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When did maturity become the ultimate taboo? Gary Cross, renowned cultural historian, identifies the boy-man and his habits, examining the attitudes and practices of three generations to make sense of this gradual but profound shift in American masculinity. Cross matches the rise of the American boy-man to trends in twentieth-century advertising, popular culture, and consumerism, and he locates the roots of our present crisis in the vague call for a new model of leadership that, ultimately, failed to offer a better concept of maturity. Cross does not blame the young or glorify the past. He argues that contemporary American culture undermines both conservative ideals of male maturity and the liberal values of community and responsibility, and he concludes with a proposal for a modern marriage of personal desire and ethical adulthood.

During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment and relaxation. However, by the middle of the century, a new type of park began to emerge, providing well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment. Contrasting the experiences of Coney Island and Blackpool with those of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton explore playful crowds and the pursuit of pleasure in the twentieth century to offer a transatlantic perspective on changing ideas about leisure, class, and mass culture. Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an \"industrial saturnalia.\"Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these \"Sodoms by the sea\" flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts' very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions. The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britain's industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.

Comparative studies of the uses and changes of free time have been relatively rare in social history, especially in the 20th century. By reflecting on some of the ideas and findings generated by a new study that John Walton and Gary Cross conducted concerning the changes in the meanings and behaviors of playful crowds in the U.S. and Britain across the 20th century at Coney Island, Blackpool, Disneyland, and the Beamish Museum, this paper raises some of the possibilities and difficulties of doing a comparative social history of 20th century pleasure crowds. National and other differences will be considered in explaining why the Blackpool resort area survived much social change in the 20th century and Coney Island did not, as well as how Disneyland and the heritage site of Beamish reflected differing adaptations to middle class crowd and aesthetic sensibilities.

This essay explores the linkage between modern children's consumer culture and the globalization of the design and manufacture of playthings. While toy production and innovation were centered in Germany from the 17th through 19th centuries, it shifted to the U.S. and Japan, recently to China in the 20th century. The authors chronicle why the U.S. and Japan drifted from production to product design and marketing and how China became the locus of manufacturing in the last 20 years. Playthings have long roots in local folk cultures and crafts, and regional and national traditions of toy and doll making have long re-inforced ethnic and local identities in children. But the construction of modern childhood over the past century especially has paralleled the decline of these craft traditions and the emergence of a global children's commercial culture.

The eight-hour work day, after a generation of agitation, was won for many Europeans in the aftermath of WWI. Based on French archival & published materials, it was found that the demand for shorter hours was independent of, albeit often related to, the economic demands of workers. The eight-hour goal after WWI was linked to the prewar concern with additional family time & the nineteenth-century ideal of rational recreation. Yet, it also pointed to a newer desire to protect continuous blocks of time from work or the control of employers & to create regular patterns of work & leisure time. It required a fortuitous constellation of events -- especially a postwar threat of radical insurgence -- to be realized. Far from manifesting the integration of workers into a new consumer capitalism, the eight-hour movement raised the industrial conflict to a new level. Against employer intransigence, unions demanded technical innovation so that an increased productivity might benefit labor -- not merely with more income but with more leisure. 1 Illustration. Modified AA.

In this lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented study of American industry's efforts to promote a corporate and consumerist image of the American dream of progress, Cynthia Lee Henthorn makes a valuable contribution ro the growing literature on American consumer culture.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In this book Cross and Walton employ four major \"pleasure places\" to discuss developments in the amusement industry and the evolution of western leisure preferences. While the authors acknowledge that \"American commitment to novelty and mobility, and British tradition and class stability\" (55) may have shaped the pursuit of pleasure in the two countries, they carefully consider the influence of location, climate, means of transport, length of season, land holding patterns, political alliances, and more distinctive factors. In the second half of the book Cross and Walton argue that the emergence of a middle-class crowd focused on children and child fantasies gave rise to amusement parks catering to nostalgia for innocence and wonder.