clever, clever," said Rose's first wife, the legendary Fanny Brice. "He's a smart little goose." Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose is the first biography in fifty years of the producer, World's Fair impresario, songwriter, nightclub and theater owner, syndicated columnist, art collector, tough guy, and philanthropist, and the first to tell the whole story of Rose's life. He combined a love for his thrilling and lucrative American moment with sometimes grandiose plans to aid his fellow Jews. He was an exaggerated exemplar of the American Jewish experience that predominated after World War II: secular, intermarried, bent on financial success, in love with Israel, and wedded to America. The life of Billy Rose was set against the great events of the twentieth century, including the Depression, when Rose became rich entertaining millions; the Nazi war on the Jews, which Rose combated through theatrical pageants that urged the American government to act; the postwar American boom, which Rose harnessed to attain extraordinary wealth; and the birth of Israel, where Rose staked his claim to immortality. Mark Cohen tells the unlikely but true story, based on exhaustive research, of Rose's single-handed rescue in 1939 of an Austrian Jewish refugee stranded in Fascist Italy, an event about which Rose never spoke but which surfaced fifty years later as the nucleus of Saul Bellow's short novel The Bellarosa Connection.