Cities of play: Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island in the nineteenth century.
Item
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Title
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Cities of play: Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island in the nineteenth century.
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Identifier
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AAI9908367
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identifier
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9908367
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Creator
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Sterngass, Jon R.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Thomas Kessner
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | American Studies | Recreation
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Abstract
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In 1800, hardly a thousand travellers journeyed yearly to Saratoga Springs, Newport was floundering in the midst of a fifty-year decline, and Coney Island's beach resembled a barren wilderness. A century later, Saratoga's 'pilgrims' had increased a hundredfold, Newport's summer season dominated American high society, and five million pleasure seekers visited Coney annually! In the formative antebellum period, these liminal places served as laboratories where sojourners often experimented with novel ideas about work, gender, class, community, privacy, and luxury. Free mineral springs and beaches, and enormous semi-public hotel verandas, parlors, dining rooms, and courtyards were perfectly suited to flirtation and other non-commercial interactions. Visitors strove to "see and be seen," and perceived themselves to be performing before "all the world" in a culture of theatricality and masquerade.;Most of this playfulness disappeared after 1860, when privatization and commercialization overwhelmed the 'subversive' possibilities of leisure travel. At Saratoga, gambling houses and a horse racing track were only the most renowned examples of the increasing commodification of pleasure. On the other hand, Newport's hotel industry, so prominent before the Civil War, completely collapsed when challenged by the private cottages of the plutocracy. Yet although the range of the visitor's experience narrowed as the century progressed, Newport and Saratoga both reveal a nineteenth-century culture less earnest and more pleasure-loving than stereotypical portrayals.;At Coney Island, Gilded Age entrepreneurs created the infrastructure and transportation network, generated publicity, and imaginatively experimented with the new commercialized leisure. A trip to Coney was in many ways a variant of the travel experience already pioneered at Saratoga and Newport, and from 1870 to 1900, the Island enticed a heterogeneous crowd which included large numbers of working-class Americans. Coney Island in the later amusement park period (1897-1911), however, is particularly miscast as carnival, contested space, or oppositional subculture, for the supposed novelties of the era were hegemonic in nature and can be traced back to Gravesend in 1880. By 1900, more Americans travelled than ever before, but the market economy had gradually eroded the frisson so typical of the antebellum city of play. (With seventy-two illustrations.).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.