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.