This thesis investigates the historical American medicine show of 1880-1900 through the lens of contemporaneous social and cultural debates, primarily regarding class and race relations. The medicine show pitchmen, the central figure of the medicine show, is the progeny of the confidence man of the mid to late-nineteenth century, best personified through the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum and novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The confidence man utilized a performative identity directed towards the assumed needs and desires of his audience, which gave him a purely pragmatic orientation. As the confidence man filtered through emerging forms of popular entertainment, he found his place in the traveling medicine show in the figure of the medicine man. In many ways, the medicine show functioned as a cultural arena in which the concerns of rural audiences about the ongoing professionalization of the classes, specifically within the medical profession, were investigated and manipulated.

This thesis examines the extent to which the BBC was able to shape the output of popular culture on radio in Britain, according to its own system of beliefs, between the years 1933 and 1967. This research will show that from the outset, the BBC was an institution with a mission to inform, educate and entertain the nation. While it was not opposed to entertainment, its focus was didactic and supported a mission to improve its audience both culturally and intellectually. This policy was not always welcomed by the audience but, with the exception of the war years, persisted into mid 1950s. The Variety Department was formed in 1933 to produce all forms of light entertainment and this research will examine how its policies shaped the production of popular culture over the period concerned. This study looks not only at the workings of the Variety Department but also the topics of Americanisation and vulgarity, the two areas in which the BBC had particular sensitivities. It analyses the BBC's strategies to counteract the American effect on popular music and spoken-word programmes and how it provided its own particularly British form of entertainment in order to produce programmes it considered suitable for British audiences. It also investigates programme censorship imposed by the BBC to mitigate vulgarity in programmes, so as to produce those it considered suitable for its audiences. This thesis will contend that for over 40 years the BBC Variety Department produced popular entertainment programmes on radio which became an integral part of people's daily lives until, within a few years radio was superseded by television as the nation's principal provider of domestic entertainment. There has been no discrete study of the BBC Variety Department and it is intended that this research will add to the existing scholarship in BBC history and contribute to the analysis of radio's place in domestic popular culture in the period examined.

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in English Dissertation deals with the freak show culture in Prague and the Czech lands in a broader context of the modern discourses of dis/ability and the imaginations of the collective body of the Czech nation. Exhibitions of "Lilliputians", "Giants", "Siamese twins" and other "extraordinary" bodies are analyzed here as a part of the history of an international entertainment culture in the 19th-century Europe. The emphasis lays on the turn of the century, the decade that witnessed rash development both of the capitalist entertainment industry and the expert disciplines that dealt with the "ab/normal". I claim, that the popularity of freak shows in this period rested in their ability to articulate fears and ambitions of their visitors, both in their individual embodied experience and their imaginative belonging, notably their belonging to the collective body of the Czech nation. In four case studies, I focus on individual freak figures and analyze how the intersections of different axes of difference - ethnicity, gender, class - within the representation of "the extraordinary", coproduced certain notion of social order and power hierarchies that were closely intertwined with the imagined collective body of nation.

in English Dissertation deals with the freak show culture in Prague and the Czech lands in a broader context of the modern discourses of dis/ability and the imaginations of the collective body of the Czech nation. Exhibitions of "Lilliputians", "Giants", "Siamese twins" and other "extraordinary" bodies are analyzed here as a part of the history of an international entertainment culture in the 19th-century Europe. The emphasis lays on the turn of the century, the decade that witnessed rash development both of the capitalist entertainment industry and the expert disciplines that dealt with the "ab/normal". I claim, that the popularity of freak shows in this period rested in their ability to articulate fears and ambitions of their visitors, both in their individual embodied experience and their imaginative belonging, notably their belonging to the collective body of the Czech nation. In four case studies, I focus on individual freak figures and analyze how the intersections of different axes of difference - ethnicity, gender, class - within the representation of "the extraordinary", coproduced certain notion of social order and power hierarchies that were closely intertwined with the imagined collective body of nation.

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À mi-chemin entre un café, un jardin d’agrément, un bal et une scène théâtrale, les cafés-concerts et les music-halls représentent les divertissements les plus importants du XIXe siècle. Espaces spectaculaires qui accueillent des sociabilités hétérogènes et qui combinent une double fonction artistique et festive, l’identité socioculturelle de ces nouveaux loisirs s’est d’abord élaborée par opposition au statut du lieu d’art. Le postulat de la rareté des répertoires et des artistes issus des cafés-concerts et des music-halls dans l’historiographie des arts scéniques, et dans la transmission des savoirs en danse, nous a conduits à enquêter sur les raisons et les enjeux de cette mise à l’écart. « Lieux dangereux et vulgaires », « spectacles immoraux », « artistes insipides », sont les expressions symptomatiques d’une perception négative fondée sur un ensemble idéologique qui concourt à dessiner les contours d’une illégitimité culturelle. Une première étape de la recherche vise à analyser les principes de distinction sociale et de hiérarchisation artistique en œuvre dans le processus de délégitimation des cafés-concerts et des music-halls, en puisant dans les sources produites par les institutions en charge du contrôle des spectacles au XIXe siècle. Catégorisés en tant qu’objets populaires, les arguments déployés par les instances administratives et la police des théâtres révèlent en premier lieu le fondement d’une idéologie de classe, focalisée sur les origines prétendues populaires de ces divertissements. Entre le Second Empire et la Troisième République, l’histoire des cafés-concerts et des music-halls est traversée par un phénomène de féminisation qui bouleverse les pratiques et les représentations associées à ces espaces et participe à resémantiser leurs premières attributions sociales et symboliques. La seconde phase de ce travail s’intéresse aux effets d’un processus qui interagit sur les plans socioculturel, professionnel et symbolique par une présence féminine érotisée et qui tend à bâtir la catégorie du divertissement comme appartenant au genre féminin. Afin d’interroger les échanges entre altérités féminines et corporéités populaires sur les scènes des cafés-concerts et des music-halls durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, la thèse mobilise deux catégories d’artistes féminines — les effeuilleuses et les danseuses de chahut-cancan — réunies autour d’un geste scénique et érotique commun : le déshabillage. L’étude de ce geste ouvre un troisième champ de questionnements sur les rapports entre l’érotique et l’illégitime dans les pratiques professionnelles de femmes qui exercent un métier artistique au sein d’un lieu spectaculaire à la fois déconsidéré et hautement érotisé. À travers les différentes étapes qui jalonnent cette recherche, la réflexion cherche à rendre compte de l’impact du déshabillage érotique sur la sensibilité d’une époque, sur le statut social des femmes, mais également sur les mouvements internes de professionnalisation des artistes de café-concert et de music-hall au XIXe siècle, et plus globalement, sur l’héritage historiographique de ces divertissements. / Halfway between a café, a pleasure garden, a ball and a theatrical stage, café-concert and music hall are the main entertainment places in the 19th century. Spectacular spaces that welcome heterogeneous sociability and combine a dual artistic and festive function, the socio-cultural identity of these new leisure activities was first developed as opposed to the status of the art place. The postulate of the rarity of repertoires and artists from café-concert and music hall in the historiography of performing arts, and in the transmission of knowledge in dance, has led us to investigate the reasons of this exclusion and the issues at stake. "Dangerous and vulgar places", "immoral performances", "insipid artists", are symptomatic expressions of a negative perception based on an ideological set that contributes to drawing the contours of cultural illegitimacy. The first stage of the research consists in analysing the principles of social distinction and artistic hierarchy in the process of delegitimization of café-concert and music hall, based on the sources from the institutions responsible for controlling 19th century performances. Categorized as popular objects, the arguments put forward by the administrative authorities and the theatre police reveal first and foremost the basis of a class ideology, focused on the supposedly popular origins of these entertainments. Between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the history of café-concert and music hall was marked by a phenomenon of feminization that disrupted the practices and representations associated with these places and helped to redefine their first social and symbolic attributions. The second stage of this work focuses on the effects of a process that interacts socioculturally, professionally and symbolically through an eroticized female presence, and that tends to build the entertainment category as belonging to the female gender. In order to question the exchanges between female otherness and popular corporealities on the stages of café-concert and music hall during the second half of the 19th century, the thesis focuses on two categories of female artists — the effeuilleuse (strippers) and the chahut-cancan dancers — gathered around a common scenic and erotic gesture: undressing.

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