Gilbert Seldes

"This book is not a record of the major events in American history during the nineteenth century. It is concerned with minor movements, with the cults and mania of that period. Its personages are fanatics, and radicals, and mountebanks. Its intention is to connect these secondary movements and figures with the primary forces of the century, and to supply a background in American history for the Prohibitionists and the Pentecostalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamentalits; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints. Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements, and the relation of each of these to the others and the orderly progress of [the United States of] America are the subject."--Back cover.

Discussions of slapstick, comic strips, vaudeville, and other elements of popular culture and their relationship to such traditional art forms as opera, ballet, drama, and classical music.