Abstract
The position of the United States as a country targeting growth in the fields of technology and engineering has been repeatedly reasserted in recent years. From President Obama’s State of the Union address when ‘maintaining our leadership in research and technology’ was cited as being ‘crucial to America’s success’, to the various initiatives to recruit students to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programmes, science and technology have been presented as being crucial to America’s international strength.1 This focus is central to America’s identity as a world leader in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but is a far cry from the ideas upon which the United States was founded. This transition from untamed Eden to our ‘Sputnik moment’, I argue here, was aided by the concomitant development of various entertainment venues in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that helped city-dwelling citizens adapt to rapid industrial change through bridging the past and future, the rural and urban.
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Notes
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, ‘Remarks by the President in State of Union Address’, 25 January 2011. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address.
Mark Caldwell, ‘Defining American Urbanity: Royall Tyler, William Dunlap, and the Postrevolutionary Theater in New York’, Early American Studies (Fall 2009), 309–32.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
See David E. Coke and Alan Borg, Vauxhall Gardens: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), for a comprehensive history of this site.
Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 4.
Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24–5.
See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Malcolm C. Watkins, ‘Artificial Lighting in America: 1830–1860’, in Annual Report of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year Ended June 30, 1951 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1952), 393.
Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 243.
Edwin Forrest Murdock, ‘The American Institute’, in A Century of Industrial Progress, ed. Frederic William Wile (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), v–vi.
Ethan Robey, ‘The Utility of Art: Mechanics’ Institute Fairs in New York City, 1828–1876’ (PhD dissertation: Columbia University, 2000), 628–35.
John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., preface to Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 6.
Harry C. Freeman, A Brief History of Butte, Montana: The World’s Greatest Mining Camp (Chicago, IL: Henry O’Shepard, 1900), 48–51.
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© 2013 Naomi J. Stubbs
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Stubbs, N.J. (2013). Modern Nation and Rural Idyll: Reconciling Progress and Purity through Performance. In: Reilly, K. (eds) Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology. Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319678_10
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